The Unimaginative Hysteria of Umair Haque

As of July 9th, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has claimed the lives of approximately 135,000 Americans. In his recent Medium piece “America Can’t Take Four More Years of This Lethal Idiot,” Umair Haque, the London-based business consultant, writer, and former Harvard Business Review contributor, leverages a familiar strategy: not letting a crisis go to waste for political purposes. In this July 2nd piece, Haque uses the pandemic as a lede to argue that President Donald Trump is both the person to blame for the virus’ toll on the American people—and that President Trump is also responsible for turning the United States into a “fascist” nation. He asserts that “there’s no real debate possible about the reality of America becoming fascist.” For Haque, the United States has clearly become a “dystopia” under President Trump, whom Haque labels as the “textbook American idiot.”

The implication of all of this, of course, is also that the American public is too dumb to see what is truly happening to its society. As such, Haque unimaginatively concludes, “I have no answer for the world, except to have to state the truth. Maybe Americans are this dumb.” Now, the themes of alleged fascism, the evils of President Trump, and stupidity on the part of Americans are common themes throughout Haque’s prior work; in fact, it sometimes appears that these are the only topics he seems interested in writing about. Fortunately, for us, “dumb” Americans, however, we have Haque and his wise European friends to save us from ourselves. Haque, of course, leaves us with the warning that President Trump “can still pull off stealing the next election” and, if he succeeds, we must “reflect on precisely and fully why four more years of a lunatic—one every bit up there with Caligula and Nero—like Donald Trump” would look like.

In “America Can’t Take Four More Years of This Lethal Idiot,” Haque—joining many other commentators and television personalities—begins with the misleading premise that President Trump is solely responsible for the death and economic fallout that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. In his analysis, Haque asserts that, at first, President Trump “denied there was a problem, then minimized, then told people to drink bleach…after cutting funding for the WHO and backing out of global vaccine efforts.” This take is not supported by the actual record of events. In contrast, many could very reasonably argue that it was the World Health Organization (WHO), which is led by Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, along with Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), who both contributed extensively to the disinformation and inaccurate reporting on which many public health decisions rested. Medical professionals were silenced, certain scientific findings were suppressed, and misleading information was mouthed by officials at high levels of government the world over.