The deaths of those Americans who have passed away due to COVID-19 is the result of an incompetent Donald Trump not being removed from office as a result of his Senate impeachment trial earlier this year.

That’s according to the top House Democrat who led the prosecution of Trump during that trial.

Some 50,439 Americans have died from COVID-19, while nearly 900,000 have been sickened, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We have an election in nine months. How much damage could he really do? And we posed that question to the Senate and we answered it by saying that he could do an awful lot of damage but frankly, Chris, I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do in the months ahead. There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead in significant part because of his incompetence, because of his inability to think beyond himself and put the country first,” said Rep Adam Schiff (D-Calif), who led the prosecution of the charges against Trump in the January Senate trial related to Trump’s efforts to hold up US military aid in Ukraine in exchange for dirt on political rival Joe Biden.

In the end, all Senate Republicans–except Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah–chose to allow Trump to remain in office.

“I don’t think we would have ever anticipated that his brand of narcissism and his brand of incompetence would be so fatal to the American people but probably, you know, the strongest echo of what we were talking about during the trial was when he was earlier talking about how he didn’t want to return the calls from governors,” Schiff said in an on-air TV interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “He didn’t want his vice president to return calls from governors that weren’t saying nice things about him, that really weren’t saying things about him he could turn into campaign commercials as he has.” 

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