Upon hearing the news, a lot of normally perfectly nice people said "I hope he dies."
But Twitter apparently doesn't want people to say that.
A lot of people have said they hope he suffers. I'm not sure what Twitter's policy on that is.
He seems to have recovered, but for the record, I'll state here you're not necessarily a bad person if you hope he suffers, or dies, or suffers and dies.
It's a lot like the now-hackneyed Trolley Problem and all its variants. If you can save two people by killing one innocent person, what should you do? What if it's hundred of people? Or, in the case of Trump, in the minds of some people, potentially the entire world? Of course, nobody is talking about killing Trump. We're just evaluating the question of whether it's ok to hope he dies.
The question of whether it's ok to hope he suffers is similar. That's a lot like hoping your own child suffers a little bit as a result of making a bad decision, so that the child learns a valuable lesson, and becomes a better person. That's not wrong either, is it?
Morality is a difficult thing. A lot of perfectly nice people think it would have been ok to have killed Hitler, and a lot of them are convinced that if they had been in Germany (or even Austria) at the right time, that's what they would have done. Many Romanians were happy to see Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife executed. And the US Government quite deliberately brought about the death of Saddam Hussein.
In each case, it was essentially because the political leader's narcissism and desire to maintain power led to practices that caused great harm to their countries, and, at least in Hitler's case, the world at large.
Luckily, in our country, the President simply does not have that kind of power, and we have perfectly democratic processes for getting rid of really bad ones.
Also for the record, here's a link to a CIA report documenting US involvement in assassinations or attempted assassinations of Diem, Schneider, Trujillo, Lumumba, and Castro. In some cases, there's pretty good evidence that the President at the time (Eisenhower or Kennedy) knew of and/or approved the actions.
And here's an excerpt from a Guardian article describing a number of foreign leaders that the US Government has tried to kill or helped to kill:
"In spite of this, the US never totally abandoned the strategy, simply changing the terminology from assassination to targeted killings, from aerial bombing of presidents to drone attacks on alleged terrorist leaders. Aerial bomb attempts on leaders included Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
"Earlier well-documented episodes include Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, judged by the US to be too close to close to Russia. In 1960, the CIA sent a scientist to kill him with a lethal virus, though this became unnecessary when he was removed from office in 1960 by other means. Other leaders targeted for assassination in the 1960s included the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam."In 1973, the CIA helped organise the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, deemed to be too left wing: he died on the day of the coup."
