Americans have gone from having access to most of the world to being banned from most of it. Today, Americans are only allowed in a few Caribbean islands and the Balkans. An American passport is now worthless. Worse than worthless, it’s a plague.

In the absence of a humane or competent government, America is now ruled by COVID-19.

Welcome to the Plague States of America.

COVID-19 could have been managed in January, or February, or even now, but that would require leadership, or even caring about the millions of Americans suffering from this pandemic.

For those of you that are still thinking about voting for Trump, your vote for this embodiment of wrongness will continue America’s suffering and contribute to needless deaths. The fact is, our president is an incompetent, uncaring, narcissistic, buffoon. He doesn’t care about you, and even if he did, he is too stupid to put policies in place that will help you or our country. He is a disaster. Our worst president ever. Don’t believe us? Try traveling on your beautiful American passport.

The most reliable projections are saying 200,000 dead and 50 million infected by election day in November. Even these projections struggle to account for completely irrational federal actions like denigrating masks, pushing to reopen early, and pushing students back into schools. This is not the absence of public health, this is its opposite.

It is, in effect, governance by COVID-19. Not a failed state. A plague state.

Even after election day, Donald Trump will still be in power for nearly 3 months, until January 20th. Besides impeaching a dead-duck President, there’s nothing America can do but wait, while COVID-19 grows ever stronger. Grows completely out of control. In a pandemic, days matter, hours matter. A year is entirely too late.

America will be lucky to exit this pandemic with less than a million dead and 100 million infected. The living will be lucky to exit their country within the next five years.

It’s not that other nations don’t want to welcome Americans, they just can’t. The point of a passport is that a sovereign power vouches for its bearer, but America can’t vouch for the health of their citizens at all.

Americans have poor hygiene (low masking rate) and at least 40% of the population can’t be trusted to even believe that COVID-19 exists, let alone to take it seriously. They’re likely to refuse testing, not report symptoms, and break quarantine. Americans have a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that makes them unwelcome travelers.

That’s the near future of the United States. An epidemic that spreads largely unchecked. A population too unprotected and too ignorant to be allowed anywhere else.

It seems that Trump did just what he said he would do: He built a wall around America. He just never told Americans that they would be stuck inside.

Welcome to the Plague States of America. You can check out, but you can never leave.