The latest bombshell in the media is Bob Woodward's revelation that he has recordings of Trump being Trump, with the most damning statements concerning Trump's downplaying of the emergent COVID-19 pandemic:
"I wanted to always play it down," Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."
I, for one, would rather have seen a panic than a pandemic. March 19 was just about a week after things were shutting down anyway. Of course, the initial shutdown was predicated on initiating a testing regime which would allow persons without COVID-19 to return to work... it's just that the testing regime was not put into place in a coherent fashion. Six months later, and I find that my volunteer coaching gig is untenable due to safety concerns, and my workplace's fundraisers will be diminished due to social distancing needs. Yeah, a little panic in March would have gone a long way toward avoiding these detriments to my current quality of life.
The craziest thing about these revelations is that Trump didn't just downplay the crisis, but claimed that it was a 'Democratic hoax' to damage him politically. Ironically, if he had acknowledged the hoax, and rallied the country behind him to combat the spread of the virus, he could have used the resultant political capital to cruise to re-election. His current predicament is completely due to his laziness and mendacity, and 195,000 deaths later, with no end in sight, he's reduced to using statistical manipulation in a failed attempt to make his pandemic response seem better than the Obama/Biden response to H1N1.
I just hope the goddamned media doesn't try to play these tapes down... with thousands of Americans still dying, this campaign is a death race, not a horse race.
5 comments:
Thanks for putting the blame where it belongs. Too many things I've read blame Woodward but the bottom line is it is the president's responsibility to put in place the things that keep us safe not Woodward's. We will probably conjecture for ever whether, if Woodward had spoken up fewer people would have died, but what we do know is that too many died because the president didnt speak up and do his job. Bonnie, because I'm not really anonymous.
But the toilet paper! Can you imagine what a crisis that would have been if we had all panicked at once?!
I think the panic Trump really has in mind (although he'll never articulate it) is a Wall Street panic. He has been measuring the success of his economy by how the stock market is doing. Fear of a Pandemic would (as it eventually did) cut the bottom out from under the market. He was try to avoid stock losses, that's all.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
Is it that auto-correct or am I getting senile? The last sentence in the post above should read," He wanted to avoid stock losses, that's all."
Yours with increasing crankiness,
The New York Crank
He was just putting off the inevitable by kicking the can down the road. By the time the election comes, there will be at least a quarter of a million dead Americans.
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