Trump Admits To Downplaying Pandemic
Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, writing for The Washington Post:
“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”
[…]
“Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states,” Woodward writes. “There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced.”
No shit.
This is real audio (expertly assembled into a video by our friends at The Lincoln Project), straight from Donald Trump, where he admits to knowing how deadly the coronavirus was, and a subsequent admission that he intentionally downplayed it to the public. Allegedly he wanted to avoid creating a panic.
This is a stunning revelation, but to hear it come directly from Trump’s own mouth is really something else. The pandemic is the biggest issue of this election, and a lot of pundits have been saying the election could boil down to a referendum on the Trump administration’s response to it. If the election really does turn out to be a referendum on the COVID response, then Trump’s already hole-y ship just hit an iceberg. The question now isn’t whether the ship will sink (it’s undeniably going down; history will not look favorably upon his response), but whether they can keep it afloat until November third. They’ll certainly try to patch up the damage as much as they can (probably by releasing an untested vaccine in mid-October), and they’ll try to deflect attention to other issues, but I personally think they’re taking on water too quickly to stay afloat until the election. If it does come down to a COVID referendum — knocking on lots of wood here — I don’t think Trump can win.
From a CTV News interview with American History Professor Allan Litchman, summarized by Graham Slaughter:
[The revelation that] Donald Trump knew COVID-19 was deadly in the early days of the pandemic but publicly downplayed the virus will go down in history as "damning."
“This is the greatest dereliction of duty in the history of the U.S. presidency,” Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University for nearly 50 years, told CTV News Channel on Thursday.
I respect Litchman and his analysis a great deal. You may recognize his name, as he’s the historian who constructed the unbelievably accurate “Thirteen Keys” model of predicting U.S. presidential elections.
Why Trump felt comfortable speaking so candidly with Woodward, one of the most influential journalists in American politics, has everything to do with his “pathological ego” Lichtman said.
“Donald Trump thinks he’s smarter than everyone, he thinks he’s more cunning than everyone,” said Lichtman, who is a Democrat. Only one of the dumbest people in the room would constantly act like they’re the smartest person in the room.
As for Trump’s defence that he didn’t share how deadly the virus was because he didn’t want people to panic, Lichtman said it simply doesn’t pass the sniff test.
“What is Trump’s whole campaign based on? Causing panic. ‘Elect Joe Biden and your streets are going to burn. The criminals will be attacking your houses. The suburbs will be abolished.’ This is a guy who’s worried about causing panic? Come on. How could you possibly believe that?”
Again, rich hypocrisy. He’s effectively saying “look at what’s happening, our cities are on fire, Antifa* is coming, this is what will happen if you elect Joe Biden”, hoping his followers are stupid enough to ignore the fact that Trump is president now and it’s already happening. It’s so self unaware.
But let me guess, Republicans: y’all are totally okay with this. Something about not wanting to create a panic, sometimes you have lie to your kids because you love them, yadda yadda yadda. Republicans should be more offended by this than anyone. It’s an outright admission by Trump that he’s playing them for fools because they take every (self conflicting) thing he says as gospel.