The NY Fishwrap's Viper offers a mordant review over the recent revelations in the audio tapes of conversations between The *ILK (*impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King and the DC Fishwrap's Bob Woodward about what The *ILK knew about the nascent Coronavius Pandemic and when he knew it. Turns out that The *ILK had plentiful warnings before the first US casualty to COVID-19 at the beginning of 2020. And, The *ILK confessed to Woodward that he did nothing about this public health menace for three months into 2020. What sort of punishment would be fitting for this criminal act? This blogger hopes that The *ILK will contract COVID-19 and suffer quarantine for the rest of his miserable life in a cage (beloved by The *ILK for migrant children) at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. The miserable end of his days are more than deserved. And, after he dies in agony, his burial will be no burial at all. His bloated diseased body will be stripped and his corpse left in the Cuban jungle to be devoured by carrion-eating animals and birds. If this is a (fair & balanced) wish for The *ILK, so be it.
PS: The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump’s Deliberate Coronavirus Deception
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Recordings, real or rumored, have been a leitmotif of the Trump era.
There was the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Donald Trump confessed to his proclivity for serial sexual assault. The fabled “pee tape,” the existence of which would have been pornographic proof of Russiagate, haunted the first few years of the Trump presidency.
James Comey hoped there were recordings of what he described as Trump’s mafia-like efforts to suborn him. (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”) Michael Cohen released a tape in which the president assented to a scheme to buy the silence of a former Playboy model he allegedly slept with. Omarosa Manigault Newman had a tape in which she and two other Black Trump staffers worried about the existence of another tape, which she claimed had caught Trump using the vilest of racial slurs. The actor Tom Arnold had a whole cable series about his search, ultimately fruitless, for incriminating Trump tapes.
Trump recordings loom so large because they offer the prospect of breaking through Trump’s alternative reality, of nailing down this most slippery and mendacious of presidents, of showing everyone who he really is. But even those that materialize are often quickly forgotten, as Trump’s approval rating stays low but stubbornly stable and one scandal is eclipsed by another. Our politics suffers no shortage of incontrovertible proof of Trump’s venality. What it lacks is accountability.
It’s possible, maybe even likely, that the famed journalist Bob Woodward’s utterly damning tapes of Trump discussing the Coronavirus will fall into this same nothing-matters cycle. But decent people with public platforms should try to make sure that doesn’t happen.
It’s not just that these tapes reveal the president lying about the pandemic that has ravaged America on his watch. What’s shocking — even after more than three and a half numbing years — is the deliberate, willful nature of the lies. Unlike most Trump tapes, Woodward’s actually tell us something new about the president, rather than just confirming what we think we already know.
Because Trump is a prodigious consumer of propaganda, as well as a creator of it, it’s not always clear how aware he is of spreading disinformation. People who’ve spent time with him often conclude that truth has no meaning for him. Woodward quoted Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, saying: “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.” Trump creates for his supporters a carapace of malignant fantasy, but he often seems to live inside it with them.
Yet in recordings Woodward has released of Trump talking about the Coronavirus — excerpts from interviews conducted for Woodward’s new book [9/15/2020], Rage — the president doesn’t sound ignorant or deluded. Rather, he sounds uncommonly lucid. On February 7, Trump described the virus as airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” adding, “this is 5 percent versus 1 percent, or less than 1 percent.” It’s not clear whether Trump thought that Covid-19 had a 5 percent case fatality rate — a number that seemed plausible in February — but he clearly knew that compared with the flu, it was several times as likely to kill.
And yet he told the country just the opposite. “The percentage for the flu is under 1 percent,” Trump said on March 7. “But this could also be under 1 percent because many of the people that aren’t that sick don’t report.” Despite knowing that the virus was airborne, he mocked mask-wearing and held several large indoor rallies. He told Woodward in March that “plenty of young people” were getting sick, but over the summer would insist that 99 percent of cases were “totally harmless” and that children are “almost immune.”
We know now that this wasn’t just Trump being buffoonish and engaging in magical thinking. It was conscious deception. Publicly, Trump kept insisting that the virus would disappear. Privately, he told Woodward: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Of course, Trump usually loves creating panic — about immigrants, about antifa, about low-income people invading the suburbs. But there is one place he wants to maintain tranquillity — in the financial markets. “Just stay calm, it will go away,” he said on March 10. “We want to protect our shipping industry, our cruise industry, cruise ships, we want to protect our airline industry.” He added, “A lot of good things are going to happen. The consumer is ready.”
And so Trump lied to the country about the calamity that would soon overtake it. His administration didn’t ramp up a national testing or contact-tracing program. He and his supporters pressured states to open up prematurely. A July Pew poll found that only 46 percent of Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party considered the coronavirus a major threat to public health, compared with 85 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Trump could have made Republicans take the virus seriously. He chose not to.
Not long after attending the president’s June rally in Tulsa, OK, the former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died of COVID-19. In August, whoever is maintaining Cain’s Twitter account [Zombie] tweeted, “It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.” It was Trump who made such a cultish commitment to denying the lethality of COVID-19 into a sign of loyalty. And all the time, he knew better.
Trump supporters may not care that their president has knowingly endangered them, withholding potentially lifesaving information that he readily confided to an elite Washington journalist. But that doesn’t change the importance of what Woodward has captured on tape. It’s now clear that just because Trump is lying to us, that doesn’t mean he’s lying to himself.
Trump’s lies sabotaged efforts to contain the coronavirus, almost certainly leading to many more deaths than it would have caused under a minimally competent and non-sociopathic leader. On September 9, there were 1,176 coronavirus deaths in the United States. In Canada, there were two.
When someone’s actions lead to the death of another, we evaluate that person’s intent and state of mind in order to assign the right measure of blame. When a president’s actions lead to the deaths of thousands, we should do the same. ###
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist at this newspaper since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
Copyright © 2020 The New York Times Company
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
