Trump lied, people died, Trump didn’t care
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Since his book is out, Bob Woodward finally decided to share the scoop he’s been sitting on since February:
Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.
At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear, and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.
Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.
This just shows that Trump is a man truly in touch with the people:
Little understood dynamic 👇
I spent lots of time reporting in Pennsylvania diners in 2016, & I heard over & over again that if a pandemic struck, average voters wanted a president who’d lie to them about it publicly while *simultaneously* revealing the truth to elite DC journos— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) September 9, 2020
Seems unfair that the master of the give-’em-enough-rope interview is also the master of the deadpan media parody.
Alas, this is no parody:
I concede the point — if you look beyond deaths and case numbers and arbitrarily exclude many of the liberal democracies that have performed much better than the U.S. Trump’s performance doesn’t look as bad CHECKMATE LIBS!