There’s a passage in the Bob Woodward recordings of Donald Trump that I’ve no doubt you’ve heard about a million times by now; the one in which our president claims that his decision to downplay the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic was all about avoiding a panic. That’s right – Donald Trump would have you believe that he is trying to prevent mass hysteria, or at least that’s what it sounds like on this tape. Either that or he was worried about a panicked stock market. (Given his conviction that the stock market is the only economic indicator worth consulting, perhaps that’s more like it.) I think it was Chris Hayes who commented that Trump’s campaign slogan is panic. This is the guy that brought us MS13 living next door, rapists and murderers coming over the border, killer caravans heading north towards Laredo, antifa threatening the peace, Cory Booker threatening the suburbs, and so on. Really?
Probably the only thing really surprising about these Woodward recordings is how halfway normal the president sounds. Interesting how when there’s no television or live audience he starts to act almost human, even chummy. Listening to this, you start to see why Joe Scarborough and Mika were so enamored of him for a while prior to his presidential run. He was a T.V. star, after all, and totally in on the joke, right? Not right. In all honesty, it’s no surprise that Trump was aware of how deadly and contagious the novel Coronavirus is. We’ve long known that he was briefed on it, and it only made sense that he would be. I mean, the man has a glass head – it’s not hard to see what his motivations might lead him to. The virus was not his fault, right? So why should he have to pay a political price for it. Just pretend it’s not there …. that trick works with everything else.
Unfortunately for the Donald, viruses – much like facts – are stubborn things. They don’t yield to our hopes and desires. They aren’t scared away by a little off-hand blow-hardiness. You can see Trump getting as frustrated as a five-year-old over how this thing is unfolding, grasping for anything that will help him put the scourge behind him. As usual, he’s working overtime to change the subject and focus the public’s mind on anything other than COVID. Typically, for Trump, that means playing the fear card, warning of an attack on the suburbs by some dark army of his imagination. So he’s saying the quiet parts out loud again, which is how he started in politics and likely how he will end.
Despite what their own domestic intelligence agencies tell them, Trump and Barr continue to insist that “antifa” and Black Lives Matter are somehow potent threats against the republic, NOT heavily armed, white militias. That’s the narrative they hope will carry them to victory this fall. Let’s prove them wrong.
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Of course, this principle gets violated all the time without consequence, particularly by our own leaders and those of our allied nations. Not sure how, exactly, this prohibition made its way into this document back in the day when the United States was the sole remaining power and the first-ever superpower in world history. We had an enormous hand in erecting this international order, putting ourselves at the very top of the global power structure in as much as we were the only nation to have emerged from the ravages of World War II stronger than before. Why would we include this principle only to violate it consistently for the next seventy years?