woodward on trump

Anyway, all of that pales in comparison, in my opinion, to Trump’s deadly, daily lies regarding the pandemic. He literally has the blood of nearly 200,000 Americans on his hands. We already knew Trump was putting his reelection and the Stock Market above human lives. But now we also know, from the recordings, that he knew it was deadly serious. He can’t pretend anymore that he was just fighting “elite libtards” on the science, owning them, etc. He knew. He knew had bad this shit was gonna be back in January, at least, and he said so to Woodward.

This also tracks with other stuff we knew before these bombshells. That Trump and others in his administration blocked a plan to fight the pandemic, because they decided this was just a “Blue State” problem, and they could blame Blue State governors, etc. As long as it wouldn’t impact Trump’s base, directly, they could scapegoat their way to victory in November — or so they believed. And the revelation that Trump knew how deadly this is also casts more (obscenely ugly) light on his decision to hold a half dozen indoor rallies in the last few months.

He doesn’t care how many Americans die, as long as he maintains power. And we know he doesn’t care about how many furriners die. Kids in cages. Migrants in cages, period, despite Covid-19. Fomenting a coup in Venezuela. Leaving the Kurds defenseless to be slaughtered by the Turks, cuz he and Erdogan had a phone conversation, etc. Bragging to Woodward about this amazing new Nuke “he” had developed, etc. etc . . . which tracks with his earlier public statements that he would use the Bomb, even on Europe, if necessary.

Not to mention his anti-Climate policies.

Worst. President. Evah.

Imagine if George W. Bush had prior knowledge of the attack on 9-11 and decided to not say anything about it because he didn't want to panic anyone.

— Kevin Folta (@kevinfolta) September 11, 2020

This was IQ45’s chance to earn a re-election. You can’t blame him for the virus…. All he had to do was acknowledge the threat and tell the population what we needed to do to fight it, based on the advice of people like Fauci, science etc. and based on what other countries have done. (Germany, Italy, Korea, Singapore, HK, Malaysia etc…. But that’s not his M.O… his M.O. for every challenge in his life is to lie and delay and largely, thanks to his scumbag lawyers, it has worked. So he lied and delayed again and it has crippled an entire country. His opportunity to be a leader has instead revealed that he’s a coward and incompetent . He really needs to be fire…..

In addition, he most likely had access to information from Wuhan sooner, but didn’t do his job to be aware….. I mean supply chain WW is heavily dependent on goods from China, most industries knew in January that the virus was starting to cripple China’s output and that the local government was squelching information and this jackass did nothing but tweet bullshit from his toilet.

zn wrote:

Plus the entire “panic” thing is itself dubious. There is such a thing as disaster studies. Historians and social science people study events like the great SF earthquake in the past, or tsunami events in the present and so on. What people in disaster studies say is that there is more harm done by authorities doing things to “prevent or control panic” than there is harm done by actual or real panic. In fact disaster studies people say that the entire “people panic” routine is all fiction. Under the conditions of actual disaster, you are far more likely to get community solidarity than “panic.”

“Panic” is a thing in movies.

So what kind of “panic” did Trump-brain anticipate? Rioting in the streets? Cities burned down? Mobs congesting the freeways?

Naw the “panic” would be people hunkering down and…gulp…spending less money on a daily basis because they go out less.

Which of course would not be panic, it would be a rational response.

But less lucrative.

Right. The only “panic” he could have been worried about was panic on Wall Street. Not panic on Main Street. He could not possibly care less about that.

And…what’s ironic is that Bush DID have advance notice. Remember the memo about planes? That’s a bit different, of course, because you wouldn’t “say” anything about that kind of event, anyway, but…he ignored it.

Here’s a new scoop — except for those here who already knew about it.

;>)

This, of course, was bound to happen, and was “the plan” all along, when Trump forced a reroute of info from the CDC to his own Homeland Security Dept. Far less chance for those pesky scientists to mess up his endless lies/propaganda about Covid-19.

Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19 The politically appointed HHS spokesperson and his team demanded and received the right to review CDC’s scientific reports to health professionals.

Excerpt:

The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.

In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon.

The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation’s public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Caputo’s team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”

In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to “hurt the President” in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department and obtained by POLITICO.

This must have been the sequel:

Btw, what was Perry Mason doing in Tokyo?

Yeah, Carlson knows what’s truly important about this. Who let Trump talk with Woodward 18 times by phone (for the book)!! It’s all their fault!!

Trump is also trying to blame Woodward for not sharing what he knew, earlier, about Trump’s deadly mendacity.

We’re light years beyond the twilight zone.

And, cuz the right-wing/GOP mediaverse has far, far more message discipline than the centrist/Dem mediaverse, it may just work. Endless repetition, the projection of confidence and certainty, a unified voice — these things work. Doesn’t matter that it’s all lies.