The Pandemic Diary: Woodward and Trump
https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/the-pa ... and-trump/
The main takeaway from this should, obviously, be the fact that Trump has now been conclusively proven to have committed an act that, were he not immune from criminal process by virtue of his office, would and should lead to a prosecution for mass negligent homicide. Seriously, if he were a CEO and he was saying that about health hazards his company created that led to thousands of preventable deaths, he’d literally be arrested, even in a country like ours, which goes easy on such things. If this were a different country than the one it is — if this were some late-80s Eastern European autocracy or some mid-century Latin American country ruled by a tyrannical strongman — mobs bashing in the door of the Imperial Palace and frog-marching the Dear Leader before a firing squad would not be out of the realm of possibility. Because he is president, however, and because this is America, however, this will be treated as a political matter.
To be sure, it’s a political matter no sane person shouldn’t have had their mind made up about months ago. Maybe I left a smidgen of room open in my mind which allowed for Trump being too dumb to understand what he was faced with and too shitty a person to care, but that’s not fundamentally different to what he’s now been found to have truly done. It’s more evil than incompetent now — this is evidence of clear calculation with apparent knowledge of the risks we faced as opposed to fingers-in-the-ears defiance — but we knew in March that he was not going to do jack shit to protect the country, at which point a sane U.S. Congress would’ve impeached and removed him anyway. This is damning, yes, but in my assessment, Trump was well beyond damned well before now.
Then there’s the secondary takeaway: the journalistic one. The one in which Bob Woodward sat on the tape of the President of the United States admitting that he was hiding and lying about the danger of the pandemic from the beginning.
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While Trump himself is somehow able to exist in a fantasy world where up is down, most people aren’t. If Trump’s deadly, deceitful words were known in March or April instead of only now, the grifters, the truthers, the Republican governors and all of the sketchy people who have run interference for them and relied on them would not have been able to use their “it’s just like the flu” or “this is easily controllable” rebop as a shield. They would not have been able to simply say, as they did, that they trusted the president and thereby end the conversation. Because they were able to do that — because there was pyramid of COVID-19 bullshit built on the immovable foundation of support for Trump by enough people to make it messy — thousands upon thousands of people have died. And will continue to die, because the tractor tire started rolling down the hill months ago, and we’re all inside of it.
