Is it time to vote?
Donald Trump, on tape and repeatedly, says he understood what his intelligence team was telling him about the utter widespread terror of a global pandemic and decided “to downplay” the danger. There are 190,000 dead Americans and six million ill because he didn’t want to deal with it properly.
What more do Americans need to know?
Ignoring the deadliness of the coronavirus is a dereliction of the basic job of being president. Trump is incompetent.
Disclosure of the Trump attitude towards hearing bad news is at the core of the new book Rage by Bob Woodward, the longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, who also released a portion of the tapes of the 18 conversations he had with Donald Trump over four months.
As Trump told us that this virus was marginally worse than seasonal flu, and he refused to coordinate a full national response, he lied—and put Americans in danger of serious illness and death.
There are no anonymous sources in the heart of this book, no disgruntled former employees, no enemies; it is Trump talking about being Trump.
In other words, as Donald Trump told us that this virus was marginally worse than seasonal flu, and he refused to coordinate a full national response, he lied – and put Americans in danger of serious illness and death.
What does Trump think this job is about?
Outside of the coronavirus effort, the image projected in this book reflects Trump’s views that generals are pussies who care more about alliances than Trump’s trade policies, that people who work for him think Trump is an idiot, that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the virus guru, reports that Trump can’t pay attention to the incoming information.
Trump cannot do the job. Trump can rail, insult, signal unquestioning followers, but he can’t do the basics of his job. Basically, the source of this conclusion is Trump himself in these conversations. Trump called the book “just another political hit job” and said his remarks reflected that "You cannot show a sense of panic." Fox News labeled it a “distraction.”
No one can say that a disclosure like this will affect the outcome of the November election, but in combination with reports of labeling wounded and dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” his attitudes about the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters for social justice, there has to be a residual effect.
We all have a relative or friend who has succumbed to coronavirus, and we certainly have lost jobs and had our lives upturned because Trump “didn’t want to cause a panic.”
We’ve spent the last seven months tearing ourselves up about wearing masks, about creating physical distance, losing jobs and school and normal lives while, at the same time, Trump was disowning all of those effects?
Who does Trump think he is? He works for us, not the other way around. It is his job to bring us into the needed information about the virus and to get this nation moving in a singular direction to fighting that contagion.
Trump seems to have absolutely no problem trying to get us to focus solely on the perceived violence of Portland and Kenosha. All of a sudden, violence that happens in the middle of the night on a single block or two of a city can be blown up by this administration to reflect complete panic in the suburbs. What is the difference?
Trump has no problem building up fear.
He only has a problem with losing the spotlight on himself, and on the visceral need for reelection.
Trump can’t do the job.
Is it time to vote?
