He Still Likes Playing it Down

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

“I wanted to always play it down, I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”  Donald Trump to Bob Woodward, March 2020

“We don’t want to jump up and down and start shouting that we have a problem that is a tremendous problem (and) scare everybody.” Trump, yesterday

It only took seven days.

     One week is all it took for Donald John Trump to top his despicable 2018 comments about fallen Marines in France, thereby retaining his infallible talent for topping his last latest outrage. But this was different. This was worse in more ways than I think one thinking person can enumerate on their own. When snippets came out of some of Trump's 18 taped conversations with Woodward yesterday, the White House immediately launched into spin mode. 

    All Trump could say was to reiterate his reasons for lying to the American public about the deadliest pandemic to hit our shores in a century. By today, he was blaming Woodward for not releasing the tapes sooner in a tweet that could've been written by the Zodiac to the San Francisco Police Department ("Dear Blue Meanies- It's the press's fault I was allowed to kill again. signed Zodiac.").

    One has to almost feel sorry for White House staffers who are now in pretty much permanent crisis/spin mode after discovering what their boss had said to one of the reporters who'd helped bust the Watergate scandal wide open in 1973. Against his will, Trump was a no show for Woodward's last book, Fear, because, knowing Trump shoots off his unfiltered mouth and Woodward's reputation for getting at truths no one else can seem to get, they kept Trump as far away from Woodward as possible.  

     So, Trump hedged his bets by doing a year-long end run around his more media-savvy staff. Of the 18 interviews Woodward conducted with Trump, only three were conducted in public- Two at the Oval Office and one at Mar a Lago. The other 15? Well, those were largely if not entirely unplanned late night phone calls from Trump's bedroom either at the West Wing's Executive Mansion or at any of his 16 country clubs.

     One can imagine Trump, giddy at the chance of finally talking to the Bob Woodward, one of the few people to whom Trump actually looks up with adoring eyes, lying on his stomach in bed at 1 AM, knees bent and ankles up in the air, twirling his combover around his finger like a preteen girl talking to that cute new boy in school while Melania retched in the toilet in the adjoining bedroom.

     All the while, he was spilling secrets to the one man to whom he shouldn't've been speaking, if you're somebody in the WH's right wing spin machine, especially in light of what Woodward had written in Fear, and leaving out 328,000,000 other Americans. He told Woodward the facts about the pandemic: That it was highly transmissable. That it was five times deadlier than the flu. That children could get it. That it was "very deadly stuff". That the mortality rate was 5%.

     And that it was airborne.

    To Bob Woodward, he was the president we should've had, the one that 63,000,000 Americans voted for. He was a president in full possession of the facts, figures and realities of COVID-19 and he didn't pull any punches. He proved that he'd been listening to his public health advisors when they'd begun briefing him about the novel coronavirus on January 9th, was engaged and retained that information.

     Then, like Bob Woodward, he kept it all to himself for personal gain. Seven months later, over 191,000 Americans were dead because of it.

  

What About Bob?

“Bob Woodward is a very interesting guy, as you know. He’s obviously been heralded as a great reporter. But you’ll recall that there were also things that he knew … late in the Bush term.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

As usual, Bob Woodward's got some 'splainin' to do. Over his 19 books that now span six decades, Woodward has made a very handsome and lucrative living in unearthing news that no one can seem to get to then sitting on them until his next book comes out, long after those topical facts and news items lose their relevance. He hides these nuggets of journalistic gold like a miserly, paranoid '49er, refusing to reveal it to his own paper, The Washington Post, and his own readers.

     Bob Woodward has become complicit in the coverups he used to help uncover and all for personal gain. And Woodward's publisher, Simon & Schuster (as usual, as they've published most of the books about Trump this summer) and the WaPo seem perennially, and disturbingly, OK with that. Except, as I'd said in the second paragraph, this is different. Now, unlike the other news nuggets Woodward's sat on over the years, 328,000,000 American lives at stake.

     And it isn't just Kayleigh ("The president had never lied to the American public about COVID."), Fox and Frauds, the White House and Trump going into spin mode. Even Woodward's on his back foot, as well he should be. Nearly 200,000 Americans are dead because the correct facts were never disseminated to the American public and Woodward's weasel words ring more hollow than usual. His "defense" is that he needed to fact-check what Trump had told him back in February and March about the virus, which is absurd. Virtually every creditable doctor from government epidemiologists such as Anthony Fauci to ER physicians were warning us about how dangerous this disease was and what we needed to do to defend ourselves from it.

    Yes, the man who broke Watergate with Carl Bernstein and who has access and sources that would make Sy Hersh drool with envy suddenly needed an entire half year to vet what Trump said about COVID-19? Bullshit.

    But, Bob Woodward, as inexplicably trustworthy as he's generally considered to be, is not the president. OK, fair enough. But Woodward was complicit in the coverup just as surely as John Dean, HR Haldeman and John Erlichmann were in covering up Watergate. And this is what he let Trump get away with:

“Part of it is the mystery. Part it is the viciousness. You know when it attacks it attacks the lungs. And I don’t know — when people get hit, when they get hit, and now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people.”

     Yet, months later on August 5th, Trump called in to Fox and Frauds (which is also helping start up the spin machine) and said, "If you look at children, children are almost, and I would say almost definitely, but almost immune from this disease. I don’t know how you feel about it, but they’ve got stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this.” By August 7th, the CDC had to issue guidelines warning us that "children are at severe risk of COVID-19." And Trump was demanding that schools reopen on time.

"I Still Like Playing it Down."

"Why did you lie to the American people and why should we trust what you have to say now?"”That's a terrible question and the phraseology. I didn't lie. What I said, we have to be calm."  -Trump, minutes ago at a press conference.

“It is important to remember that President @realDonaldTrump shut down the entire American economy to put the health of America first.” -Mike Pence in a heavily ridiculed and now-deleted tweet

Three days after telling Woodward, “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed... And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” he called Fox and said to Trish Regan, instead, “We’re in very good shape. We have 11 cases. And most of them are getting better very rapidly. I think they will all be better.” A little less than two weeks later, he told reporters on the South Lawn that “we have it very much under control in this country.” He had no qualms about doing so because he knew at that moment there were millions of goobers watching Fox at that moment, hanging on his every lying word.

     By February 26th, he'd publicly poo poohed the very idea the virus could be lethal. Two days later, at a South Carolina rally, Trump pronounced coronavirus, "a Democratic hoax." By March 19th, during perhaps the only times Trump was perfectly transparent, he explained to Woodward why he consciously decided to mislead the American public about the deadliest disease we've faced in 100 years. “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

   The right wing spin machine is so patently absurd that Pence is literally (and very briefly) rewriting history by telling us that Trump shut down the entire economy because he loves us so much. Reality check: It is impossible to "shut down" an "entire... economy" the size of ours and Trump did nothing of the sort. As Democratic governors shut down large parts of their state economies and enacted public health safety measures such as mandating mask wearing and social distancing, Trump was sneering at them and tweeting about liberating Minnesota and Michigan and demanding businesses reopen by Easter.

    Nearly 200,000 dead bodies later, the lies continue. ABC's Jonathan Karl became just about the first reporter to ever call Trump a liar to his face and Trump, naturally, took umbrage at that.

     Yet the man who's now pretending he didn't want to panic the country has predicated virtually his entire campaign on fear and incipient panic, warning white "suburban housewives" if Biden was elected, the darkies will come with their low income housing and God knows what they'll do then. He's warned us about looters, rioters and arsonists despite a plethora of evidence proving those violent criminal acts were carried out by his own supporters. Don't believe me? Two words: Kyle and Rittenhouse.

    But, most damningly, the Woodward tapes show that Trump isn't the befuddled, conspiracy theory-chasing mongerer that we've all portrayed him as. In Woodward's tapes, Trump showed he was in full possession of the facts, figures and truth of the coronavirus then made an arbitrary decision to keep those facts, figures and the truth from us. Trump is no senile old fool who could and should be removed by a 25th Amendment remedy.

     He knew he was damning us to a hell on earth and intended to ensure that to ensure his reelection. I believe prosecutors call that "murder one."