On Wednesday, excerpts from Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, began popping up online. From those snip...
On Wednesday, excerpts from Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, began popping up online. From those snippets, we learned that President Trump not only knew that the coronavirus was deadly but he was literally told this pandemic would be the worst moment of his presidency by one of his advisers. The president then proceeded to walk out onto a national stage and lie about the impact of the coronavirus over and over again. Bodies kept dropping, and when the president wasn’t playing golf, he was lying about the seriousness of what would become a global pandemic.
On Thursday, the president had the opportunity to address claims (and audio) that he knew and “downplayed” the threat level of the coronavirus, and you know what he did? Well, first he noted that his boo North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was in good health:
Kim Jong Un is in good health. Never underestimate him!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020
Then, he blamed...Bob Woodward:
Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months. If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020
Yep, that’s right. This is all Woodward’s fault. Raise your hand if you voted for Bob Woodward for anything? The level of pass-the-buck-ness in this administration is literally breathtaking. I don’t even believe that anyone in the Trump administration actually believes this shit, so I won’t even waste my time breaking down how this was/is a president’s responsibility.
Just know that there have been two types of people in this country since Trump took office: those of us who believe that Trump is Satan’s best slave hand and those who believe that Trump is God. So tell me, what difference it would have made if a journalist with ties to the Washington Post, an organization that Trump and his cronies have discredited as “fake news,” would have come out and said the quiet part out loud? We all knew that Trump was out of his depth and that he was lying to try and save his floundering president, but yes, let’s act like it was all Woodward’s fault.
On Feb. 7, in an on-the-record interview with Woodward—one of 18 fucking interviews that Trump gave—the president admitted that the coronavirus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flu” but publicly he kept lying, claiming that the coronavirus was like a seasonal flu and that the cases would soon be “close to zero,” the Hill reports.
Some folks have claimed that Woodward should’ve come forward for the public good. But to those folks I say, Woodward is a white man and when have white men given a shit about the public good? Think about this: Woodward’s life work was bringing down the Nixon administration on information given to him by a man known only as “Deep Throat.” For 30 years Woodward and the Post kept the man’s identity a secret. Then Vanity Fair got word that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat and they moved on the story. That story would catch the Post completely off guard.
“It really landed on us,” Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor during the Watergate era, told the New York Times. “I had no idea it was coming.”
But, there was one person who did: Woodward.
Not only did he know the story was coming, he was quoted in it. Because the secrecy of Deep Throat’s identity added to the mystique surrounding Woodward’s personal narrative as the journalist who brought down a president using intel from some ghostly figure, he didn’t want the identity to be leaked. But he didn’t even bother to mention to the Post that Vanity Fair was not only on to them, but they’d interviewed him about it. In short, if he’d fucked over the Post, what makes you think he’d give a fuck about the rest of us?
Woodward would later defend his decision not to tell the world what he knew about the coronavirus to the Associated Press.
“He tells me this, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, but is it true?’ Trump says things that don’t check out, right?” Woodward said, adding that he was trying to find out: “What did he know and when did he know it?”
Which all sounds like bullshit to me. This about the greed of white men: One too selfish to give a shit about the lives of Americans he’s been elected to lead and another willing to hold it all in as long as he can profit in the end.
But let me be clear: This all falls on one man’s slumped shoulders.
As it stands “the coronavirus has infected over 6.3 million Americans in total and resulted in more than 190,000 U.S. deaths,” the Hill reports. And that blood is solely on one man’s orange stained hands.
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