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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Sept. 10, 2020

Trump's Lies On COVID Were Pretty Transparent
Plus, Senate Republicans play model Congress

 

All presidents lie, but Trump has actually highlighted why that's a
problem. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

First Response

The big story, finally aligned with the pandemic for the first time in a
minute, is about Bob Woodward deciding to let us all in on conversations

he had with the president about the coronavirus in February and March.
The headlines on this are that Trump knew back in February that COVID-19
traveled through the air and was much deadlier than the flu, and in
March he admitted to downplaying the severity of the virus, "because I
don't want to create a panic."

First of all, Bob Woodward sitting on information about presidential
lies until he has a book to promote is... well it's the difference
between being a hungry reporter in 1973 and a palace courtier in 2020.
Many people were going to die from minimizing the extent of the pandemic
and not acting on knowledge of its impact. An author with as big a
financial cushion as Woodward would recognize that and act in the
interest of humanity rather than his first printing.

All that said, having Trump try to use this as his own excuse

is pretty rich. There's no way to read what he did as a protective
effort not to scare people
,
from the same guy who has broadcast that immigrants and anarchists will
burn down cities and murder random people on the street if he doesn't
retain power. He downplayed it because he wanted to get re-elected and
thought he could bullshit his way through another crisis. A hundred and
ninety thousand people would beg to differ but they're all dead, and
cannot be erased from the public consciousness.

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I'm definitely reminded of the common refrain that all governments
lie. The World Health Organization was resisting the idea of airborne
transmission, what Trump stated as fact in February, as late as July
,
so maybe we can expand that to non-governmental organizations as well.
In the early 2010s it was de rigueur to say that presidential lying was
a sign of strength
,
actually, because a public can't handle the truth. The Trump era has
washed this all away, and revealed the dangers of continual lying at the
highest levels, how it has fostered distrust and bent reality into
warring perspectives.

And yet I do think I was able, without getting a taped confession, to
figure out that Donald Trump was lying about the virus. He kept saying
that he wanted fewer tests because then there would be fewer cases, and
then he said on March 6, a month after the first Woodward conversation,
that he didn't want a cruise ship to dock

because the cases would be counted. On March 9 he said the flu-the
thing he already knew wasn't as deadly as the coronavirus, and we all
knew the same just by looking at reality-dwarfed the risk from COVID.

Trump is such a bad liar that he's almost truthful. He's all
artifice and what he's really thinking isn't ever below the surface.
Anyone with a modicum of critical thinking could ascertain that he was
downplaying the virus. And yet this is still worthy of the familiar
slogan we hurl at presidents, "Trump lied, people died
."
As the head of a political tribe in a polarized age, his surface-level
statements, however clearly manipulative and self-serving, do set the
tone. They suggest whether his people should be concerned or not. And so
this recklessness did lead Americans to their graves, and mainly the
ones who would dictate their personal behavior by what Donald Trump says
about a subject.

In other words, it was the people who actually listen to Trump that
suffered the most. He ravaged his own base.

This was a rare case where Trump's words and actions mirrored one
another; he said he would downplay the threat, and he did. More often,
the umbrage taken from Trump's words neglects his actions
,
in part because focusing on actions would implicate the centrist
predilection toward more war and starvation of the public that's
popular among the media set. Maybe Trump's failure to protect the
well-being of the American public can bring the conversation around to
his destructive policies, informed by a destructive smash-and-grab,
zero-sum worldview.

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Useless Senate Bill is Useless

Today there's going to be a failed vote today

on the Senate Republican simulacrum of a coronavirus relief bill, and
after that maybe we can face the reality that this Congress will not be
coming with any more help. I don't have the heart to detail
"what's in" the Senate Republican bill, or whether they get to a
magic majority to "put pressure" on Democrats. It's all theater
anyway.

To reach that intra-caucus consensus, Senate Republicans had to cut the
cost in half, and maybe if they keep doing that in Zeno's Paradox
fashion, they can get
full buy-in as it approaches zero. They had to please Ted Cruz

by inserting tax credits
for private
school scholarship donations. It's a ludicrous situation.

To me the main thing you need to know about the bill is that they got
around the restriction on only originating spending bills in the House
by gutting and amending existing legislation