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.
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.
Today there’s going to be a failed vote todayon 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. And that bill was intended “To condemn gross human rights violations of ethnic Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.” So human rights are left out of the bill, both through the too-small relief for desperate Americans and the erasure of concern for the Uyghurs. At least there’s no clause in it thanking the Xinjiang security forces like the credits of Mulan.
Democrats will filibuster this bill, fingers will be pointed, some stopgap spending bill will get us through the election, and that’s the end of your legislating for 2020. Yesterday the Senate was confirming judges, while 28 million people continue to collect a too-meager unemployment check. The White House is looking to do more shitty and insubstantial executive actions to layer on top of the old shitty and insubstantial ones.
In a matter of weeks people will vote in an election to choose a new set of leaders. The old set is wearing pretty thin.
