President Withholds Vital Info on Pandemic, Leading to Nearly 200,000 Dead
This is more deadly. This is five-percent versus one-percent, and less than one-percent. So, this is deadly stuff.
– President Donald Trump on the dangers of Covid-19 to Bob Woodward, February 7, 2020
It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.
– Trump at a White House coronavirus task force briefing, February 27, 2020
There is now a recording of the president of the United States admitting to celebrated author/journalist, Bob Woodward that he was fully aware of the deadly severity of Covid-19, which he cites as five-times as dangerous as normal flu on February 7 and that its transmissions through the air makes it an imminent threat to the health of Americans. Donald J. Trump then spent the next six months not only saying the opposite of what he knew to be true, but outwardly combatted attempts by states and its governors to enact rules to curtail it, then refuted his administration’s scientists and doctors’ repeated dire warnings of its risks, many of whom received death-threats as a result. He is doing it right now as you read this. And, in the most naked expression of evil in a political leader, Trump hosted six campaign rallies in packed indoor arenas for an entire month until he was forced to stop on March 2. And during those rallies, he mocked the virus as a “hoax” that would “disappear miraculously” with weather.
At the time of Trump’s comments, there were less than twenty cases in the U.S. There are now 6.5 million. He then went onto share in the same interview that the dangers to young people were just as severe, before announcing in a Coronavirus Task Force Briefing days later that young people are hardly affected, if at all. This utterly indefensible cover-up of vital health information during the first weeks of the deadliest pandemic in a century is the smoking gun used to kill 192,000 (and counting) of our fellow citizens.
No matter how you parse this; it is systemic murder. Plain and simple. Tantamount to the worst example of government-sanctioned killing of Americans in my lifetime; Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s blithe disregard for the facts on the ground in Viet Nam from 1966 through to 1974 when tens of thousands of American kids died for a completely fabricated war, for which the strategic framework for achieving victory was long gone. Both of those presidents quit in shame.
The president should be summarily removed from office for this. But he will not be. Instead, he will continue to lie, run ads, and make rally appearances to scores of people with no protective masks to strive to be re-elected. He disparages his opponent, former VP Joe Biden for wearing one. He dismisses the deaths of Americans as “It is what it is,” as he said during an Axios interview last month. This immoral dereliction of duty is a hideous scar on the body politic and a permanent stain on the American character. Trump is scum. And he must be expunged from office this November, because only we can stop this.
Of course, Trump’s lies on the severity of Covid-19 is another glaring example of the abject failure of his presidency, which has been defined by his incessant dishonesty to protect his ego. If news is bad for him, he claims it is fake. If a member of his inner circle or administration official blows the whistle on his criminal activities or is convicted of said crimes, he claims to have never known them – including two of his campaign heads and a private lawyer. He wanted his inauguration to dwarf his predecessor’s. It did not. So, he sent his minions to lie about it. He wanted to hide the damaging information in his tax returns as far back as 2015 when he began to run for office, so he lied they were being audited and said when the IRS was done he would release them. He did not and has yet to do so. When Russia interjected itself into our 2016 presidential election that ended with his winning, he downplayed its effect, denied it happened against his own nation’s intelligence, and then obstructed the investigation to get to the bottom of it. He even committed treason on foreign soil by siding with Vladimir Putin against the U.S. in Helsinki, Finland in July 2018 to perpetuate these distortions.
Trump knowing the dangers of this disease and working against the nation he has sworn to protect is what he does again and again. He ran on protecting the border from deadly invasions, but he allowed a lethal combatant (he called himself a war-time president this past spring) to enter our country and run roughshod. Replace Covid-19 with ISIS, how does it look now? I write this on the eleventh day of September. Think if al-Queda had killed 192,000 Americans. We lost 2,779 Americans that day. How do we remember it? How will we remember our 2020 bin Laden; Donald Trump?
Trump’s National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien warned the president as early as January 28 in an intelligence briefing, ten days before the Woodward interview, that the virus would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency, while O’Brien’s deputy, Matt Pottinger informed the president it had the very real potential to be as bad as the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed an estimated fifty-million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans.
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward of the growing deadly pandemic in late February, nearly one month to the day of these official warnings. “I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Trump clumsily seized on the last part of the above statement as a specious defense the day after the revelations by claiming he was attempting to be a calming influence. This man, who has based his dying campaign for re-election on stoking fears of suburbs being overrun by angry blacks and anarchists, who embraces conspiracy-theory propaganda about Antifa and grade-school level QAnon madness, who tried to stop the eventual Blue Wave that acted as voter condemnation of him in 2018 by creating a phony caravan of marauders attacking the border, wanted us not to be panicked.
Then Trump had the audacity to compare his withholding of vital information from Americans by evoking FDR, who in December of 1941 quite forcefully expressed to the United States and the world of a “day that would live in infamy” after Pearl Harbor. He did not tell people we are having some boat issues and that the Japanese attack was a hoax and that the reports from Hawaii were fake news to keep the life-and-death facts from injuring his image. He was a real leader, an actual president, not a game show host huckster real estate cheat, whose fragile self-esteem has destroyed the economy and killed citizens.
In less than two months we can wipe this virus called Donald Trump out. Then go about facing the truth about what has devastated this country over the past six months, while he worked hard to help it. We know now, for sure, from his own mouth, that all of it could have been avoided. If you have contracted Covid-19, suffered, lost a loved one, blame Donald Trump. He could have done his job, but he played his games instead, as always.
Systemic murder.
End it on November 3.
