Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Faced with the damning revelation that President Trump admitted he downplayed the coronavirus despite fully grasping the urgency of the threat, he and his propagandists have settled on their counter-spin: Trump was acting as a kind of modern-day FDR, sagely calming the country to prevent an outbreak of self-destructive mass “panic.”
But there’s a serious problem with this account. The facts already on the public record demonstrate that whatever desire Trump had to avert any panic was largely about doing what he perceived was in his own personal and political interests, not those of the nation or the American people.
Trump and his defenders have fixated on the word “panic” in this quote, which Trump gave to Bob Woodward on March 19:
Well I think Bob, really to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.
That came after Trump admitted on Feb. 7 to Woodward that he understood the coronavirus was airborne, making it particularly contagious, and even that “it’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” Trump conceded he knew how bad the threat was and then admitted to downplaying it.
Yet Trump’s defenders now insist his stated desire to avoid a “panic” demonstrates that he was operating from the belief that he had good reason to downplay the virus threat — and that in so doing, he was acting in the public interest.
The timeline is damning
In February, for instance, Trump did repeatedly rage over the idea that the coronavirus was creating a panic. But, crucially, his own public statements explicitly revealed that he saw the possibility of a panic largely through the prism of his own interests.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...umps-frantic-spin-about-woodward-revelations/
But there’s a serious problem with this account. The facts already on the public record demonstrate that whatever desire Trump had to avert any panic was largely about doing what he perceived was in his own personal and political interests, not those of the nation or the American people.
Trump and his defenders have fixated on the word “panic” in this quote, which Trump gave to Bob Woodward on March 19:
Well I think Bob, really to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.
That came after Trump admitted on Feb. 7 to Woodward that he understood the coronavirus was airborne, making it particularly contagious, and even that “it’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” Trump conceded he knew how bad the threat was and then admitted to downplaying it.
Yet Trump’s defenders now insist his stated desire to avoid a “panic” demonstrates that he was operating from the belief that he had good reason to downplay the virus threat — and that in so doing, he was acting in the public interest.
The timeline is damning
In February, for instance, Trump did repeatedly rage over the idea that the coronavirus was creating a panic. But, crucially, his own public statements explicitly revealed that he saw the possibility of a panic largely through the prism of his own interests.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...umps-frantic-spin-about-woodward-revelations/
