9/10/20
Faced with the damning revelation that President Trump admitted he downplayed coronavirus despite fully grasping the urgency of the threat, he and his propagandists have fixated on the word “panic” in this quote, which Trump gave to 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 that he understood 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 good reason to downplay the virus — and that in so doing, he was acting in the public interest. But a look at the timeline before and after that admission to Woodward shows that even if Trump did want to avoid provoking “panic,” it was largely for self-absorbed reasons, not out of any discernible conception of what was good for the country. Throughout February, Trump was utterly obsessed with the impact that public news about coronanvirus was having on the markets.
Even if you grant that Trump worried to some extent about panicking the public in addition to hurting the markets and his reelection hopes — which is highly unlikely to have weighed heavily on him in the least — this only incriminates him further. The whole reason Trump’s own officials urged him to tell the full truth was so he’d use his presidential authority and megaphone to prep the American people for the excruciatingly difficult and self-sacrificing steps that would be needed to combat the virus and limit more loss of life. He refused to do that for weeks and weeks. And that helped allow the virus to rampage out of control here, ironically leading to an even worse economic lockdown than might otherwise have been necessary. Trump’s stated desire to avoid what he called a “panic” isn’t exonerating in the least. In yet another wretched perversity, this excuse reflects a harsh light right back on to the same depravity, malevolence and incompetence that characterized his mishandling of the pandemic all along, with unthinkable consequences. Even in seeking to avoid this panic, Trump was largely subverting the national interest to his own. And as we now know, he did this regardless of the immense human toll he fully understood it would all but certainly take.