9/10/20
Recordings, real or rumored, have been a leitmotif of the Trump era. Trump recordings loom so large because they offer the prospect of breaking through his alternative reality, of nailing down this most slippery and mendacious of presidents, of showing everyone who he really is. But even those that materialize are often quickly forgotten, as Trump’s approval rating stays low but stubbornly stable and one scandal is eclipsed by another. Our politics suffers no shortage of incontrovertible proof of Trump’s venality. What it lacks is accountability. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that the famed journalist Bob Woodward’s utterly damning tapes of Trump discussing the coronavirus will fall into this same nothing-matters cycle. But decent people with public platforms should try to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s not just that these tapes reveal the president lying about the pandemic that has ravaged America on his watch. What’s shocking — even after more than three and a half numbing years — is the deliberate, willful nature of the lies. Unlike most Trump tapes, Woodward’s actually tell us something new about the president, rather than just confirming what we think we already know. Because Trump is a prodigious consumer of propaganda, as well as a creator of it, it’s not always clear how aware he is of spreading disinformation.
Yet in recordings Woodward has released of Trump talking about the coronavirus — excerpts from interviews conducted for Woodward’s new book, “Rage” — the president doesn’t sound ignorant or deluded. Rather, he sounds uncommonly lucid. On Feb. 7, Trump described the virus as airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” adding, “this is 5 percent versus 1 percent, or less than 1 percent.” Trump clearly knew that compared with the flu, it was several times more likely to kill. And yet he told the country just the opposite. Despite knowing that the virus was airborne, he mocked mask-wearing and held several large indoor rallies. We know now that this wasn’t just Trump being buffoonish and engaging in magical thinking. It was conscious deception. And so Trump lied to the country about the calamity that would soon overtake it. Trump supporters may not care that their president has knowingly endangered them, withholding potentially lifesaving information that he readily confided to an elite Washington journalist. But that doesn’t change the importance of what Woodward has captured on tape. It’s now clear that just because Trump is lying to us, that doesn’t mean he’s lying to himself. Trump’s lies sabotaged efforts to contain the coronavirus, almost certainly leading to many more deaths than it would have caused under a minimally competent and non-sociopathic leader.
