Unclaimed virus victims buried in mass grave in New York
It is true. It is not hyperbole. It is not partisan over-reach. President Trump lied about Covid-19 and now nearly 200,000 of our fellow Americans have died.
Sure, there were a handful of deaths and cases by early February when Trump told The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “This is deadly stuff,” and “You just breathe the air,” the president explained, “and that’s how it’s passed.”
This is not like the other 20,000 plus falsehoods that Trump has uttered since taking up residence in the White House. These lies about the virus were fatal.
- On February 24, Trump tweeted to the world, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
- On February 27, he said, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
- On March 10, he said, “And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
So, why did Trump say all this? Why did he lie? Why didn’t he fulfill his duty to protect American citizens?
On March 19, Trump told Woodward, ”I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Five days later, Trump made this statement on Fox News – March 24:
I brought some numbers here. We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off, I mean every year. Now when I heard the number—you know, we average 37,000 people a year. Can you believe that? And actually this year we’re having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies, say, “Stop making cars. We don’t want any cars anymore.” We have to get back to work.
He played it down then in the early days when the nation had an opportunity to get our act together – and he continues to play it down. Just yesterday, September 10, Trump held a campaign rally in Michigan; again no masks (or hardly any – he certainly didn’t wear one), no social distancing; no warnings – no nothing.
And it’s not like – since he acknowledged the severity of the COVID to Woodward – he acted immediately and enacted national testing, national supplies, a national plan and response. He didn’t do it when it knew way back in February and he still hasn’t done anything up to today.
As John Nichols in The Nation summarized:
A president who recognized his duty to protect the American people would have moved aggressively to address the threat, as leaders of other countries did. Instead, Trump denied the danger, with his words and deeds, until the rates of infection and death surged to levels that Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged in early August had the United States experiencing the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world.
The LA Times Editorial Board also had this view:
We suspect even his excuse for lying to the American people is less than truthful, and that it was the stock market he was really trying to keep calm. It’s been well-documented that in the early months of the pandemic, the president was frantic about how the disease would affect the economy. He raged about how the news media and the Democrats were exaggerating the dangers to scare the markets and make him look bad. Los Angeles Times Editorial Board
A deliberate deception to enable his re-election. That’s what it’s all about. He didn’t want to look bad. Trump was / is willing to have Americans die to help ensure he’s voted in again. His minions didn’t want the national security information about the threats to our 2020 election from the Kremlin; he didn’t want anyone to know about the threats from white supremacists. He didn’t want the COVID numbers to go up.
Yet, he’s untouchable. His enablers in the Senate have assured us of that. But, the irrefutable truth is, Trump lied, and we died.
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Great and fact based article. Enjoyed very much.