Bob Woodward Takes On Trump
I haven’t read Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage.” You haven’t either. It doesn’t come out until next week.
What follows are my hot takes based upon hair-on-fire accounts in the press:
First, if Donald Trump actually told Woodward back in February that he knew Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but was downplaying its seriousness to prevent a national panic, why did the newspaperman wait until September 15th - 49 days before the election - to publish such explosive information?
It’s not like the associate editor of The Washington Post didn’t have another outlet. You’d think that information might have been useful to Post readers last winter.
When challenged about the timing of this revelation, Woodward told the AP that he wasn’t sure this was true at the time and was still mining other sources.
Sure. Nothing to do with churning out another best seller and inflicting the most damage on the president’s chances of re-election.
I hesitate to ask this, and run the risk of making the heads of Trump haters explode, but what’s wrong with trying to keep calm in the country, as long as the president was simultaneously taking measures to try to curb exposure to the virus and keep hospitals from being overrun?
Trump may have said he was downplaying the seriousness of the virus, but he banned travel from China on January 31 - just one week after the first confirmed case in the U.S. - over the objections of some “experts” and to the derision of the Democrats who accused him of over-reacting and xenophobia.
That ban signaled that something ugly was brewing in Wuhan.
There’s more.
Oh, and it’s worth noting that in February it was folks on the right who seemed far more worried about the virus than those on the left who were too busy painting Trump as a racist. On February 25, Nancy Pelosi urged people to wade into crowded celebrations of Chinese New Year. On February 28 Joe Biden declared, “it’s not time to panic about coronavirus.”
Back to Trump. On March 13 the president declared a national emergency. You had to be an idiot not to realize this pandemic was real by then. It was the first drastic health emergency in my life time. It quickly caused governors to close schools and send people home from work.
On March 16 the president announced a national “15 days to slow the spread” urging people to stay home and practice social distancing and hygiene. On April 2 Trump extended it to “30 days to slow the spread.”
On March 27th Trump signed the bipartisan $1.8 trillion CARES Act, which saved the economy from a depression and kept some small businesses afloat. The feds sent out $1,200 payments to almost everyone.
You don’t do that for the sniffles.
In mid-March Trump announced that he would order the USNS Comfort to New York, with its crew of 1,200 and 1,000 hospital beds, to provide overflow care for patients in Manhattan. In record time the ship was readied and on Saturday, March 28 the Comfort sailed out of Norfolk.
I remember that day. I was on the beach in Norfolk with a throng of people waving American flags as the hospital ship passed.
Trust me, we knew this thing was serious.
On March 19th, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. had a shortage of ventilators and that experts were warning that by the end of May “as many as 820,000 U.S. coronavirus patients would need ventilators.”
One more prediction that was wildly wrong.
Yet, in response, the Trump administration immediately ramped up ventilator production, shipped thousands to the states and now has 120,000 in the national stockpile. The government just canceled contracts to build more because of the ventilator glut.
Trump wisely left shutdowns and other measures to the governors. What was needed to control the pandemic in New York was not the same as what was needed in Montana.
According to some reports, Trump told Woodward that the virus wasn’t just hurting the elderly it was hitting young people, too. Trump was wrong about that. This virus picked off the elderly and those with other serious health conditions. Young people have emerged unscathed for the most part. Of course that hasn’t stopped newspapers from ginning up hysteria with every positive case detected in a school or college.
If the president was trying to tamp down panic, the media has done its best to keep it going.
As far as the Woodward news, Dr. Anthony Fauci - the hero of the left - was busy shooting it down yesterday.
The New York Post reported that Fauci said it wasn’t his impression that Trump downplayed the seriousness of the virus:
“I didn’t get any sense that he was distorting anything. In my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had,” Fauci said.
Similarly, in a piece headlined, “Fauci Denies Hearing Trump Distort Facts on Coronavirus,” Politico quoted Fauci saying “I didn’t see any discrepancy between what we told him (Trump) and what he announced publicly.”
As late as March 9th, of course, Fauci, too, was downplaying the threat of the virus, urging Americans to continue to take cruises.
“I think that if you are a healthy young person there is no reason not to go on a cruise ship, Personally, I would never go on a cruise ship because I don’t like cruising. But if you have an underlying condition or you’re an elderly person who has an underlying condition I would recommend strongly that they do not go on a cruise.”
On March 8 Fauci told “60 Minutes” in no uncertain terms that Americans should not be wearing masks. They don’t do any good, he said.
Then, on April 3rd, Fauci did an about-face and said, yes, masks were a good idea and he’d only cautioned against them a month earlier because he was worried about a shortage of masks for frontline workers.
I mention this to remind you that misinformation has been rampant during this pandemic. The Chinese lied repeatedly about the virus and so did the World Health Organization, claiming for a preposterous amount of time that there was no evidence of person-to-person spread of Covid-19.
That left the West unprepared for the rapid spread once it arrived.
Some of the bad information was innocent: Many experts - and Trump - believed that the virus would show seasonality like other coronaviruses and recede in the summer. Perhaps it would disappear altogether as SARS had. The president merrily predicted that life would return to normal by Easter. He was wrong.
Instead, it spiked.
Thankfully, the virus is proving less deadly now than in was in March, April and May. The New York Times reports that cases were down 13% over the past two weeks and deaths declined by 22%.
The U.S. and the rest of the world made myriad mistakes during this pandemic. Too many lives were lost. Now many experts are questioning the lockdowns that not only rocked the economy but resulted in a dramatic increase in depression, suicide and domestic violence. Oh and most governors failed to protect nursing home residents. In Virginia, more than half of all deaths have been of people in long-term care facilities.
My prediction: Woodward’s book will harden the position of those who loathe the president, while Trump supporters will shrug and say that the president ought to be optimistic and it’s his job to tamp down hysteria.
Pick your side. Oh wait, you already did.
