At a key moment, with hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, the president lied.
There are many, many strange things about the Republican political reaction to the Donald Trump presidency, but one of the strangest is the refrain I’ve heard time and time again—“Pay no attention to what Trump says. Pay attention to what he does.” In essence, the argument is that the Trump administration consistently saves Trump from himself by enacting policies that are far superior to Trump’s pronouncements.
Why do I say this is strange—especially since some of Trump’s policies are, in fact, better than his pronouncements? (This is not just true of Trump, by the way.) Well, because it’s been received conventional wisdom since the foundation of this republic that the president’s words matter. They matter a great deal.
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And that brings me to the revelations this week that Donald Trump knew the coronavirus was far more deadly than the flu and yet deliberately played down the threat. I’m not going to rehash all the quotes, but the summary is in the tweet below, and the relevant recorded segments of Bob Woodward’s interviews with Trump are at the link:
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We will debate for years why the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, a nation chock-full of many of the best doctors and hospitals in the world, experienced such a disproportionately staggering death toll. But here’s one reason: A man who millions of people trust and who sets the tone for communications from massive right-wing news outlets and for massive right-wing celebrities told a series of lies. Those lies were transmitted and believed. People acted on those lies.
If you know anything about the right-wing media-entertainment complex, you know that many of its leading lights don’t just reject mainstream media or progressive critique. They thrive on it. They relish it. If these folks have a unifying ethos surrounding leftist attacks, it’s the silly sentence, “If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.”
No, it can also mean you’re wrong—sometimes seriously wrong.
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I’ll be honest with y’all. I really try to resist anger. There’s just too much anger in American politics. In fact, a key theme of my book is that anger and enmity represent their own independent threat to the American republic. But the president’s deception makes me angry.
I’ve spoken to too many people in my neighborhood, church, and community who absorbed the president’s words, heard their favorite figures in the conservative media, and believed them—even to the point where when the president pivoted and began to acknowledge the full dimensions of the crisis, many of those folks believed that the president’s pivot was artificial, a product of Dr. Fauci’s nefarious influence and not a product of undeniable and deadly facts.
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American history is replete with examples of presidents preparing Americans for long and painful struggles, and in many ways that kind of preparation was perhaps even more indispensable at the onset of this pandemic than it is when preparing Americans for most military conflicts. After all, “flattening the curve” and limiting the spread of the virus required public acceptance of the threat and massive voluntary compliance with public health guidelines and mandates. There are not enough police in the country to enforce mask mandates (nor would we want police to be so pervasive).
We had to do this together. We had to believe this was real. At a key moment, with hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, the president lied. He made many Americans disbelieve. When critics of the president declared, beginning even in 2015, that “character is destiny,” this is what we meant. When the time would come to tell the hard truths, the president was likely to fail—and fail he did.
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When critics of the president declared, beginning even in 2015, that “character is destiny,” this is what we meant. When the time would come to tell the hard truths, the president was likely to fail—and fail he did. https://t.co/QnT7KfTtk5
— David French (@DavidAFrench) September 11, 2020
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