Big fires everywhere
Colossal lies bring giant catastrophes. President Trump’s huge lies about the Coronavirus pandemic—about how lethal the virus is, about how good the administration’s response has been, about everything relating to Covid-19—have propelled the progress of the disease more even than how easily the virus spreads.
“You just breathe the air,” explained the president to journalist Bob Woodward on audio tape. It was a rare Trump truth. Rage, the book that resulted from Woodward’s interviews with Trump in late winter and early spring, confirmed more decisively than anything else the President’s breathtaking duplicity, his shamelessness in lying to the American people on life-or-death issues, his utter lack of a social or a moral conscience, how comfortably his acknowledgement of white privilege as a reality in this nation sits alongside his conviction that a privileged white person that feels a sense of guilt about that is a deluded fool.
“You drank the Kool Aid,” Trump told Woodward when the journalist inquired whether people like him and the president, older, privileged white men, should feel a sense of responsibility regarding the persistence of systemic racism. The reference is to the hundreds of followers of cult leader Jim Jones who died after ingesting poisoned Kool Aid at his direction.
The irony is that it is Donald Trump’s most fanatical followers who drank the Kool Aid by believing Trump when the president denied the very existence of Covid-19, claiming it was a hoax concocted by the Democrats to hurt his reelection. Later, they drank Trump’s lethal concoction when they trusted Trump’s assertion that Covid-19 was no worse than a “little flu” the cases of which would “soon go to zero.”
At the time, Trump told Woodward that the new virus kills more than five percent of those it infects compared with less than 1 percent of those who get the flu. His foolish fanatical followers went around defiantly mask-less, loudly protesting every commonsense public health measure like stay-at-home orders and social distancing rules. They drank Trump brand Kool Aid, and many died as a result. A recent study showed, for instance, that dining indoors at a restaurant is one of the main ways people catch Covid-19. People who bought Trump’s whopper-sized lies about the Coronavirus were the ones most likely to ignore the public health advice, to catch the virus, to get sick, and to die.
The allusion to the deadly Kool Aid is unconsciously insightful, revealing volumes about Trump’s political positions and general mindset. For Trump, it is suicidal and foolish for those who benefit from injustice—racial, economic, gender-based, or of any other kind—to recognize publicly the existence of the wrong and to try to right it. Although doing the right thing often redounds to the benefit of the privileged in the long run, for Trump, to act for justice in a way that might harm his immediate self-interest, like paying his fair share of taxes instead of looking for every dodge to avoid paying them, is just plain stupid.
Trump’s lying ways are deadly, but they do not exist in a vacuum. Like Trump and his fans, the entire Republican Party lives on a deadly river of self-interested denial and delusion. One Trump fanatic told CNN reporter Jim Acosta that he wasn’t wearing a mask at a packed Trump rally because: “There is no COVID. It is a hoax to destroy the United States.”
There is no global warming, no climate change either. The woods and the towns and the people in California and Oregon are catching fire by spontaneous combustion, not by dint of a planet warming because of the massive burning of fossil fuels. And we do not have to do anything about it as it will start to cool down as if by magic. What is good for coal and oil is good for the American people even if some, like the victims of the fire and the smoke in the western states, end up crying “I can’t breathe.”
Denial and delusion are the bywords Trump, the GOP, and their followers live and die by. Somehow, Bob Woodard’s persona, his fame, and his journalistic skill and “let me put you at ease” style that Trump mistook as the natural solidarity between well-off white Anglo men of a certain age, enabled the journalist to produce a double-edged tour de force.
The stuff that Trump told Woodward in the “just two old men talking mode” could be published as the sum total of truths ever uttered to a journalist by Trump. The same material could be packaged as a riff on O.J. Simpson’s book (If I did it) retitled how and why I did it: a criminal’s confession. This is two books in one, one the private truths of a pathological public liar and the second two an account of some of the most damaging lies he has told the American public.
But compared to Trump, as a liar and a criminal, O.J. Simpson is an apprentice. In closing, I will repeat below what I wrote for a breaking news piece in progreso.us last week.
The revelations in Rage, Bob Woodward’s book about Trump, documented by a priceless set of tapes in the president’s own voice, is best seen as the voluntary confession of a criminal, as if O.J. Simpson had given the police a “how and why I did it” interview.
But Trump’s guilt cuts much deeper: At worst, Simpson killed two people. Trump’s deliberate lack of action against Covid-19, his orchestrating events most likely to spread the scourge, his urging people to attend super-spreader political rallies, his mocking of people for practicing the basic safety measures—social distancing and masking—his bullying everybody into opening the economy and the society wide as if inviting the virus to enter, and his own refusal to set the example by wearing a mask, are responsible for the deaths of at least tens of thousands and, perhaps, ultimately hundreds of thousands of people.
This is homicide on a mass scale. Take all the people who died needlessly because of the miserable, mad existence of Charles Manson, include the assistance of his fan base very like Trump’s cult, then multiply that by a factor of 10,000 or 100,000, and you get an approximation of the scale of Trump’s culpability.
