I suppose the Woodward Book could have been more damning

[ideologyhunter]

He told people in Michigan and other states that they needed to liberate themselves! Which meant, what? Go back to Happy Hour with the nomaskies? Dance in a mosh pit? What an unpardonable wretch (I hope.)

 

[lpetrich]

In March, Trump openly said that he knew it was serious but wanted to keep people’s hope up. ...

What an excuse for lying. Trausti, don't you hate Winston Churchill for talking about blood, toil, tears, and sweat? Angela Merkel for saying that this issue is very serious?

 

[mrzyphl]

Since this news broke I looked forward to reading the Fox News opinion columns and the hilarious comments section. Guess what? They shut down the comments section!
I guess they anticipated how easy it would be to ridicule their pathetic spin on it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

In March, Trump openly said that he knew it was serious but wanted to keep people’s hope up. ...

What an excuse for lying. Trausti, don't you hate Winston Churchill for talking about blood, toil, tears, and sweat? Angela Merkel for saying that this issue is very serious?

I don't recall Churchill saying the Nazi problem would disappear... like magic.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Since this news broke I looked forward to reading the Fox News opinion columns and the hilarious comments section. Guess what? They shut down the comments section!
I guess they anticipated how easy it would be to ridicule their pathetic spin on it.

Pathetic, but effective. The brown shirts swallowed it whole. They'll fucking believe anything.

 

[lpetrich]

Donald Trump’s fatal flaw: Of his many defects, Bob Woodward may have identified the worst | Salon.com - "Trump's failures come from a deep, dark well of fear and cowardice. He doesn't believe in anything, even himself"

According to interviews recorded by Bob Woodward for his book, "Rage," Donald Trump was briefed by national security adviser Robert O'Brien on Jan. 28 of this year that the coronavirus "will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency," that the virus was five times more deadly than ordinary flu, that it was spread when "you just breathe the air," and that it would soon become a worldwide pandemic. At the moment Trump told Woodward these things, on Feb. 7, the president had one job: Persuade the American people to work together to deal effectively with this threat to their health and well-being.

But he failed miserably.

Trump has two favorite ways of dealing with anyone who causes trouble with him: legal threats and buying them off, preferably with other people's money.

What we haven't learned yet is why. If Trump knew way back in February that the coronavirus was as dangerous as the 1918 flu pandemic and was likely to cause severe damage to the economy, why didn't he do what he'd always done and buy his way out of it? Why didn't he propose a package of about $8 trillion to $10 trillion that would attack the virus with health care spending and protect the economy with a massive stimulus? It was a perfect setup: He could have convinced the supine Republicans to go along, the Democrats would have been all for it, he would be spending someone else's money, and he might well be coasting his way to re-election by now. But once he had made his case that the virus was just a "hoax," that it was "like a flu," and that the U.S. had "pretty much shut it down," he forfeited his chance to spend his way through the crisis.

Instead, what we got was more than 6.6 million cases of coronavirus, nearly 200,000 dead, and another Trumpian tsunami of lies and cheerleading. Open up! Send the kids back to school! Play ball! It's going to just disappear! Look at the stock market! Unemployment is down!

 

[lpetrich]

Is Donald Trump mostly evil or mostly ignorant? Bob Woodward's book offers an answer: Both | Salon.com - "If Trump's calculated dithering on the coronavirus was obviously malevolent, his foreign policy is just moronic"

It figures that Bob Woodward, the man who helped to take down Richard Nixon 45 years ago, would follow up with a big book about Nixon's natural heir to the presidency, Donald Trump. Just as Nixon was undone by tape recordings he foolishly made to document his own corruption, so too Trump foolishly allowed himself to be recorded by Woodward. That's what sets Woodward's book "Rage" apart from all the other Trump books that have come before: We can hear the quotes in Trump's own voice, so he can't get away with calling it fake news.

...
When Trump says he didn't want to start a "panic" it's obvious that he meant he didn't want a stock market panic. Recall that he reportedly went nuts when Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, did what any public health scientist would do and announced on Feb. 25 that the coronavirus (which Trump already knew was "deadly stuff") was likely to cause massive disruption in the United States. The markets nosedived and Trump was livid, threatening to fire her for doing her job.

...
It's obvious that Trump has never, from the beginning, cared in the slightest about the pain and suffering caused by this deadly virus.

Then about Trump's foreign policy.

So is all the ridiculous folderol over North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, whom Trump believed could be cajoled into giving up his nuclear weapons by snuggling up to him. Woodward asked people in the CIA about Kim's "beautiful letters" to Trump and was told that while intelligence officials didn't know who had actually written them, they were "masterpieces."

The analysts marveled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump's sense of grandiosity and being center stage in history.

It's pretty obvious who was being played in that relationship.

It wasn't "Little Rocket Man".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Indifferent with a heapful of over his head.

 

[lpetrich]

Woodward: Historians examining the Trump era will ask 'What the F happened to America?' | TheHill

From an interview on CNN on Sep 22, as part of Citizen by CNN.

Asked about Trump saying he would give himself a perfect grade on his administration's coronavirus response — Trump said on Monday that "on the job itself, we take an A+" — Woodward said, "I'm quite frankly embarrassed for him that he would say that, because all Americans know that 200,000 were killed."

"It's almost like denying the nose on your face," Woodward, 77, added.

BW said about him that "he's obsessed with reelection."

"He's failed to build a team, he harasses people, he attacks people who work for him. This impulse decision-making, I've never seen anything like it, in the presidency or any institution," the Washington Post journalist said.

"We see now with the Supreme Court issue he's shifted the spotlight," Woodward said, referring to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week at 87. "He's absolutely delighted — this is an issue that's very important to his base, to Evangelicals. So the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of these events in history that has changed the entire dynamic."

BW calls the Trump Admin's response a "monumental failure."

 

[Elixir]

Yawn.
It's not exactly news that the most interesting thing about Trump is that he is an unusual mix of cunning and stupidity.