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Lost in the politics of discussing what Pres. Trump knew and when he knew it is the understanding that while we think the current 180k or so people that have died right now is high– it’s small in comparison to what Pres. Trump believed the number could be according to the experts when he talked with Woodward.
Here we are today, thinking that approaching 200,000 is horrible, but back when Trump was talking to Woodward, I believe he was thinking that millions of Americans would die. The health care services would be overrun, and we would be dying without access to any care. Would health workers even continue to show up for work? How could the food supply chain continue? We would starve and, before that, panic about the prospect of starving. Americans would soon be at war with each other. There would be civil disorder — far beyond the Black Lives Matter riots — and the disease would spread even more quickly, with nothing to stop it.
When Trump said “I wanted to always play it down” and not “create a panic,” did he believe that 11 million Americans were going to die?
In that light, consider what Trump said to Woodward on March 19th (in the same transcript), “Well, I think Bob, really, to be honest with you… I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”
When you look at it like this, you might get a different view of the panic that Pres. Trump thought could happen. He could have been told it’d be the end of America.
At the same time, the US Surgeon General and Dr. Fauci were telling Americans not to wear masks, they didn’t work, etc. We all know how that turned out.
Personally, I think we should been more like Sweden and Taiwan. Give people all the information and let them make the call. Keep our elderly safe, common sense precautions, keep people working– even if the 11.5 million number was real.
But we live in a country and elect officials that, regardless of whether it’s Benghazi, SpyGate, or COVID-19 we always have to wonder if our government is telling us the truth or everything it knows. It is our servant, after all…
