Trump Unmasked: Champion Liar Wins CoVID-19 “Lie of the Year” Award — Congrats

 

Date with and Recovery from His Virus Denials 

Unmasked with Masked Cadets at West Point

(Army-Navy Game: December 12, 2020) 

Later he did wear mask awhile

PolitiFact, a non-partisan fact-checking operation on Wednesday, December 16 declared that Trump’s coronavirus downplay and denial is the “Lie of the Year” winner. From Trump’s own words and record presented here from CNN is a list of critical Trump’s public statements that fueled confusion and conspiracies from the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.

·  He embraced theories that COVID-19 accounted for only a small fraction of the thousands upon thousands of deaths.

·  He undermined public health guidance for wearing masks.

·  He cast Dr. Anthony Fauci as an unreliable flip-flopper.

·  He said on January 22. “We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine.”

·   He then said on February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

·   He then said on February 26: “This is a flu. This is like a flu. It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”

·   He then said this on March 27: “You call it germ, you can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody knows what it is.”

Trump’s angle was simple and clear: The threat to your health was being over-hyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president.

Now the punch line: What is possibly worse than all of those Trump statements? Ironically, Trump knew that Covid-19 was far more dangerous than he was letting on. 

For example: Trump told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in March: “I wanted to always play [the threat posed by the coronavirus] down. I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic.”

Worse, a month prior to that stunning admission, Trump also had told Woodward that Covid-19 was “deadly stuff and that it was more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

Finally, even after the gravity of the threat was clear to the country, and those outrageous Trump statements and in disputing and undermining best medical practices to mitigate the spread of the virus, Trump repeatedly refused to wear a mask in public.

He pushed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus despite a lack of anything beyond anecdotal evidence.

His own FDA eventually revoked the emergency use of that drug after it became clear that it was “unlikely to be effective in treating Covid-19.”

During the election campaign, Trump promised, over and over again that the United States was rounding the corner on the virus even as medical experts suggested, rightly, the worst was yet to come.

So, why this end now with 300,000 deaths since day-one. The impact is clear: Republican governors, afraid of crossing Trump, were reluctant to take actions, most notably wearing mask mandates, to slow the spread. Patients who were literally dying from the virus were in disbelief. 

Mask-wearing is simply a matter of public health, became a political statement. And the sick and dying just kept piling up and up and up.

Why – what purpose? Also, pretty simple: All to improve Trump's political prospects for reelection. Trump saw the virus from the start as a political problem to be managed. If people thought the virus was running rampant and a massive threat to their well-being, then his chances of winning a second term would go downhill quickly. So he downplayed it not because he truly believed it was fake or overblown news but because he wanted to win.

My 2 cents: This fine article is from Chris Cillizza at CNN - it stands by itself and worth reviewing.

Thanks for stopping by.