Should Bob Woodward have revealed that Trump lied sooner?
When a crime is committed it’s sometimes a favorite pastime of a certain kind of armchair cynic to find people other than the criminal to blame. The most repulsive of the type are the blamers of rape victims. Far less abhorrent but still representative of the breed are those who insist that Bob Woodward should have come forward sooner with the taped revelation that Donald Trump deliberately misled the American people about coronavirus. Put another way, could lives have been saved had Bob Woodward come forward sooner with the tape proving Trump was lying?
Let me start by interjecting the personal. I’m not a huge fan of Bob Woodward. I’ve always thought there was something just a little bit sleazy about him and that he didn’t always deserve the accolades he so generously receives. From his involvement in the “Jimmy’s World” scandal (in which he supported a Washington Post inner city story about an 8 year old heroin addict that turned out to be entirely fictional) to his highly questionable claim of a deathbed interview with CIA Director William Casey, to his rather clumsy, unimaginative interview style, he’s never exactly been my favorite. Of the two famous Watergate reporters I always thought Bernstein was the smart one.
What’s more, had I been in Woodward’s position, I would like to think I would have announced to the world right away that Trump was lying about coronavirus and I had the tapes to prove it. To be sure, I doubt that it would have done any good. When you stop to think about it, it still hasn’t done any good, really, and that carries my point. But announce I would have, all the same. And it would have come, I think, at no loss to my soon-to-be-released book.
With those preliminaries out of the way, it isn’t Bob Woodward’s job to warn the American people about the dangers of coronavirus, it’s the job of the president of the United States. Trump’s failure to do so is his shame, and he shares that shame with nobody. Bob Woodward is no more responsible for the inner workings of Donald Trump than Lindsey Graham is responsible for Trump’s moronic decision to do the Woodward interview in the first place. The buck stops there, and we need to stop suggesting otherwise.
Donald Trump deliberately misled the American people, knowing with crystalline clarity, in advance, that people would die. He did it to protect his precious stock market with the insane belief that it would enhance his re-election chances. He made the decision to voluntarily trade 200,000 American lives (so far) in exchange for four more years as America’s first criminal president, went home, had dinner and slept like a baby. Donald Trump is the evil at work here. He gets the blame and no one else.
If there’s any doubt left among you that Donald Trump is a psychopathic murderer, wholly without an ounce of human compassion, a murderer who would kill anyone any time to advance his shot at re-election, now is the time to abandon that doubt. Donald Trump isn’t just your garden variety corrupt Republican, he is as evil and as ruthless and as heartless and as vicious as any serial murderer you have ever read about. Trump is a dead-eyed killer.
There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.