This is this illustration Salon used to illustrate Heather “Digby” Parton’s story:
Salon used one of the numerous side-view photos of Trump yelling, although I could found a better one (here). The background of syringes made no sense to me since it sends the opposite of the message conveyed in Digby’s conclusion:
This book ("Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,") reinforces the story that we already knew which is that the death toll in the U.S. from the pandemic is so high largely because the president of the United States at the time was an incompetent narcissist who was incapable of handling the crisis. So instead he said it was all bad press and poor optics and tried to happy talk his way out of it. It ended up killing people. A lot of people. Despite his desire to be seen as the man who single-handedly created the vaccines and saved the world, his followers heard him "downplay" the virus and they believed him. Now many of them are refusing to get the shots and Trump's American carnage continues to this day.
Trump never shouted “wear a mask and social distance” or later on “get shots in your arm, take the vaccine” or went out of his way to use the influence he wielded over his supporters to take Covid very seriously because it was a grave threat to them and their loved ones. From the beginning of the pandemic he mocked the wearing of masks. Once our three vaccines became available his cult of Covid deniers were primed to be anti-vaxxers.
Trump could have easily reversed his dismissive message about the dangers of Covid after he survived what we now know is a close brush with death; but being a malignant narcissist he focused only on the optics and the politics. I doubt the thought even crossed his mind. (See My June 25th diary)
For example:
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time, “prayed” that Trump would “emerge from the experience with a newfound appreciation for the seriousness of the threat,” according to the authors. He hoped Trump would urge all Americans to listen to public health experts “before it was too late.”
“Instead, Trump emerged from the experience triumphant and ever more defiant. He urged people not to be afraid of the virus or let it dominate their lives, disregarding that he had had access to health care and treatments unavailable to other Americans,” the book states.
Redfield’s hopes were dashed the instant he watched Trump disgustedly rip off his mask as he stood at the top of the White House stairs after returning from Walter Reed, according to book.
Trump wanted to continue to say Covid was no big deal and, somewhat contradicting that message, that he is a mythic superhero could survive a disease that was killing lots of people. (see: “President Donald Trump’s Alleged Muse On ‘Superman’ Stunt Has Twitter Leaping Tall Buildings”)
This would have been a cruel message beyond egregious and atrocious to send to the family and friends of those who died from Covid:
Trump didn’t promote anything to do with preventing the spread of Covid. What he did was antagonistic to all the life saving to the life saving advice coming from the vast majority of medical experts. This is why I like like my image of him spewing out a killer virus. It shows in graphic form what he actually did. If each of the forty or so viruses in my illustration represents 10,000 people who died in the United States that would add up to 400,000 of the 600,000 actually died.
There’s no way to determine how many Americans would have not gotten Covid or died from it. However, I think we can be sure that if Trump had taken the threat seriously in February when he first knew how deadly it was (as told to Bob Woodward, memorialized on tape, and reported on in Woodward’s book) many people wouldn’t have gotten sick and many, many thousands wouldn’t have died.
From NBC News: President Donald Trump acknowledged the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic in a February interview with journalist Bob Woodward and acknowledged downplaying the threat in an interview a month later, according to an account of Woodward's new book.
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic," Trump said in a March 19 call with Woodward, according to an audio clip posted Wednesday on The Washington Post's website. The newspaper obtained a copy of the book, "Rage," which is scheduled to be released next week.
In the same interview, Trump acknowledged that the disease was more deadly than he previously thought.
"Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older," Trump said, according to an audio clip, and then added, "young people, too, plenty of young people."
According to various reports Trump’s father wanted him to be a killer. I suppose Daddy Fred would have approved of his son’s psychopathic dismissal of Covid as a threat, though dismayed that it didn’t win him a second term.
The poll: Definition of Inflection Point
In math a point of a curve at which a change in the direction of curvature occurs and in business and elsewhere a time of significant change in a situation; a turning point.
