Trump is so dumb he admitted he played down the virus when he knew it was serious.
also Woodward: NSA and CIA have classified evidence Russia placed malware in election registration systems of two Florida counties, St. Lucie and Washington. It could erase voters in specific districts. The systems vendor used by Florida was also used in states across the country.
So dumb that he talked to Woodward on tape for 18ish hours.
But not surprising. This guy wanted to talk to Mueller too.
Woodward is as bad as Trump for holding back this information for personal gain.
It truly is amazing how dumb Trump is. He caught lightning in a bottle once, and made people think he is some kind of political genius, but he’s actually really bad at politics.
It’s always a safe bet, of course, to be skeptical of any revelations about Trump “moving the needle” in the polls. But I give this one a better chance than most. At minimum, it’s not going to help him pull voters back in his direction who have defected to Biden. And given that he’s eight points behind and behind in so many swing states, he is the one who needs to move that needle, not Biden.
Of course, millions of people somehow could not see, or didn’t care, what an effing buffoon Trump was back in '16, so I have no hope that this is the one revelation that will bring him down. Who knows, though: maybe this, coupled with the confirmed insults to the rank and file military, will finally get through some of the less thick skulls of his supporters. A loss of, oh, maybe another 2-3 points in the polls would be sufficient to have me whistling a happy tune. Failing that, it will at least be mildly entertaining to see what knots my MAGAt acquaintances tie themselves into whilst trying to explain away Trump’s clear contempt for them.
“As bad as…” is a total garbage comparison. Yeah, it wasn’t great that he withheld trump’s statements. But as bad as the fucking president actively letting people die through official policy? It’s not like trumpers listen to Woodward to begin with.
Nope. This would’ve changed nothing with the Freedom MAGAts even if this revelation had dropped in the spring. There would still be just as many deaths, AND the headlines would’ve faded by Memorial Day. The fact that it’s hitting now isn’t just a money grab by Woodward, it has the potential to chisel away at Trump’s numbers a bit with very little time for him to recover. It’s not gonna flip many voters from Trump to Biden, but it could help solidify Biden’s numbers and make Trump’s lukewarm voters less enthusiastic. As these types of headlines pile up, it may even flip a percent or two from Trump to Biden.
Does Bob W want to make money? Sure. So what? Sitting on these tapes wouldn’t have saved any lives, but if the timing helps push the final scoreboard toward the Blue team, fantastic. So to say he’s as bad as Trump is ridiculous. He isn’t even as bad as this fucking hangnail bleeding down my finger right now.
It was fact-checking.
That’s what-about-ism.
He did exactly what Trump did. He had the same information and he sat on it while people died. He’s not worse than Trump, but that standard that would excuse mass murder. He’s scum, he had the information that would save lives and he sat on it for personal gain,
He had a tape. What fact was he checking, his bank balance?
It seems that he had to corroborate Trump’s testimony with others like Dr Fauci. Really, this matches what lawyers and others before did by having more than just one lawyer talking to Trump for important business cases, this is because denying what he said before is a Trump feature not a bug.
Even tapes are not so good, remember that many times their staff did come with explanations about what Trump “really meant to say”, having them be on the record before that expected move is important IMO.
He has a tape, it is Trump himself, there is no argument about this. He did exactly what Trump did, hide the very same thing exactly, Trump’s own words that explained how bad and how dangerous Covid was. There is no difference at all. Whatever else Trump did or Woodward didn’t do is irrelevant, they both deliberately withheld information that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives for personal gain.
This is how Trump wins, when people can no longer tell right from wrong because hardly anything is as bad as what Trump has done. This reasoning says you can go kill 3 people and it’s alright because you didn’t kill 3 people and rob a bank. And I suppose you wouldn’t mind if you or those close to you died so Bob Woodward’s book would make a big splash.
This is no different than all the rest of the rats deserting the sinking ship who claimed to be protecting America by keeping an eye on Trump but actually doing nothing but aiding and abetting him.
Good thing I’m not voting for Woodward /s
This is also a type of what-about-ism.
I’m not entirely disagreeing here. I would think Woodward could get this fact-checked quicker than most, but would it really have mattered in March or April when the hoax claiming was working?
The fact that this has been going on for months shows what a complete idiot/bastard/shithead Trump is. It is much more damaging to say he knew this MONTHS ago than saying that he said this last week.
Will it really make a difference? I don’t know. But I do know that if the President sat on info FOR MONTHS that could change the death rates of a virus is quite a summary of Trump’s priorities.
There’s no facts to check, it is a tape with Trump’s voice. That’s all there is to it. Woodward doesn’t get to decide whether it will make any difference, he had information that the public needed to know, it was his job as a journalist to inform the public. That’s why he gets to do things like keep sources private. Next time he tries to claim some kind of journalist’s privilege he needs this thrown back in his face. He can say whatever he wants about it, there is no way to distinguish his actions in this case from any other Trumpist.
I am about as anti-Trump as one can get, but someone could argue that the “admissions” themselves aren’t quite as damning as they seem. A president trying to, shall we say, ‘manage’ the information flow in order to prevent people from panicking is not an entirely unreasonable action. The chaotic bullshit-filled “Look at me!” press conferences, the sheer incompetence of the response itself, and trying to muzzle the experts are monumental failures on his part - ones for the ages. But someone confessing that they wanted to prevent widespread panic, even to the point of ‘downplaying’ the risks a little, by itself is not quite as bad as it seems, IMO.
Of course if people are going to ignore his other failures and this is what finally moves the needle, I’ll take it.
The theory here seems to be something like this:
Anyone open to evidence knew that this was going to be terrible at the same time that Woodward knew it. Woodward didn’t get credible advance warning, because any advance information he got was from Trump, and that’s not a credible source.
He didn’t have the opportunity to warn people in advance to take precautions: nobody would, or should, listen to him over epidemiologists. His only opportunity is to provide a very clear example of how the president lied to the public in a way that cost tens of thousands of lives.
Nobody said that but you. He had Trump on tape saying that he knew how bad this would be. That’s information the public needed to know and Woodward had no excuse for keeping it secret.
Are you saying you would do what Woodward did if you had that tape? That tape you knew was Trump’s voice because he recorded it. That’s what you would do? Keep that information secret while hundreds of thousands of people died?
Absolutely 100% unreasonable. This is not a president who ever tries to prevent people from ANTIFA ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS RIOTING CRIME TORPEDO THE ECONOMY MEDIA ARE THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE panicking. Making people panic is his one and only political tool.
In this case, what he did was to discourage people from taking precautions that would have saved lives, because he’s not able to think more than like two weeks in advance and thought that preventing people from (for example) shutting down businesses would keep the economy humming along. It wasn’t panic he was trying to prevent, it was a momentary drop in the economy.
And yet according to you it’s perfectly reasonable for Bob Woodward to keep this information secret for personal gain.