Trump showed his true colors several times during the 2016 campaign.
And before that there were many scandals or appalling things from the whole birther thing to trump uni to the central park five thing and on and on.
So Trump’s subsequent behaviour is not suprising to me.
However, the situation is a lot worse than I anticipated, since the GOP collectively decided to sell out every principle they once pretended to have. And Trump’s support has remained fairly stable despite this requiring millions of people to completely lose touch with reality.
I don’t know Nemo. The Bob Woodward interview would seem to belie some of this.
He did know how dangerous it was and chose to downplay it. But I agree that he won’t admit when he’s wrong. But he also won’t admit that he lies all the time.
Thanks for asking. I haven’t read other replies yet, but here’s my take: Trump was seen by many as quintessential Queens — envious of the glitz of Manhattan, with low-class taste (think golden toilets). Archie Bunker with money. Trump’s distrust and disdain for the intelligent, cultured elite of NY was there from the beginning, so it’s no surprise he attracted this element nationwide (and the anti-science ethos) decades later.
I admit that my disdain for him is itself rather elitist — an educated, culturally hip New Yorker putting down an uncouth, outer-borough nouveau riche.
But then there’s the Central Park Five issue. Not all New Yorkers were aware of Trump’s paying for a full-page NY Times ad essentially demanding that five innocent young men of color be lynched — but those that knew about this now hated the scum Trump, rather than just rolling our eyes at his lack of class.
(ETA: Lest anyone misunderstand, I LOVE Queens. I live in the Midwest, but in my house on a wall along the stairway is a map showing all the hundreds of languages spoken in that amazingly diverse few square miles. My mother, wife, son, and enjoyed a full day just doing Queens stuff last December, and it was one of the best days of the past year or two.)
Slight nitpick: the five young men were not exonerated for several years (the actual criminal was not convicted until 2002, although the men’s appeals were made within 3-4 years of the 1987 crime.
Trump took out the ad not long after the crime, I’m pretty sure still in 1987. So as vile (and probably racist) as it was, the Central Park 5 were not widely thought to be innocent at the time of the ad.
When they were exonerated, Trump did indeed double down and refused to admit he was wrong, being the asshole he is.
I think that is pretty much on-point, but not for the reasons you might think. New Yorkers were familiar with the guy for a lot longer than the rest of us, and I suspect that as the amount of information goes down, only the most salient points stuck out for him.
I mean, I grew up in suburban Houston, and here’s more or less the chronology I recall- sometime in the 1980s he got a lot of press for being super-rich and a billionaire for reasons that I don’t recall. I just remember he sort of came out of nowhere into pop culture as “the richest man in the world” or some such.
Then he sort of faded into the background for much of the 1990s- I think some of his casinos went bankrupt about this time- anyway, we didn’t hear too much about him from there until he was the chief… antagonist(?) of “The Apprentice” starting in the early 2000s.
At that point, the show more or less traded on the perception of him being a self-made billionaire and actually knowing what he was doing, even though it was fairly clear to even recently minted business school students like me that he wasn’t really working from the same reality as we were with respect to leadership, performance, business development, etc…
Fast forward to 2015, and he decides to run for President. New Yorkers know he’s an ass, incompetent, and mostly a fraud because of the local information. Those of us who are not New Yorkers but who aren’t low information realize that for someone who’s supposedly SO good at business, that he’s got a really checkered record and an awfully big mouth for someone with such a record. Something doesn’t add up. But we don’t know the actual details like New Yorkers do.
But my suspicion is that out in the boonies, all that actually filtered out there and stuck were the main points of the myth- billionaire, excellent businessman, assertive. So I think that people in Western Nebraska, for example, think that this guy has something to offer, when in fact, he really didn’t.
That was in February. In January, when they first came to him to explain the situation, he just wanted to talk about vaping.
But yeah–it’s more that he has picked and chosen what to address, depending on how it will serve him politically. Everything for him is a show. What he couldn’t envisage was any way that handling the virus would be a good show, where he could promote himself. It was all about science, and that has little performance value. And yes, by the time that the pandemic was inevitable it was too late–he would have to effectively admit that he was wrong, which he isn’t capable of doing.
There are several good answers in this thread. I’d add a couple of points:
Trump prioritized, above all else, a stock market that would continue to go up and up and up. If a President went before the nation and said ‘there is a serious danger of a pandemic and we must all work together to save as many lives as possible’ (or anything resembling that), the stock market could well have taken a dive. Trump thought that maybe the whole thing would blow over, so, better to pretend it was all a hoax, and thereby keep the masses from selling off their restaurant and airline (etc.) stocks.
Trump saw the potential to make a buck.
Ask yourself: why doesn’t every American have an N95 mask–either one with removable filters, or a supply of disposable N95s? After all, they are the best solution to protection in the presence of a dangerous airborne pathogen.
The answer, of course, is that they are in short supply (and expensive if you can find them).
But…why are they expensive? Why are they in short supply?
The answer: it’s highly profitable to those few companies that make them, for there to be little competition.
A well-run government response would have involved invoking the Defense Production Act to bring about broad (and well-regulated for safety) domestic manufacture of N95 masks. Among other things.
But that would have cut off the profitable situation in which a few manufacturers make massive profits—profits which may well be being shared with the President and his designated wealthy supporters.
It hasn’t all gone smoothly; the Trump Administration did make some errors in setting up the kick-back machine:
But on the whole we can be fairly certain that Donald and a select few have done very well out of the pandemic–and we haven’t even started talking about the insider trading they’ve been able to do with the monopoly on information they hold.
I knew Trump could be very bad, but I was hoping he would not be.
Within the first month of his administration my slight hopes he’d grow into the job were dashed. But in 2017 I could not imagine how horrible he’d be. He is dangerously insane.
That doesn’t really hold up. Sure, the price of N95 masks went up because of demand and scarcity. But there’s no reason the demand couldn’t have been far higher. If Trump had backed a program of building up a stockpile - which he could easily have justified - he could have set the demand at whatever point he wanted. He could have authorized a crash program to increase mask production, given interest-free government loans to the mask making companies so they could pay for expanding their production, and bought up all of the increased production. The companies would have made vastly more profits than they actually did.
The Bush administration understood how to use a national emergency as justification to funnel huge government contracts to their friends in the business community. Trump could have done the same by going public early with the Covid19 crisis.
But the interview in which Trump claimed he intentionally “down played” the crisis was in March. By that time it was becoming clear that Trump had made the wrong decision about the crisis back in January and he was already trying to rewrite history.
I agree with both of these, but I’d go further on point 1 and say that Trump is just a marketing man. He’s not interested in doing actual work, or understanding things. He’s mainly focused on selling the idea that he’s a good president, not doing anything to make it actually true (he obviously doesn’t care about truth anyway).
Even now, with 230k dead, the response is still just to try to talk the virus into non-existence; say the deaths are over-reported, blame Jyna, say there’s a cure etc etc but not actually do anything.
I think this is the interview I had in mind when I made my comment.
"During one phone interview on Feb. 7, President Trump shared with Woodward that the virus is airborne and is “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
And yet the next month, Trump publicly compared COVID-19 to the seasonal flu.
But regardless, I think we both agree that Trump is a lying liar who lies a lot.
One thing I was expecting from the beginning of Trump’s term was that a major crisis would come along and Trump would screw it up, and that that would be the only thing that could possibly prevent his re-election.
I wasn’t thinking of a pandemic; I thought it would be some kind of international conflict or involvement. But his incompetence was so clear from the beginning that I was definitely thinking to myself: “Such an event as that–if it happens before re-election time–would be his only possible downfall.”
Still, I won’t believe it until it actually happens. I’ve always thought that even then they would be able to devise some bullshit scam to win again–because there are just enough dumbshit suckers in this country to fall for it.
I also was expecting him to have some kind of undeniably humiliating mental breakdown or physical collapse in public. So far, I’ve been wrong on that, but who knows what might happen in the next few months. I won’t be surprised if we learn some day that during these last weeks of the election he was using an unusually large amount of drugs to keep himself together.
The fact that he accused Biden of this is a strong indicator that it is what he himself is actually doing.
