September 14, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Bob Woodward interviewed Donald Trump back in January and February and now tells us that, way back then, Trump realized that the coronavirus was not only quite deadly and would infect even children, but also was airborne and highly contagious.

Right now it’s fashionable to attack Bob Woodward for having sat on all that information, and debate whether he had a “duty to warn.”

It’s a reasonable discussion, but it misses the larger picture.

If Donald Trump knew how deadly Covid was, Bob Woodward could not have been the only person he told. Everybody in the Cabinet, the Vice President, the Health and Human Services Secretary, and pretty much everybody working around him in the White House had to have known.

He even put Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus task force back then. They all knew.

So rather than asking why Woodward didn’t tell us, shouldn’t we be asking why our government officials, who are paid to keep America safe, also didn’t tell us or do anything about it?

We talk a lot about the “Trump Crime Family“ but his entire Cabinet knew how bad this was last winter, too. Not only are Trump and his kids grifters and liars, but he put together an entire cabinet of grifters and liars.

In fact, it went beyond that. Senators Kelly Loeffler and Richard Burr, both Republicans, dumped stock after getting briefed about this knowledge.

A physician and professor at George Washington University has suggested that Donald Trump is guilty, at the least, of negligent homicide. And certainly this is criminal political behavior.

Trump didn’t just ignore what he knew about this virus, he actively lied about it to the American people. And he continues to lie about it to this day.

Holding giant rallies, as he did over the weekend, will lead to increased infection spreads and more deaths. There will be other Herman Cain’s who will die in a few months because of what Trump is doing right now.

Other countries that took testing and contact tracing seriously are now able to return to something that resembles normalcy. Taiwan, for example, has not had a case of local transmission since April. Nobody is dying there.

We here in the United States are almost a year behind them, with our economy reduced to rubble, all because Donald Trump didn’t want to “panic“ the stock market.

The inaction and lies from Trump and those around him in the White House will lead to more than a quarter-million dead Americans by election day, more than in every war and conflict since 1945 combined.

Virtually all these deaths can be laid at the feet of those people in the White House and their leader, Donald Trump, who lied or remain silent.

How should America respond to leadership whose knowing, intentional lies and actions killed more Americans then “the enemy“ in North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan over a 70 year period?

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.