Motives
Bob Woodward, a man who has parlayed his role in the American Left’s great shining moment since the New Deal, namely Watergate, into a lifetime appointment as living embodiment of the Journalist as Hero fantasy, has a new book out, and — shockingly — it is about Donald Trump. This is Woodward’s modus operandi. Almost every election season, he has a new book, always pitched and purported to be the most objective, level-headed “insider’s look” at the White House, and always chock full of hackneyed “revelations” perfectly calibrated to become talking points for a month, and get him invited onto every cable news show in America, in the run-up to the election. In other words, this is how Bob Woodward makes money.
Call me when a Great Journalist has earth-shattering political revelations that actually reveal something, and that he has not obviously timed for the biggest possible boost to his bank account and personal glory.
The current startling revelation from Woodward’s world-altering new bestseller, by the way, is his quote of Trump, apparently from February, saying he knew the coronavirus was serious, but wanted to play it down so as not to “cause a panic.”
The kooks on the Left are jumping all over this as “proof” that Trump killed 186,000 people. Sorry, no. If it is true that Trump said this — and even if he said it, I would be skeptical of his motives, since he is a pure self-promoter, and only knows the methods of self-promotion — on its face, it would only suggest that…he didn’t want to cause a panic. For the Left, of course, it is part of the job of a good national leader to foment panic, so as to precipitate irrational and radical responses that the country will regret forever. They call it “never letting a crisis go to waste.” For not doing that, they are now claiming that Trump deserves to be pilloried.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Trump does not deserve the pillory, but merely that his supposedly choosing not to cause a national panic would be a poor excuse for it.