You’re here, so you don’t live under a rock, and you’ve probably at least heard about Bob Woodward’s new book, and the eighteen on-tape interviews he did with Donald Trump for it, in which Trump, among many other admissions, admits that he knew the Coronavirus was more serious than he was saying in public, and that he basically kept downplaying it in the hopes it would go away, because the whole thing made him look bad.
If you have or had a functioning cognitive capacity in the last few years, this will surprise you not at all. Lying comes easier than breathing to Donald Trump. Or, rather, he simply creates the reality he prefers in his mind, then insists everyone else play along. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but that’s a whole other book-length blog post.
No, what pisses me off is that Bob Woodward — who has enough money and reputation to satisfy any sane human being — sat on the tapes, and the reporting, while the bodies piled up and basic health precautions became cause for a fucking civil war. And why did he do that? To sell more books. It’s the same as John Bolton, and that NYT reporter two weeks ago, and who knows how many other people.
And why? Because capitalism as presently practiced has so skewed our incentives and priorities such that all the lives unnecessarily lost, all the economic woe, the lost jobs and businesses and careers, all the culture war bullshit that only drags the whole thing out longer: all that put together doesn’t outweigh the individual interest in pursuing personal and private profit.
It’s a fucked up way to run a society. I wish more people realized that.
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