Last month, as he’s done nearly every day of his cursed presidency, Donald Trump took to Twitter with an important message for his followers. “Everybody does phony books on Donald Trump and Republicans, just like the Fake Dossier, which turned out to be a total fraud perpetrated by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC,” he wrote, before urging people to steer clear of one forthcoming tome in particular. “The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been.” While Trump has dubbed virtually every unflattering account of his presidency “fake news,” there was something about this particular warning that seemed extra desperate, given that it was issued many weeks before the book was scheduled to be released or the public knew of any details it would reveal. And now, we have a good idea why!

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China. “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.” Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a February 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

Of course, at the time, Trump was actively telling the country that the virus was not a big deal at all, that it wasn’t as bad as the flu, that it would magically disappear, and that any claims to the contrary were lies by the “Fake News Media” and their partners in crime, the Democratic Party. And speaking of lies:

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

While it’s not exactly news that Trump spent months misleading the public about COVID-19—we’ve known since April that he was warned in more than a dozen briefings about the fatal disease but continued to downplay it anyway out of fear of spooking the stock market—this is the first recorded account of the president fully admitting that he purposely lied about the severity of a virus that has now killed more than 190,000 in the U.S., a death toll made significantly worse by his shambolic “leadership.”

Asked about the president’s decision to actively deceive the country about the virus, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that Trump “never lied to the American public on COVID,” he was simply expressing an air of “calm” about something people should have actually been scared shitless about.

Later, Trump explained that he made the decision to lie about how bad the virus was because he just loves this America so much. “The fact is I’m a cheerleader for this country,” he said, painting a mental picture no one should ever have to see. “I love our country and I don’t want people to be frightened, I don’t want to create panic, as you say. And certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We want to show confidence, we want to show strength, we want to show strength as a nation, and that’s what I‘ve done and we’ve done very well by any standards…it’s been an amazing job that we’ve done.” 

In fact, it hasn’t been an amazing job and we haven’t done well by any standards, unless the standards are “anything less than 200,000 dead people is fine.” Also, had Trump told the truth for the first time in his life and been straight with Americans about the severity of COVID-19 and instructed them to act accordingly, the U.S. would have needed far fewer body bags over the last six months and the economy wouldn’t be in the toilet.

Anyway, all of this would probably be unbelievably damning if anything Trump ever did made an ounce of difference to his supporters, who apparently believe everything the president tells them, up to and including telling them he lied about a highly contagious, extremely fatal disease for their own good. Uncle Donny knows best!

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Jared Kushner, boy genius, strikes again

In other Kushner news, the first son-in-law reportedly told Woodward that “the most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots,” apparently referring to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, because irony officially died on January 21, 2017.

P.S., the White House remains fully on top of this thing

Basic screenings for people coming into the country on the off chance they’ve got a highly contagious disease? Who needs ’em!

As of next Monday, the U.S. government will stop performing enhanced screening of passengers coming from high-risk COVID-19 countries, Yahoo News reports. Since March, incoming international flights from much of Europe, China, and other regions of the world have been funneled through 15 airports, where passengers were subjected to basic health screenings, including a temperature check, and told to fill out a symptom questionnaire and contact information for possible contact tracing. Yahoo News says the order to stop screening came from the White House, with the several agencies and contractors who have been involved working to meet the September 14 deadline.

Herd immunity via mass casualty, here we come!

Trump can’t think of any reason whatsoever that Black people might not want to show him any “love”

In other Rage revelations:

During a conversation on June 19, Woodward, whose father was a lawyer and judge in Illinois, pointed out that he and Trump were white and privileged, and asked if that affected his thinking. “Do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave to a certain extent, as it put me and I think lots of white privileged people in a cave and that we have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country?” Woodward asked.

“No,” Trump responded. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn't you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

In a separate conversation about race, on July 8, Trump complained about his lack of support among Black voters, according to the Post. “I’ve done a tremendous amount for the Black community,” he told Woodward. “And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love.”

Could that possibly be on account of Trump’s long history of abject racism? His years-long insistence that the first Black president of the United States wasn’t born here? His commentary about Black people “living in hell”? Any of these things ringing a bell? No?

Donald Trump was actually nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize

He’s been gunning for one of these things ever since they gave one to Obama and now his name has actually been put forward…by an anti-immigration Islamophobe who’s also been charitably described as a “nut job”:

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament for the populist Progress Party, said Trump should be considered because of his work “for a peace agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel which opens up for possible peace in the Middle East.”

Tybring-Gjedde has been a member of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, since 2005. He is known for being pro-Israel and for opposing immigration policies that he thinks have been too welcoming. The lawmaker has often demanded that immigrants adjust to Norwegian society. He called Muslim headscarves an “Islamic uniform” and compared them to robes worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2006, he nominated Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch-American activist, writer and politician critical of Islam, for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At present, there are 318 candidates in the running for the 2020 prize, so Trump’s shot of actually clinching this thing is quite slim, though we’re sure he’ll graciously congratulate the winner and not go on a 77-tweet tear about how he was robbed.

Elsewhere!

Major vaccine trial is paused to investigate unexplained illness (Washington Post)

Senior DHS official alleges in whistleblower complaint that he was told to stop providing intelligence analysis on threat of Russian interference (Washington Post)

Emails show HHS official trying to muzzle Fauci (Politico)

Trump Attacked Generals as Weak and Too Focused on Allies, Woodward’s Book Says (NYT)

JPMorgan Finds Some Workers Improperly Pocketed Relief Funds (Bloomberg)

Trump reports raising $210 million last month, lagging behind Biden’s record-breaking August haul (Washington Post)

Teacher breaks “swuggling”—swimming while juggling—record in Oregon pool (UPI)

“A voter who was told she couldn’t wear an anti-Trump shirt at a polling place because it violated electioneering rules simply whipped it off and did her civic duty topless.” (AP)

— Melania Trump Sounds a Lot Like Her Husband in Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s New Book
— How Trump’s Handling of White Supremacists Could Create a Homegrown Crisis
— Ashley Etienne May Be Biden’s Deadliest Weapon Against Trump
— What’s the Reality Behind Netflix Hit Selling Sunset?
— How to Abolish the Police, According to Josie Duffy Rice
— The Pandemic Is Creating an Endless Summer in the Hamptons
— From the Archive: The Perks and Perils of Being Donald Trump’s Daughter

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