I wonder if the Trump politicos knew that the Woodward recordings would come out right before the 9/11 anniversary.
I certainly heard the similarities, listening to the documentaries on 9/11. I got to hear both George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani say, “The most important thing For a leader in a crisis is to appear calm.”
Did they know that September 10th would be the perfect day to make the “Calm” excuse? Sure, they said, “Trump downplayed the risks of the pandemic so people would remain calm.” Then the next day we see images of a clear-eyed, young, still-sane Rudy on 9/11 assuring us that we just need to stay where we are, stay in our homes, and we’d be fine.
Of course, to make the comparison accurate, Rudy should have walked through the streets (without a mask on, remember) and he should have said, “Lung cancer from breathing in this epic cloud of dust? It’s like having allergies. It’ll be gone in a month, like magic.”
2 responses to “Call For Calm”
Yeah, there is “encouraging people to remain calm” (good, usually, to some degree) and then there is “pretend there is no problem and specifically encourage people to do things that would make everything worse” (bad).
Given the number of things Trump has tried to scare people with (your suburbs will be invaded by antifa criminals! your religious rights are under attack! you’re under attack!), I am… extremely dubious… about the calm claim in itself, even if it were argued that he was just totally incompetent at telling people to remain calm – that he somehow couldn’t tell people to remain calm while not yelling “hoax!” and discouraging mask-wearing or other safety measure; that it’s somehow impossible to communicate that people should remain calm without adding the suggestion that injecting antiseptics would fix the virus probably. (That said, I do remain baffled as to what he *was* doing/thinking at all these stages, because… yeah. It’s all quite weird.)(maybe it’s an argument for after he is out of office that actually it’s mental illness so he shouldn’t be jailed because he’s been incompetent for the full statute of limitations?)
KC – all we needed was “stay calm and do X” and we got “stay calm and do nothing.”