Analysis: Americans are dying. Here are Trump’s excuses
Excuses will be offered. Justifications will be made. But Americans who should not be dying are dying.
Russian bounties on US troops: Reports that Russians may have placed bounties on US forces in Afghanistan have been met with a shrug by the White House.
- The reports are unverified.
- The President was not briefed.
- “Rogue intelligence officers” are out to embarrass the President.
There’s one constant in each new twist of the drama over Russia that has overshadowed every day of Trump’s term in the Oval Office.
Each time there’s a damaging story on the issue, he makes exactly the same move — dumping on the US intelligence that lies behind it. It was a similar story when the President used a Helsinki summit with Putin to throw US intelligence agencies under the bus over their assessments that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help him win.
Trump is equally dismissive of science when it comes to coronavirus. While the Russia bounty reports required Trump’s attention, his refusal to lead Americans, specifically on the issue of face masks, requires willful indifference to obvious fact and disregard for the power he holds to help save lives.
Excuses include:
- It’s up to individuals to know how to protect themselves.
- Trump doesn’t want to trample anyone’s freedom.
“We must have no stigma, none, about wearing masks when we leave our homes and come near other people. Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves, it is about protecting everyone we encounter,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Monday.
A political debate that’s costing lives. And Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring and so ever-so-slightly willing to speak his mind, nailed the mask debate on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
“Unfortunately this simple lifesaving practice has become part of a political debate that says: If you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask. If you’re against Trump, you do,” Alexander said.
Ergo: people will die when folks follow the President’s lead. That’s an undeniable fact as coronavirus runs rampant in the US, while other countries seem to contain it.
The excuses sound the same even when lives aren’t at stake. The White House said the President didn’t know the guy with the Trump sign in the golf cart yelled “White Power!” in the video he retweeted.
He never knows. It’s always someone else’s fault. And usually that someone or something is specifically trying to bring him down. Often, he’ll blame Barack Obama.
Wash, rinse, repeat is a cycle that is getting very repetitive more than three years into the Trump administration. But now, with so many American lives on the line, it’s a pattern that’s harder to dismiss.
