Many others have ridiculed President Donald Trump for telling reporter Bob Woodward that he “always sought to minimize [Covid-19] . . . because I don’t need to panic. ” It’s funny, because Trump loves to create panic – about Mexican immigrants, anti-effects, single-family zoning and, more frighteningly, low-flow toilets.
But Trump has told us something profound about American politics.
Nineteen years ago today, a men’s organization from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates kidnapped 4 passenger planes, controlled to take 3 of them to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing a total of 2977 others. In a day.
On March 19, the day Trump explained his reasoning to Woodward, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already predicted that the coronavirus would kill thousands of Americans and in all likelihood up to 1. 7 million.
In the first situation, George W. Bush, then president of the United States, actively encouraged panic: Americans could not sleep safely in their beds unless we had invaded Afghanistan. The FBI could download bank statements or internet activity. citizens at any time without a court order. Saddam Hussein hid the anthrax in his moustache.
In the second, objectively much scarier situation, the President of the United States brazenly declared that he minimized danger. It is not just the danger of Covid-19 itself: its management has also minimized the permanent economic danger to tens of millions of inhabitants. American.
What explains the disparity of reactions?
History shows that the answer is as apparent as it is strange: the truth has nothing to do with gigantic government actions, but politics is basically the illusions that leaders seek to create in our heads.
In the case of September 11, Bush’s leadership did not attempt to respond rationally to the actual facts, but used it as a justification for doing what they had sought to do but may not. Project for a New American Century had explained last year that “the United States has been seeking for decades to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” a purpose that “transcends the factor of Saddam Hussein’s regime. “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an assistant a few hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon that he sought to “go massively – sweep everything, similar things and not,” adding Iraq if possible. her national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, hastened to explain that they saw 9/11 as an “opportunity. “
On the other hand, Covid-19 demanded a large-scale government response, but Trump didn’t need to do much, so Trump delivered hours of a television screen he starred in, but there wasn’t enough PPE for doctors and nurses, or a tactile find. Bush was looking for an excuse to do a lot of dead things, such as invading Iraq, while Trump was looking for an excuse not to do anything when there was actually a Lot to do.
Any look at history shows that this is how the world works: governments what they should do and then seek public justification.
On December 16, 1989, Panamanian troops fired on an American soldier and threatened to rape a naval officer’s wife, but in the world of political illusion, President George HWBush explained that it meant we had to invade Panama, which we did. killing thousands of other people (the exact number of victims is discussed). An anonymous member of Congress rightly stated at the time that “the December 16 incidents were the excuse, not the reason, of the invasion. “There was no genuine connection between the attack on Panama and what had happened to American troops, which would have been completely ignored if Bush had not sought war to overthrow the country’s army chief, Manuel Noriega, who had once been an asset of the CIA, but had an antagonist of American interests.
On August 2, 1964, the SS Maddox of the United States exchanged campfires with North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. No American sailor died; Maddox suffered a single bullet hole, then, on August 4, nothing happened at all, the United States imagined a moment of imaginary attack on the Maddox. At the global political illusion, the United States used these occasions as justification for aggravating a war. who ended up killing millions of people in Indochina.
It’s just an American thing.
In April 1980, members of Islamic Dawa, an Iraqi Shiite organization backed by Iran that opposes Saddam, threw a grenade at Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. According to Saddam, this meant that Iraq had to go to war with Iran, which it did. , resulting in the deaths of one million people on both sides.
In June 1982, Palestinian terrorists attempted to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in London, which, according to Israel, meant that he had to invade Lebanon, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people and the Sabra and Chatila bloodbath.
In September 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, who was Jewish, shot dead a German diplomat in Paris. According to the Nazi party’s SA paramilitaries, this forced them to lead the Kristallnacht.
Today more than anyone else, we want to perceive how Trump’s brazen honesty tells us about life on earth. Our lives are valuable because the tough can use them to create the “panic” they want. Otherwise, Americans will die silently in a vacuum, as we have been doing every day since Covid-19.