Donald Trump himself is 'deadly stuff'

 To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink. --George Orwell, 1984

Donald Trump knew how bad COVID-19 was but deliberately chose to downplay it in order to prevent "panic." In so doing, he discouraged Americans in positions of authority from taking common-sense precautions to contain it and individual Americans from taking common-sense precautions to avoid catching it. Yet he claims that he "didn't lie" to us when he called the disease "the Wuhan Flu," even though he admits that he knew all along that it was far more deadly than the flu. 

So Mr. Trump told Bob Woodward, whose new book, Rage, will have exactly zero impression on the President's supporters, and who have long since shown themselves to be immune to any evidence- including the President's own rare admission- that he has ever been wrong about anything. They will continue to insist that masks don't work, that concern is unnecessary, that President Trump was justified in urging states to reopen their economies despite not meeting the guideless established by his own White House taskforce...and in the process contribute to the spread of a disease that will continue to kill, not so much the careless, as the especially vulnerable people with whom the careless and the negligent come into casual contact.

And they will continue to insist that they are "pro-life." Needless to say, the President will join them in continuing to deny any responsibility in a public health disaster of historic proportions which, though it could not have been prevented, will be many times worse than it needed to be because of this error in judgment committed collectively by the most unfit president in the history of the Republic and the minority of the voters who chose him and continue to support him.

The ramifications of Mr. Trump's admission ought to be catastrophic for his own dwindling chances at re-election. They will not be. My guess is that relatively few votes will change. Anyone who could be distracted from blind, mindless, automatic support of anything the man does has already defected.But the whole business has solidified my strong conviction that there is no way enough rational, realistic Americans can be found to vote for the man to win him a second term, and also that if somehow President Trump is re-elected, that very fact will constitute prima facie evidence that the American people are no longer capable of governing themselves, and that the experiment that began in 1776 is doomed.