Mr. President, You Don’t Get to Decide Which Emotions we Have
By: Jennifer Friebely
Tags: Covid-19, Government, Trump, United States, Election 2020

In a Vanity Fair article by Caleb Ecarma — the situation of the lie is well summarized:

In March, when reality had more than caught up to the White House’s lies, Trump explained the reasoning behind his dishonesty. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said in a March 19 interview with Woodward, adding, “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” Speaking with a level of honesty he has rarely, if ever, displayed during his coronavirus press briefings, the president then noted, “Now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older — young people too, plenty of young people.”

It sounds like the president was treating Bob Woodward as his therapist. I get this visual of President Trump lying on a couch, unburdening himself with all of his unfiltered thoughts.

When ABC News Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Trump about why he lied to the American people — Trump attacked the question.

“That’s a terrible question and the phraseology,” Trump said. “I didn’t lie. What I said is we have to be calm. We can’t be panicked.”

I don’t see anywhere in the presidential oath anything about “panic prevention.”

If there’s some major sh*t going down that even POTUS deems panic-worthy, who in government has the responsibility to tell the people?

If a disastrous storm is bearing down on us — should we be told to stop listening to the weather report, so we don’t panic?

So — what worries you, Mr. President when you think about the American people panicking? Which American people are you referring to who are panicking?

Will it make you look bad? What does panicking en masse even look like to you?

Are you thinking about how it affects our finances? Is it because you believe the markets will tank? Are you afraid of your supporters losing money?

Are you fearful of your poll numbers and, consequently, a poor showing in the election? Or, perhaps losing, Mr. President?

Have you ever cared about anyone but yourself, Mr. President?

Examples of your inability to act presidential are so frequent it’s embarrassing to think about how the United States is perceived globally. There are too many awful things that you’ve done to list here, so I’ve linked an article. I don’t even need to allege.

Past presidents seem to have done much better jobs at unifying the country. Even when my chosen candidate lost — I still felt that the new president was my president. You are not my president.

There used to be occurrences called “Profiles in Courage,” described in a book by John F. Kennedy. Individuals who crossed party lines for the country’s good were recognized. There’s an annual award for it. I wonder if the award candidate pool is getting smaller.

Trump’s reign of terror on the GOP has prevented “afraid of the bully” senators from speaking out against horrifying behavior. And their complacency and fear of his Twitter account keeps Trump comfortably in place, which bolsters more bad behavior and so on. Trump becomes more emboldened every day.

The most pathetic refusal to comment on Trump’s handling of the pandemic and the recent revelations of his lying to the American people has to be the September 10 interview with Senator John Kennedy (R) Louisiana by CNN’s Pamela Brown: