President Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared amazingly unaware that Bob Woodward had released audio from their 18 hours of interviews, but seized on the only defense available when a reporter handed it to him at a press conference.
The right wing echo chamber immediately upgraded to the new talking point: Trump lied about the deadly dangers of the coronavirus because he didn’t want to create panic.
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward in March. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Trump’s entire campaign, as former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill said Wednesday evening, is about creating fear and panic.
“He is running a campaign based on fear and panic. All he campaigns on is that the suburbs have to be scared to death of Black people moving in, or that they have to be scared to death of riots in the city, that there’s carnage on the streets. He is all about fear in his campaign.”
It took less than a day for the President to prove his claim he didn’t want to create panic was a lie.
“The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That’s where they are coming from. If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, ‘Friendly Protesters,'” he said epithetically Thursday morning in a racist 1950’s fear-mongering tweet.
It’s almost as if he was telegraphing McCaskill’s condemnation and twisting it into as tweet.
So much for not wanting to panic people.
The Internet rose up in anger and mockery.