So many of these journalists and reporters knew all sorts of things but you don’t find out until they release the “bombshell” books.
Why It Matters – Trump’s Personal Delivery to Putin More Revelations from Woodward’s Recent Book Alexander Vindman Oct 10, 2024 Judging from the details provided by Woodward, Putin clearly understood how to play to Trump’s insecurities and how bad the situation would appear to the public. According to an excerpt released by NPR, Putin told Trump “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me”. During a period of acute shortage of COVID-19 tests, Trump went out of his way to secure a “personal shipment” of tests to Vladimir Putin at the cost of the health of many Americans.
People mostly have been kept in the dark about the true extent of the egregious and outrageous actions of Trump with regard to the pandemic. In some cases the issues have been memory holed because of censorship with noise. The Biden administration’s failure to implement excellent pandemic measures Biden campaigned on in 2020, and the failure to keep covid vaccines free, has not helped either.
Of course people writing for The New York Times knew that Putin was cautious about covid all along. I remember that ridiculous headline for the bonkers op-ed where Vladimir Putin’s desire to avoid disease was being floated as the reason Putin invaded Ukraine. One wonders how much many people knew back then and when they actually knew it. Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine because he was cautious about covid, for pity’s sake, there was no covid in 2014 and history didn’t begin in 2020..
But Putin’s desire to avoid covid, as a senior citizen and cancer patient, as somehow related to his dangerousness, was the first I remember of such correlations in the media narratives that suggested being a disabled person avoiding covid makes you associated with bad. People still make fun of Putin for avoiding covid today — I heard someone giggle about the long table this month on a podcast. These ableist orientations pressured into the zeitgeist, largely by business interests, have continued to undermine the ability of people to protect themselves. Some disinformation narratives suggest that the high risk disabled and elderly are holding up herd immunity, or even maybe dangerous criminals using masks as a “disguise”. There have been periodic weird suggestions being pushed that immunocompromised and disabled children or children who get sick with covid or long covid will become violent because of not being at in-person school — even though there’s no evidence that illness, childhood cancer treatments, accidents, disabilities, remote schooling, or homeschooling, have ever made children violent. This disability discrimination seems to have been boosted by Paul Elias Alexander publishing with the right-wing Brownstone Institute suggesting there’s some link between absence from in-person school, wearing masks, and violent youths. This is not a real thing.
In 2020 Donald Trump, as President of the United States, betrayed the people, and with far more than just debacles around covid tests. It’s not about whether Vladimir Putin “deserved” covid tests, everyone needed tests and nobody deserves disease. The problem is that elites panic and take care of their own, often while suggesting eugenics pseudoscience be practiced on others. So often it’s “safety for thee but not for me” for people in positions of power, and then they claim they survived because it was natural and just.