President Donald Trump has inspired so many dramatically titled, tell-all books that most days the non-fiction bestseller lists sound exactly like the Lifetime Movie listings.
If we’re being honest, titles like “The Room Where It Happened,” “Unhinged,” or “Disloyal” could just as easily be about a lousy husband who winds up on the business end of a shovel after he wrongs his good wife one time too many.
This week’s effort to bury the Trump presidency is called “Rage” and it comes from famed Washington Post Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who’s releasing a follow up to his 2018 Trump Tell All entitled, “Fear.”
Like its made for TV predecessors, “Rage” has a dramatic title guaranteed to generate big headlines and bigger sales, but I believe it will ultimately end up doing very little to hurt the president. Spoiler Alert.
Woodward set the political world on fire Wednesday by releasing audio-tapes from a March interview in which the president admitted to publicly downplaying the threat from the coronavirus, adding, “I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."
A sane person might recognize the value of promoting societal calm in the face of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, but when it comes to Trump, the media treats sanity the way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to treat hair salon closures -- something for other people to adhere to but not her.
Within minutes of the release of the news from Woodward’s book the same CNN reporters who’ve spent four years accusing Trump of fear-mongering were seemingly accusing him of hope-mongering.
The hashtag #TrumpResignNow quickly began trending on Twitter. Even the political groundhog himself, Punxatawney Joe Biden, made a rare journey outside his burrow to accuse the president of a “life and death betrayal of the American people” that was “almost criminal.”
(And let’s face it, if anybody knows about something being “almost criminal,” it’s the guy whose son had a top-shelf gig with a Ukrainian power company while he was vice president of a country they wanted to do business with)
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, then shot down claims Trump misled the public, telling Fox News’ “The Daily Briefing,” “I didn't get any sense that he was distorting anything. I mean in my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had. We related that to him. And when he would go out, I'd hear him discussing the same sort of things.”
Fauci’s fact check aside, the bigger reason the revelations from Woodward’s “Rage” is going nowhere is that the same Democrats who claim Trump waited too long to act waited much longer than he did.
Trump banned incoming flights from China on January 27, yet on February 24 Nancy Pelosi was seen in a video, since deleted from her Twitter account, encouraging people to visit San Francisco’s Chinatown for a New Year’s Celebration. No masks, no social distancing, no regard for the virus she now claims the president should have been doing something about at the very moment she stood in a crowd.
Biden initially characterized Trump’s January 27 flight ban as “racist” and “xenophobic” and despite his own insistence the president should have acted sooner, Biden attended a public rally in Michigan on March 9 in which no one was wearing masks.
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The Biden campaign later defended photos from the event by accurately pointing out the rally took place weeks before the CDC recommended all people wear masks in public.
Which brings us to Trump’s alleged “refusal to act sooner.”
Democrats love to talk about “following the science,” but the reality is, despite what the president may have known in January and February, the science behind social distancing and mask-wearing wasn’t being pushed at the time.
The World Health Organization declared the virus a global pandemic on March 11, and the president responded the next day by banning incoming flights from 26 European nations in an effort to slow the spread. Within a week we were all locked at home watching “Tiger King,” as part of a 15-day initiative to flatten the curve, give or take 180 days.
And herein lies the biggest problem for Democrats between now and November 3.
The Democratic Party and its allies in the media are so blinded by their hatred for this president their emotions are denying them the self-awareness that would otherwise tell them how grossly out of touch they are with voters.
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At a time when millions of Americans are struggling to piece their lives back together, Democrats are pushing sensationalist headlines that disparage the president but offer zero deliverables to help people get back on their feet.
The average voter doesn’t have the luxury of obsessing over what happened then, as they’re too consumed by what needs to be done now.
For all of his angry teleprompter reading of late, Biden still hasn’t articulated how he’d do anything differently when it comes to COVID-19 than President Trump, aside from promising a national mask mandate that he’s since had to walk back because it was unconstitutional.
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History will record the Woodward book as one of a million character assassinations waged against the president between now and Election Day.
If Democrats could read the room half as well as they read bombshell books, they’d realize voters already saw this Lifetime Movie in 2016 and it does not have a happy ending for them.
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