Will Woodward's tapes be the end of Donald Trump?

After her father's diagnosis with Covid-19, Caroline Brooks vented her frustration on Twitter. "Wearing a mask is a non-partisan issue. The advice of medical experts shouldn’t be politicized. My father ignored medical expertise and now he has COVID. This has been a heartbreaking battle because I love my dad and don’t want him to die." 

Brooks was barking up the wrong tree, however. Brooks' father, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, has been part of the problem for years now. A political fashionista of sorts, Gohmert eagerly signed onto whatever hyper-partisan, anti-establishment caucus came his way over his decade and a half in Congress. The fact that he was diagnosed with Covid-19, after months of making a show of his devotion to Donald Trump by refusing to wear a mask in the Capitol, changed nothing. He blamed his positive Covid test on his mask, and, after he recovered a few weeks later, attributed his recovery to Trump's recommended protocol of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

She then closed her July tweet with words that have become prescient with the release of the taped interviews between Bob Woodward and Donald Trump. "It’s not worth following a president who has no remorse for leading his followers to an early grave.”

As the world now knows, it turns out that Trump understood the risks posed by the looming pandemic from the get-go. On February 7th, he described to Woodward warnings from his national security advisors that the coronavirus would be the greatest challenge he would face as President, and a public health crisis on par with the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 million people. Ten days later, the President delved into the nuances of the threat. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a February 7th call with Woodward. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than... even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff.” At least five times deadlier than a severe seasonal flu, he added.

All along the way, Trump was lying to his followers. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. While he was taking great care to protect himself – visitors were not allowed to see him without first getting an instant Covid test, and those working in the White House were tested constantly – he actively encouraged his supporters to put themselves in harm's way. Even as he described the virulence of Covid-19 to Woodward beginning in early February, he has declined to this day to share that critical information with his supporters, choosing instead to use the disease as one more tool in his arsenal to divide the country against itself.

In any normal world, the publication of taped interviews that expose the extent of a President's duplicity and self-serving manipulation – leading directly to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and continuing economic devastation – would not just spell the end of his career, but leave him to live out his life in shame and ignominy. He would be vilified by his supporters, as they came to realize that the person they worshipped – exactly as Caroline Brooks suggested – had absolutely no remorse for leading them to an early grave. 

But we do not live in a normal world. Instead, within the reality distortion field that Trump creates around himself – a world in which he is the sole arbiter of reality – his supporters appear to look past the depth of his cynicism and pathological narcissism, as well as the implications of his lies for their own lives. "We're the smartest people, we're the most loyal people," Trump declared to his supporters on the eve of his victory in the Nevada presidential nominating caucus four years ago that began to separate him from the GOP pack. That alleged two-way loyalty – the loyalty of his base to him, and the loyalty that they believe he had for them – has been the foundation of his presidency. The loyalty of his supporters has proven to be unbreakable through thick and thin. But never before this has his loyalty to them been so directly – and irrefutably – exposed as a sham. 

The rallies that Trump held in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona over the days after the Woodward tapes came to light illustrate the irony of the moment. His supporters showed up, raring to go. Those seated in the bleachers behind the podium were properly masked, perhaps to provide an illusion of compliance with public health protocols to the television cameras, while the crowds that Trump faced were packed tightly together, unmasked, and raucous. The whole Covid thing is a Democrat hoax, those attending the rallies assured reporters. 

According to Pew Research, those who believe the whole thing is a hoax are the rule, not the exception, within TrumpWorld. According to Pew data, 68% of those who have relied on the President and his coronavirus task force for information about the virus believe that the outbreak of Covid-19 has been made into a bigger deal than it really is, and more than one-third of all Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe the conspiracy theory that the pandemic was planned and spread by a cabal of powerful people in order to take down the President. Among Trump's most loyal demographic – those with a high school diploma or less – 48% believe the Covid conspiracy theory is definitely or probably true. 

It is now crystal clear from the tapes that Donald Trump knows otherwise, and has known from the very beginning. There is no hoax and no conspiracy, just a killer plague, as he described it to Woodward in April; "It's a horrible thing, it's unbelievable... This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you're the wrong person, you don't have a chance... It is the plague." After the rally in Nevada this past Sunday, a reporter asked Trump whether – in light of his comments about the virulence of the virus – it worried him that his supporters were putting themselves at risk, given that they were packed inside a closed space and following none of the public health protocols. Trump, bantering affably with the reporter, said "I’m on a stage, it’s very far away, so I’m not at all concerned.” He appeared to give no regard to the risks to his supporters and instead focused only on himself.

Looking back to Donald Trump's speech on the last night of the Republican National Convention in late August, one has to wonder what the members of Congress and other Trump loyalists who had gathered on the South Lawn of the White House that evening thought as they listened to Bob Woodward's tapes this week. Like those at Trump's rallies, they toed the party line. They largely eschewed masks and sat tightly together as the President addressed them from a discrete and safe distance away. 

Hearing his words this week on the tapes, they now know what the President knew and when he knew it. And listening to his comments to the reporter in Nevada, it is also clear that he had little or no regard for their well-being, or that of their families, as they gathered together to hear his speech. Did those members of Congress have a moment of epiphany as they grasped the breadth of Donald Trump's political manipulations around a pandemic that has now killed 200,000 of their fellow Americans. Have they come to realize his utter indifference to anyone's life but his own? 

Looking back, do those erstwhile leaders of the Trump movement now wonder about the price of their own sycophancy? Have their families or friends suggested that it is time that they recognize that the man they have supported – no questions asked – for years now, is every bit the liar and con man that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio suggested early on. And have their children raised to them the question that Caroline Brooks addressed to her own father. It is the question every Trump supporter now must answer, as the depth of his duplicity has been revealed for all the world to hear: Why would you continue to support a president who has no remorse for leading his followers to an early grave?

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces.