While much of the media this week has been focused (appropriately) on the revelations in Bob Woodward’s interviews with Donald Trump that deliberately downplayed the virulence and lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic, the second damning disclosure this week—a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower’s complaint that intelligence assessments had been altered or shelved in order to protect Trump politically—is horrifying for much of the same reason: It revealed that Trump will manipulate information to the public allowing a plague to be unleashed on the public for his own political gain.
The report, from demoted intelligence-division chief Brian Murphy, claims that DHS chief Chad Wolf and others in the department attempted to manipulate official DHS intelligence by downplaying concerns about Russian interference in the 2020 election—but even more disturbingly, by ordering threat assessments to dilute concerns about white nationalism while playing up the right’s concocted bogeyman, ‘antifa.’
The spread of toxic white nationalism and its always-attendant violence has become, as Renée Graham at the Boston Globeobserves, another kind of pandemic that Trump has downplayed and allowed to spread. Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation. Continue reading.