Andrew Harnik/AP
The Editor-in-Chief of the influential tutorial journal Science has slammed President Donald Trump as a harmful liar, whose deliberate distortions of the coronavirus disaster have “demoralized the scientific neighborhood and price numerous lives in america” by muzzling well being officers and sowing confusion.
In a new column published Friday by the peer-reviewed outlet, H. Holden Thorp argued that, “Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American folks.” This, he says, “would be the most shameful second within the historical past of U.S. science coverage.”
Thorp, a distinguished chemist and the highest editor for the Science household of journals, was reacting to revelations contained in a brand new e-book by journalist Bob Woodward, and accompanying tapes, that present Trump knew in regards to the severity of the coronavirus, and even how the pathogen may unfold within the air, in early February, at the same time as he obfuscated and misled the general public by insisting the virus would miraculously disappear. “I wished to at all times play it down,” Trump advised Woodward in March. “I nonetheless like enjoying it down.”
“Trump was not clueless,” Thorp concludes. “He was not ignoring the briefings. Take heed to his personal phrases. Trump lied, plain and easy.”
The newly reported Trump feedback present essential new methods to know how the coronavirus disaster unfolded within the U.S.—and makes watching this Mom Jones super-cut of Trump’s early denials and deflections much more chilling:
