Every month or two, some public figure who ought to know better utters some weird racist remark in public and lowers themselves in the eyes of others…and usually, it's a dual lowering. Some of us think less of them because they showed a stark racist streak. And some of us think less of them because they said something stupid and, like I said, should've known better. There are racists who are smart enough not to "out" themselves that way and, obviously, there are those who are not.
You've all read and heard the worst quotes from Donald Trump's chats with Bob Woodward in which, almost with a certain amount of pride, he told Woodward things about the virus that did not sync up with what he was concurrently telling the public about the virus. And if your opinion of the 45th President of the United States could possibly go down another notch or three, it did. You thought he was a hypocrite, a con-artist, a fill-in-any-synonym for "liar." It was bad enough when you thought he didn't know how bad the virus would be but did nothing. Now, it's he did know how bad the virus would be but did nothing. Much worse.
But there's also the "something stupid" aspect of this. How dumb do you have to be to just come out and say it? It's almost like he knew The Lincoln Project and other opposition forces (including his opponent) would be out there and wanted to make it easy for them to whip up some commercials about how he was unfit to serve.
And he told it to Bob "Watergate" Woodward! Bob Woodward…the guy who writes best-selling books that nuke public officials' carefully-calculated images. He gave him multiple on-the-record interviews and now he's reduced to lame excuses like he didn't know the man's reputation or that if the quotes were so bad, why didn't Woodward report them at the time? That may be an indictment of Woodward but it doesn't make the quotes any less damning.
I dunno how I feel about Woodward saving all that material for his book…but I have to admire his skill at getting Trump to speak so candidly and his wisdom to release the actual audio tapes.
But, come to think of it, maybe it would have been better if he'd done it this way: Release the quotes in print only, let Trump's defenders all insist that this was Fake News and Trump never said such damning things…and then release the audio to prove he had. Wouldn't it have been fun to watch all the enablers have to switch and say those damning fake quotes were actually real, non-damning ones? Which is what they would have tried because what else could they say?