The Trump interview with Woodward is still shocking to me.
He speaks intelligently and expresses a deeper understanding of the issues than he ever does in other public spaces or interviews.

The sheer disconnect in all that is still surprising to me. Like... I never assume anyone who makes it to the top of a field (American politics in this case) is stupid. So I've never bought into the whole "Trump can't form a sentence" argument. Still... to hear him speak with intelligence is weird.

It only makes all his scandals that much worse. Like, if he's truly an idiot who doesn't know how to solve problems, that's one thing. If he actually knows how to solve problems, but he chooses to let people die to further his own ends, then that's just unbelievable to me. How is that not just evil?

I'm not getting all moral on this, despite the language. I'm just at a loss to understand how someone can know the sheer lethality of the pandemic and then publicly downplay that and encourage people to behave in ways that will definitely kill them. I can understand that there is more on the line than the immediate deaths from COVID. I can understand that economic collapse will kill a lot of people, too. I can try to pretend that there's a balancing act, but I simply can't imagine a scenario in which Trump's handling is productive.

Not that my imagination is a measure of good governance.