We Don't Talk About Donald Trump: A Case Study | Big Joel

hey everybody just a short one today and let's get straight into it on january 8th 2020 donald trump's national security advisor robert o'brien told him that covid was likely going to be a really big deal that the disease was airborne that is far deadlier than even a strenuous flu that it impacts the old as well as the young that it presented a substantial risk to americans etc we know trump knew this information because recently journalist bob woodward released a number of interviews what we'll call the kovid tapes where trump explicitly says all of it makes it clear that he was aware of just how much of a threat this virus could be and in one of the most interesting moments of the tape trump says this uh i wanted to always play it down i still like playing it down yes sir because i don't want to create a panic he wanted to play it down he still wants to play it down his misinformation about the virus his undermining of masks his constant comparisons of coveted to the flu something he just did even after he literally got kovid are revealed to be what we always knew them to be a campaign of misinformation against the american public a campaign that as it turns out began long before we americans without access to top secret information had an inkling that covid might be a problem here you know this is five percent versus one percent and less than one percent you know so this is deadly stuff on september 9 2020 cnn reported on this story with the help of correspondent jamie gongl and as she presents these tapes to the audience as she hears trump talk about how he lied gongle says this you know but john this wasn't just about panic the white house we know is very concerned about the economy the president is very concerned about getting reelected and this this five second quote is what we are going to talk about today this quote kind of blew me away so what is gongle saying here well i'd say it's two things right first that she is dubious of the president's motivations he says that he lied to the american public in order to not cause a panic she says that's [ __ ] in fact he most likely lied to keep the stock market rising to secure his re-election second she's implying that this is relevant to the way we interpret this situation on a moral level this is kind of a tough claim to make and i can't really prove it but watching gongl's performance here seeing the disgust on her face as she describes the way that trump lied about his motives i can't help but have the feeling that to her this is a really important part of the president's wrongdoings you know but john this wasn't just about panic uh the white house we know is very concerned about the economy hmm let's put a pin in all that for a second and digress into a bit of a thought experiment what happens to somebody when they are arrested on the charge of murder well you might say they would be brought into a court two attorneys would speak about whether or not they committed the crime then the jury would say whether they were guilty or not guilty and then they be set free or put in prison on that basis now this is of course true a great answer by the way kudos on your incredible answer to that question but it is incomplete because alongside the process that tries to determine your guilt there's another process a psychological process why did this person commit the crime who are they and how would we go about making them less violent were they a victim to some form of psychosis were they in control of the situation see justice in our society is not just a matter of figuring out who did what it's also a process of producing a subject who can be judged a moral entity who can stand before the law and face its decision for all intents and purposes then we invent a soul because it is a soul and not just a body that we want to discipline and punish now i bring all this up because we can sort of see this process unfolding in the way that gongol treats the kovid tapes for much of her coverage she is engaged exclusively with the corpus of evidence what did trump know and when did he know it remember for those of us from watergate howard baker what did the president know and when did he know it that's what bob woodward lays out in this book but in the moment that she hears trump claim that he lied about the pandemic in order to allay a national panic she almost reflexively begins to engage with this secondary psychological process here he's saying that while he certainly did lie about the pandemic he had reasonable motives for doing so preventing an ostensibly bad thing people freaking out there's a sense here that donald trump is threatening gongl's simple evaluation of the kovid tapes that he is exonerating his own soul and she can't have that no you lied about this extremely bad thing and maybe more importantly you lied for extremely bad reasons in order to judge trump to make moral claims about these tapes we can't just rely on discussions of what he did and didn't do rather we must also understand and be able to condemn the man himself that's what justice is okay am i about to look you in the eyes and say i disagree with jaime gongle on this one normally i'm a huge gongle stan but she really missed the mark here donald trump has a beautiful soul and whatever you think about his actions he always has the best of intentions well no i think she's probably right about this one in my opinion donald trump is bad and i'm not offended by anybody saying that but what i do want to look at here is the way that this understanding of justice as applied to donald trump in this situation leads us to some pretty strange and kind of unsettling conclusions conclusions about what donald trump represents and about what this cnn report actually works to accomplish and let's explore that so whenever you make an ethical claim about anything whenever you say that a fact is relevant to your moral assessment of a situation you are also saying that the inverse claim would be relevant that might sound confusing but it's really not if i say that you stole my dog and that that's a bad thing then i accept that if you didn't steal my dog then the opposite is probably true you didn't do a bad thing stop biting me and given this we have to recognize that when gongle stakes any of her moral interpretation of the kovid tapes on trump lying about his motives she's saying that if he didn't lie there then her assessment would change her opinion is tied for better or worse to donald trump's soul but here's the problem donald trump's soul is a social fiction it is a complicated prop that's it if you asked me do you think donald trump is a good person i'd say no but what if i thought that political correctness was a meaningful threat to free speech in america what if i thought that trickle-down economics was a great idea what if i thought that undocumented immigrants from mexico were an incredibly serious problem one that the mainstream media constantly lies about well maybe he'd start to look a little better a little more virtuous a little more honest that's the thing right there is no essential donald trump for most of us he exists merely as a function of language a reflection of our beliefs and so when gongol centers her investigation on trump's psyche what we find is kind of hollow cnn says he was lying about his motives and that that information is important and that just leaves room open for the white house or fox news or internet man tim poole to say the same thing in the opposite direction yes his motives are important and whether you agree with him or not trump did what he did for a rational thoughtful reason he thought he was doing the right thing they wanted me to come out and scream people are dying with that no no we did it just the right way we have to be calm and you know what are we even supposed to do with that for all intents and purposes they are just as right as she is because donald trump is just whoever you want him to be the conversation was over before it began and is this necessary is this vague ambiguous way of evaluating the covet tapes really the only way we can talk about them morally well no it's not you know just because somebody provides a moral sounding rationale for a thing they did that doesn't make it a good rationale or even a coherent one if i stole your dog and you asked me why i did that i could say well i think i'm amazing at raising dogs and that any dog would flourish in my care now you could believe me about my motives or not but either way a reasonable response here is dude there's many ways of getting a dog you didn't need to take my dog who i love and also no matter what even if there wasn't a lot of ways of getting a dog you can't steal my dog she's she's mine oh so it is with trump even if he did want to prevent a national panic he could have done that in a number of ways he could have been normal taken the virus seriously and had more aggressive policies to combat it he could have not told people in states with lockdown orders to liberate themselves he could have not called mask usage politically correct i couldn't hear you can you take it off because i cannot hear you i'll just speak louder sir okay you want to be politically correct he could have not lied to say that donald trump's stated motives here were disingenuous is completely missing the point the point being he murdered countless people enact that his intentions true or not does nothing to justify or even really explain so i guess it's time we ask the question of the day why do i care about any of this like it's a five second clip from a random correspondent and even if i'm right that the moral framework she applies to this situation is inadequate and unnecessary why does that matter to me at all and honestly i think it just kind of struck a nerve with me you know when i listen to these sections of the kovid tapes i find them really moving because it was just a choice like i often find myself thinking of trump as this bad faith evil figure who's so steeped in his own lies that he hardly knows what the truth is anymore but this is not the case he knew what he was doing every step of the way he knew it was [ __ ] and looking at that i can't help but have this visceral reaction like is that democracy like that information about the coronavirus that wasn't donald trump's right it didn't belong to him it was our information but here we just left that in his hands his incentive systems his business connections on january 8 2020 robert o'brien gave a brief where he explained that the coronavirus was an enormous threat to the united states he said that and then donald trump was like okay cool i'm gonna use that info to do less than nothing and that was his power his privilege his right it was his right to murder us and we know that for a fact because nobody stopped him is that democracy and watching this gongle coverage were left with none of that none of that complicated interpretive possibility space none of those valuable questions because of the way justice is understood and deployed here all we really get to think about is trump's ego where his motives pure is he going to heaven this self-defeating nonsense that reduces our perspective to a series of irrelevant and unfalsifiable claims about who donald trump is but we don't get to talk about what he is and we don't get to talk about what he was able to do and i don't know it might sound silly to say this about a five second clip but i think we need more than that hey everybody there thanks so much for watching my video i hope you liked it uh if you did feel free to like comment subscribe give me money on patreon if you want to i'll probably release some extra footage of my dog there uh and now it's time for my patreon question of the video sal monolon i'm sorry if this is a real name that i'm butchering and not just a uh username sal monolon uh asks guinea pigs v hamsters guinea pigs uh guinea pigs guinea pigs is the answer to that question they're cuter okay um that's that's that's it that's the question done now

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 504,569

Keywords: donald trump, cnn, big joel, covid, coronavirus, woodwarth, covid tapes, tim pool

Id: dJTnRXT5VH4

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020