Back in December, back before masks, and social distancing, and back before we all reeked of hand sanitizer and uncertainty, the Washington Post published a giant exclusive in which, through official government documents, the newspaper laid bare the lies and malfeasance behind America’s war in Afghanistan. At the time, it seemed as though this would be one of the biggest stories of the past five years. Instead, it disappeared from the national conversation even before the pandemic ate every news cycle. Meanwhile, the war ground on as American involvement gradually dissipated. So, while I hope that The New York Times's massive “Red Dawn” reporting over this past weekend manages to have a shelf life beyond Monday’s Five O’Clock Follies, I’m not making book on that either way.

To recap, in what appears to be a general alarm within Camp Runamuck, the Times was gifted with a trove of e-mails that detailed extended e-conversations between infectious disease experts in and out of government that came to be called “Red Dawn” by the participants. Let us simply say that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and his administration* do not come out of these conversations at all well.

Dr. Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation. This slow pace of action was confusing to the medical experts on the Red Dawn email chain, who were increasingly alarmed that cities and states that were getting hit hard by the virus needed to move faster to take aggressive steps.

There are several more direct exchanges. For example, when the president* enacted his European travel ban, his former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert e-mailed the group asking if the ban made any sense “scientifically,” and, if so, what he might be missing. Dr. James Lawler, a specialist in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska, replied:

Fuck no. This is the absolute wrong move.

(Lawler comes across as the no-bullshit star of the e-mails. At one point, he responded to the administration*’s soft-pedaling the developing pandemic as simply a bad form of the flu but listing “Great Understatements In History,” which included, “Pompeii: ‘just a bit of a dust storm.’”)

This story is of a piece with the Post’s Afghanistan scoop—a wholesale tearing down of the veil of fog and bullshit obscuring the truth of a steady rolling catastrophe. If you read the Red Dawn e-mails, and Lawler’s Great Understatements e-mail that was sent at the end of January, you simply cannot credit as true any of the president*’s regular spiel, which inevitably includes some variation of, “Nobody could’ve seen this coming.” The question is whether the Red Dawn exclusive is destined for the same memory pit in which the previous series ended up. From now until November, the country is going to face the most massive disinformation campaign in the history of this country. It will be all-ratfckers-on-deck, foreign and domestic. The op already is underway. We can’t afford the kind of comfortable, anesthetic amnesia with which the country occasionally approaches its national elections.

A manifest incompetent and malignant vandal is standing for re-election, and we’ve all been handed the receipts.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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