Week 200 - West on Fire - a podcast by Amy Siskind

Things are getting worse in America, week by  week. This week, as the West Coast saw wildfires spread, with much of  California, Oregon, and Washington covered in smoke so thick the sun  couldn’t break through and the sky was a hazy gray or shade of yellow  and orange, Trump ignored it. Just as he skipped a commemorative  ceremony in lower Manhattan for the anniversary of 9/11 — as if the blue  states were not his responsibility — repeating a theme from the start  in office: leader of his supporters, not the country.

This week Trump was engulfed in a second major  scandal, as journalist Bob Woodward released tapes of conversations he  had with Trump on a variety of topics, including Trump admitting he knew  in early February that Covid-19 posed a dire risk — a fact he hid and  lied about for months. One historian described it as “the greatest  dereliction of duty” in presidential history.

This week reporting revealed the Trump regime’s  embrace of tactics more familiar to an authoritarian regime than a  democracy. Department of Health and Human Services officials sought to  hide information and alter reports on the extent of the Covid-19  outbreak, while a whistleblower complaint portrayed Department of  Homeland Security officials hiding intelligence on Russian interference,  and altering reports to blame left-leaning groups for violence. There  was more shocking news about the Justice Department intervening in a  case for Trump on a personal matter, while a top deputy of John Durham  resigned from his investigation of the investigators, citing pressure  from Attorney General William Barr to finalize a report before the  election. The Treasury Department sanctioned Andrii Derkach, described  as an active Russian agent, who had been a source of information for  both Rudy Giuliani and Senate Chairs Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley in  their investigations of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

America is a country at war with itself, with  Trump stoking division as a campaign strategy. The apocalyptic skies of  the West seemed to capture the dystopian feel of an exhausted, anxious,  fearful, downtrodden America. Having failed to truly tame the  coronavirus over the summer with no federal strategy and Trump refusing  to even encourage face masks, the country now heads into fall and  winter, with dire predictions on illness and death.

Read the full list here: https://theweeklylist.org/weekly-list/week-200/

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