Hanlon's razor vs. Maya Angelou, with an illustrative example

Ever since I first encountered it, I've rather like Hanlon's razor, an all-purpose response to conspiracy theories of all kinds: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Or, if one wants to apply it more broadly, incompetence, which can happen to any organization of sufficient size even if the people who work inside it give every appearance of intelligence.

But there's another quote which I've come to appreciate lately, from Maya Angelou, which seems to serve as a sort of corollary to Hanlon's razor: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." Because sometimes, it isn't incompetence. Sometimes, it really is malice, and the signs are usually visible long before they reach critical mass.

Which brings me to this report from Huffpost:

President Donald Trump said repeatedly in March that “nobody” could’ve predicted a crisis at the scale of the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc across the globe.

“Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion,” Trump said March 19. A week later, he reiterated that “nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”

But according to reports in The New York Times and Axios on Monday, at least one top official in Trump’s own administration sounded the alarm ― in late January and then again in February ― about the potentially catastrophic impacts of the virus that causes COVID-19 on the United States.

In a Jan. 29 memo about the coronavirus addressed to the National Security Council, Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, warned that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked,” the Times reported. The disease could kill up to half a million Americans, Navarro warned in the document, and cost the U.S. trillions of dollars if no action was taken to contain the virus.

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” the memo read.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. This is hardly the first time that Donald Trump has shown us who he is: a callous, opportunistic, narcissist, who cares more about his poll numbers and reelection campaign than he does about the possible deaths of millions of Americans. Because he did know; he was warned ahead of time, repeatedly.

The paper said Monday that Navarro’s January memo was “the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront” the coronavirus crisis.

About a month after his first memo, Navarro reportedly penned a second one, this time addressed to President Trump, escalating his warnings about COVID-19.

In the second memo, dated Feb. 23, Navarro wrote of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1 - 2 million souls,” Axios reported.

Navarro called for Congress to approve emergency funds of at least $3 billion for prevention and treatment efforts.

“This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill,” he wrote. 

Let's be clear. The POTUS knew exactly what his country was about to face. He was warned explicitly, repeatedly. He just chose to ignore those warnings and play politics instead, as he has done consistently since being inaugurated. This was neither stupidity, nor incompetence; Trump understood exactly what he was doing, and what the consequences were likely to be. He just didn't care. And results of his soulless political gamesmanship on the brink of catastrophe likely will cost millions of American lives.

With deliberate malice, Donald Trump has managed to turn something as inherently apolitical as the COVID-19 pandemic into politics. I'm not going to say that the United States is alone in watching this happen, but it's the only still-functional democracy on earth where I've seen reports of it happening. And it makes me sick. May it may you sick, too, but with outrage rather than with COVID-19.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. And then vote, dammit. Because President Nero will continue fiddling: play politics while the world burns from human-caused global climate change, and while Americans burn with fever and die in horrific numbers, and while the former lead nation of the free world degenerates into the world's largest banana republic.

Good luck, and stay safe.