Sunday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” former CBS “Evening News” anchor Dan Rather accused President Donald Trump of attempting to “normalize thousands of deaths” from the coronavirus pandemic “for his own political purpose.”
Host Joy Ried said, “So, you know, Jay Rosen this week wrote a piece that gives this alternate, it gives it an alternate way of describing another man Norman Vincent Peale-esque you know Trump’s philosophy of handling a pandemic. Not how to handle a pandemic but talk himself through it. It’s called, ‘The plan is to have no plan, to wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do given who heads the table. The manufacturer of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.’ The overall point of what he wrote is the plan really is to talk Americans into thinking that it’s okay. That it’s okay that 80,000 people or 100,000 people are dead, that the 33 million unemployed is all fine and just get people to believe that with happy talk rather than actually solve the problem. What do you make of that?”
Rather said, “Well, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a full-power effort using the pomp and circumstance of the presidency to accentuate the positive and try to eliminate the negative or at least to diminish the negative. This is right out of the Dr. Norman Vincent Peale playbook, for those who remember Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Donald Trump and his father were followers of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. It’s the belief is if he keeps saying positive things, people will at least begin to believe that things are positive, whether they are or not. The deepest of that is to actually believe that by saying things or how you imagine them to be, that you can make them to be.”
He added, “I’m not saying I subscribe to any of this. I’m saying this is sort of in short what Dr. Norman Vincent Peale preached. Donald Trump is a believer. It’s pretty hard to argue right now but argue, I would say, every decent person regardless of their political affiliation has to do because we can not, we must not normalize thousands of deaths, which is what the president is attempting to do for his own political purpose. He’s accentuating the politics, diminishing the science for his own political benefit. At the same time preaching, I’m saying everything is all right, folks. Don’t worry about all these deaths.”
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