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Oct. 2, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:15

Trump Has Covid | Ep. 1107

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Time	Text
	So, President Trump has COVID.
	That's all I got.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	And it was only a matter of time until Chekhov's gun was fired, of course.
	In just one second, we'll get to all of that.
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	Okay, so obviously the big news of the day, of the month of the year, is that President Trump has been confirmed to have COVID.
	He tweeted this news out last night.
	He tweeted out that he and the First Lady have both been tested positive for COVID.
	He tweeted tonight, Flotus and I tested positive for COVID-19.
	We'll begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately.
	We will get through this together.
	And, you know, naturally, all the same people on Twitter with the blue check marks, you would expect, have been just about as nasty as you would expect.
	Some people have not been.
	Some people have been pretty classy about it.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	But the White House doctor did release a note.
	on this. The White House doctor acknowledging that the president has come down with COVID.
	Here is the letter. It says, I release the following information with the permission of President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. This evening, I received confirmation that both President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 virus.
	The president and first lady are both well at this time.
	They plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence. The White House medical team and I will maintain a I appreciate the support provided by some of our country's greatest medical professions and institutions.
	Rest assured, I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering.
	I'll keep you updated on any future developments.
	Now, obviously, we don't know the direction that COVID-19 is going to take.
	The president is 74 years old.
	He is overweight, which is a complicating factor.
	It is a pre-existing condition.
	It is an underlying condition that can exacerbate the effects of COVID-19.
	So far, it has been reported That the president of the United States has a mild case, or at least his symptoms are mild.
	We'll see how this plays forward.
	Honestly, I think from a political point of view, obviously politics comes second.
	So our prayers go out to the Trump family, just as they go out to any family that is suffering with COVID-19, which can in fact be a very serious disease.
	Politically speaking, this throws a wrench into a lot of what's going on because we have a debate that is scheduled for about two weeks from now.
	Presumably, if the president goes through the process and then he quarantines for 14 days, he will get out, I believe, literally the day of the debate to do that debate.
	So it throws a wrench into that.
	It obviously throws a wrench into his campaign schedule.
	He's not going to be going out and doing public events for quite a while because he's supposed to, according to the CDC, quarantine for 10 to 14 days.
	We have to see, of course, the vector that the disease is going to take.
	Which direction the disease is going to take.
	Here, the political fallout here is pretty obvious for Trump.
	And the political fallout, as we'll see, is largely surrounding the severity of the disease.
	If Trump recovers from the disease quickly, if it turns out that this virus is something that doesn't affect him really badly, and that in four or five days, he's basically back to normal, he has a mild case, then he's gonna be able to go out and he's gonna say, listen, I know that this thing definitely affects some people truly terribly, and we have to protect those people, we have to make sure they get all the care that they could possibly need.
	But the truth is that the vast majority of cases tend to be rather mild.
	And that is true.
	I mean, statistically, it is true that the vast majority of these cases tend to be rather mild.
	Virtually everyone below the age of 50 who gets this thing recovers of it.
	The death rates on this thing are extraordinarily striated by age.
	If you're under the age of 20, then your likelihood of dying from COVID-19 is something like Two in 10,000.
	If you are above the age of 70, then your chances of dying of this thing are something like 5%, which is a lot higher, obviously.
	And Trump is in that latter cohort.
	So if he recovers quickly and if he recovers easily, he's going to be able to say with a certain amount of credibility that it is important to recognize that this disease does not affect everybody equivalently, that many of these cases are mild, and it's important to keep that in mind when we are talking about recovery and the campaign probably moves on.
	Obviously, if it's Much more severe than we don't just have a political issue on our hands.
	We have like an actual human life issue on our hands.
	Now, it turns out a lot of people have been infected inside the White House.
	Apparently, this thing started with Hope Hicks is the current supposition.
	Hope Hicks, of course, is a top aide to the President of the United States.
	Other people who have tested positive at this point include Ronna McDaniel.
	She's a guest a little bit earlier on the show this week.
	Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the RNC, according to the New York Times, has tested positive for COVID and is experiencing mild symptoms, according to several people briefed on the situation.
	Ms.
	McDaniel is the latest person in frequent contact with Trump to test positive for the virus.
	Apparently, she received her diagnosis on Wednesday, and after a crowded donor event in March at Mar-a-Lago, the president's private club in Florida, Ms.
	McDaniel fell ill, but she tested negative way back then.
	Of course, Trump is not the first world leader to be infected.
	Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain had a very serious case.
	I mean, he was actually hospitalized.
	President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil tested positive as well.
	Bolsonaro's case was much milder than Johnson's case.
	Both of those men are significantly younger than Trump.
	He is older and probably at higher risk, just on a basic medical level, than either of those people.
	It is true that a lot of people today are pointing out Trump's personal behavior, and we'll get into that in just a second.
	And they're pointing out that earlier this week, he seemed lethargic and that, you know, he maybe should have taken precautions at that point while he was being tested.
	At that point, Mike Pence, for what it's worth, Mike Pence and the second lady, Karen Pence, have both tested negative for the virus at this point.
	And it is also true that A lot of people get this thing, and a lot of people recover from this thing, and a lot of people get it under different circumstances.
	For example, Justin Trudeau's wife had this thing.
	And so, there's this sort of belief out there, this talismanic belief, that if you do all of the right things, or what's even more bizarre, if you say all of the right things, that you're immune from the disease.
	One of the things that's very frustrating to people who watch this, and attempt to be objective in any real way about this, is that there are certain things you can do to minimize the chances that you're gonna get it.
	There's no guarantee you're not gonna get it, because we're all living life.
	You're going to run into contact with people, N95 masks may provide you a significant barrier, they may provide you real protection, but cloth masks don't provide you the same protection.
	The original idea of cloth masks was that mainly you're preventing other people from getting it, not that it prevents you from getting it.
	There was a point a month ago where Anthony Fauci was suggesting this thing is transmissible via the eyes.
	So he was suggesting that people actually wear goggles if they could.
	So there's no guarantee that you're not going to get it.
	There are things you can do to minimize it, and we'll talk about whether Trump has done those things.
	But there's this belief on the left, as we'll see, that even more than any of that, if you virtue signal about the virus, this acts as some sort of protection.
	So Trump's great sin here was not even his personal behavior.
	It was the stuff that Trump said.
	If Trump had just said, I'm super serious about it over and over and over, it would have been fine.
	Or if Trump presumably had protested it like a Black Lives Matter rally, he wouldn't have gotten it.
	Or if he did get it, then it would have been worth it because he would have been protesting racism.
	One of the big problems with this entire debacle since March is that where we should have been following the science and being measured in our language about what works and what doesn't, where we should have pointed out that risk factors vary by age, where we should have pointed out That certain types of masks are better than other types of masks.
	And we should have stopped this sort of virtue signaling about how if you wear a mask, but it's below your nose, that's better than not wearing a mask at all or something.
	Or that if you wear a neck gaiter, that's, I mean, the CDC has said, by the way, a neck gaiter is actually worse than nothing.
	A neck gaiter actually helps aerosolize your spit.
	Like if you sneeze into a neck gaiter, it actually blows it through the thing like a sieve.
	And then it just kind of makes it go further.
	It actually aerosols it wider.
	Okay, so My big problem here is twofold.
	One, I think there's some legit criticisms to be made of how Trump has personally, in terms of his attitude and what he's conveyed to other people and his personal behavior, has handled COVID.
	I also think that the media have set up these bizarre standards where you are immune to the disease if you are protesting for racial justice, where if you run around and virtue signal about wearing a mask 100 feet from other people, this somehow makes you immune to the disease when it really has nothing to do with any of that.
	There's this sort of talismanic worship of particular modes of discussing this disease.
	That if you take it super seriously, then at least you're protected from the backlash or the mockery if you do get it.
	And again, that is completely separated from the public policy discussion.
	It's completely separated from a rational scientific discussion of these issues.
	So for example, I've said on the show many times that if you're my age, if you're 36 and you're, thank God, healthy, I'm 36 and I'm healthy, I don't have any underlying conditions, if I get this thing I'm not particularly afraid of getting this thing because I'm 36 and I have no underlying conditions.
	And then I said it is also possible that I could die of this thing if I get it because it is possible that anybody could die of this thing if they get it, although the chances are extremely unlikely.
	Now, because I've said the former part, which is that, statistically speaking, I'm extremely unlikely to die of this disease, if, God forbid, something were to happen to me, then the media would jump on that and suggest that I was taking it lightly, even though I specifically say, at the end of that sentence, that it could happen to me, it's just very unlikely that it's going to happen to me.
	People do not seem to understand how statistics work in any real way.
	So if you say things like, Trump has said before, that not very many people are dying of this thing relative to the percentage of the population at this point, depending on age, That may be statistically true.
	It can also be insensitive.
	But people will use that as an example of Trump not taking the thing seriously, as opposed to, is what he is saying actually true?
	He said earlier that if you're young and you get it, you really are not at high risk.
	That happens to be a true statement.
	That's not an example of him not taking it seriously.
	And you saying that you are at high risk if you're five, as opposed to if you're 80, is actually being statistically Irresponsible with the information, but morally irresponsible, right?
	This is sort of the divide that has happened, is that if you discuss this thing in a statistically responsible way, then you are charged with being morally irresponsible.
	It's the AOC version of reality.
	And if you say things that are statistically irresponsible, if you say, well, yes, it's true that older people get it, but if you're young, you definitely could die of it without any sort of examination of the base rates or of the actual death rates, the infection fatality rates, then you are considered good.
	And so if something happens to you, then we can say, well, at least you took it seriously, right?
	That was a good person.
	It's become a moral battle as much as it has been a scientific battle.
	We'll get to more of that in just one second.
	And we will trace President Trump's actions over the past few days.
	Members of the media are starting to go nuts because now they are saying that Kayleigh McEnany was exposed to this thing back on Wednesday.
	Did she know that she was exposed to this thing back on Wednesday when she did her presser?
	Yes, I'm sure Kayleigh McEnany walked into the press room and just deliberately blew COVID all over everybody.
	I'm sure that she hates the press that much, Kayleigh McEnany.
	I mean, we're getting a little bit over our skis here, guys.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	There are now questions as to how many people Trump has come into contact with.
	So obviously he debated Joe Biden.
	A little bit earlier this week, they were socially distanced in that debate.
	They look like they're probably 10 feet apart.
	Now, it was a very loud debate.
	I assume that Joe Biden is being continuously tested, as well he should be.
	I mean, Joe Biden is 78 years old, and he does not look like he is in significantly wonderful health.
	So I'm hoping, you know, truly, that Joe Biden is being regularly tested.
	By the way, I hope that everybody who's suspicious that they might have symptoms is regularly tested, or that if you're going to be in contact with somebody who is vulnerable, that you're regularly tested.
	Yeah, I would say pretty meticulous on this sort of stuff.
	I think since March, I've been tested some five times, knowing that I was going to be in contact with somebody else.
	I've had an antibody test twice.
	I believe that testing is a very, very good thing.
	And I'm hopeful and I'm sure that Joe Biden has been tested for this thing.
	But the president was in contact with Joe Biden a little bit earlier this week.
	Apparently, it was evident earlier this week that he was feeling poorly.
	Like, as of Tuesday, Wednesday, it became pretty clear that he was a little bit under the weather.
	According to the UK Daily Mail, fears that the president may have contracted the virus were raised after it was revealed that Hope Hicks had traveled on both Marine One, the presidential helicopter, and on Air Force One in the last seven days, which transported the president and his staff to the presidential debate on Tuesday and other campaign rallies around the country.
	Hicks also traveled with the president to a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, where she was seen maskless and clapping to the Village People's YMCA.
	She's also been pictured with Jared Kushner and other senior White House staff in that time.
	Now, Jared and Ivanka have both tested negative.
	for COVID. So that means the Depenses have tested negative.
	It means the Kushners have tested negative. Trump and his wife have tested positive. Ronald McDaniel has tested positive. That's what we know thus far. So here is sort of the timeline.
	September 26th, the Trump family flew to Pennsylvania where they did a bit of an event. The president did meet with Judge Amy Coney Barrett a little bit earlier this week.
	Again, right now, the date is October 2nd.
	So the chances that he conveyed it to Amy Coney Barrett are extremely, extremely low.
	I'm sure she's been tested as well.
	Democrats are trying to claim, by the way, that this should be a case for pushing off the confirmation for Amy Coney Barrett.
	Amy Coney Barrett doesn't have it.
	And by the way, even if she did, that would not be a case for pushing off the confirmation so long as she is capable of Zooming into the session.
	I mean, they literally had James Comey testify in front of the Senate by Zoom.
	So Amy Coney Barrett could do exactly the same thing.
	On September 28th, President Trump gave an update on COVID-19 testing strategy with the VP before meeting with White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro to inspect a new electric pickup truck.
	On September 29th, he went to Ohio.
	Before boarding Marine One, the president was pictured waving to crowds of supporters During the debate, they stood Trump and Biden over six feet apart, but they did not wear masks, obviously.
	On September 30th, which is just a couple of days ago, at which point it is probable that Trump had contracted COVID, right?
	Because Hope Hicks was confirmed on Wednesday.
	Ivanka Trump shared a picture of her Instagram account with her and her dad on Air Force One.
	Later that day, the president traveled again with Hope Hicks to another campaign rally, this time in Duluth, Minnesota.
	He was seen in front of a large crowd of people, many of whom were not wearing masks.
	He threw a hat into the crowd on October 1st.
	Before Trump would later announce his positive test results, Ivanka was pictured visiting Charlotte, North Carolina, mingling with members of the public.
	And Trump attended a fundraiser in New Jersey where he participated in a roundtable with a bunch of supporters, apparently many of whom are now very nervous because he was in close proximity to them.
	All of this, of course, raises questions about the president's personal behavior in the aftermath of Hope Hicks doing this.
	Should he have been acting this way?
	Should he have been in close contact with people?
	Given the fact that he is 74 years old and, again, overweight, if I were advising the president, I would have told him a long time ago that he should be masked up in close proximity to people.
	I've told my own parents they should be masked up in close proximity to people, and my parents are 64, not 74.
	I tend to be on the cautious side.
	Now, Trump is fully capable of choosing what he wants to choose.
	There are certain risks that come attendant on that.
	It's a free country.
	That does carry questions about the messaging that he's been pushing to the American public about being cautious.
	And this is what the media have been jumping on full scale.
	So in a second, we're going to get to some of the classy leftists and then we'll get to some of the not classy leftists.
	And then we'll get into the broader debate over Trump and how this affects the election and everything that has to do with Trump's promulgation of messaging on COVID.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so as I say, some people have been classy about this, some people have not.
	Rachel Maddow was classy about this.
	this. She tweeted out, God bless the president and the first lady. If you pray, please pray for their speedy and complete recovery and for everyone infected everywhere. This virus is horrific and merciless. No one would wish its wrath on anyone. We must get it spread and under control enough. Okay, that is a class irresponsible.
	Joe Biden, for his part, sends a classy response.
	He tweeted out, Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery.
	We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the President and his family.
	This is the proper response.
	Then there are the people, the blue checks on Twitter, who are giving, I would say, rather improper responses.
	So just one example.
	The former national spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and former Obama White House staffer, her name is Zahra Rahim, she tweeted out, literally, it's been against my moral identity to tweet this for the past four years, but I hope he dies.
	Doesn't seem that nice.
	Linda Sarsour, who is a delight, she tweeted out, seems like someone don't want to go back to the debate stage.
	So apparently he's now faking COVID in order to avoid debating Donald Trump.
	Yes, I am sure that that is what's happening.
	George Conway, always classy.
	He tweeted out, he failed to protect the country.
	He couldn't even protect himself.
	Yes, that's delightful.
	Just wonderful.
	Comedian Hari Kondabalu tweeted out my response to people telling me to take the higher ground.
	Hashtag Trump has COVID.
	And it's a picture of a man flipping somebody off.
	Marley Rivera, a sports writer for ESPN, said, there is a God.
	John Fuglesang, alleged comedian and originator of the term being Fuglesang, which means somebody tells a really stupid joke about you, but then thinks they're really funny.
	I coined that term, by the way.
	John Fuglesang tweeted out, Oh, funny, funny, funny stuff.
	Okay, so some people were classy, some people were not.
	I think overall, some of the top figures were classy.
	The media, less classy.
	The media, less classy.
	Because the media are interested in the narrative above all.
	Now, again, there are a couple things that the media ought to mention at the top.
	One is you can take as many protective measures as you want.
	There's no guarantee you're not going to get COVID.
	That is just a reality of the situation.
	That doesn't mean that you should ignore those protective measures if you don't want to get COVID.
	It does mean that pretending that you have the all-sure knowledge of when people are going to get COVID and how they get COVID Then I guess you know more than virtually all of the medical professionals because we are still trying to figure out who the super spreaders are, how they spread, under what conditions this thing spreads.
	We're seven months in and we still don't know the answers to a lot of these questions, but apparently Don Lemon does.
	So CNN's Don Lemon, who is just the worst.
	I mean, he is, I was for a while wondering whether Don Lemon was the dumbest man on TV or if it was Chris Cuomo.
	It's pretty obviously Don Lemon at this point.
	So Don Lemon.
	on CNN was essentially ripping on Trump because he says that Trump had called COVID a hoax.
	Trump never called COVID a hoax.
	He did not.
	That's a lie.
	It's just not true.
	Trump said that the Democratic response to the virus, which was that the White House was totally inept and all of this, he said the media playing up the White House's bad response was a hoax.
	Okay, and you may agree with that or you may disagree with that, but he never said the virus itself is a hoax.
	I mean, go back and look at the actual comments.
	This has been fact-checked by virtually every fact-checker.
	It is not true that Trump called COVID-19 a hoax, but Don Lemon, your objective journalism expert over at CNN, he says that the president, the hoax got him, the hoax got him.
	Is this a moment of reckoning for the president and this administration?
	For all of the pretending or looking the other way, and trying to convince people otherwise of the science, for whatever reason, whether it was to make sure that he was re-elected, to make sure that he had high standing with the public, or just for whatever reason, because of the economy, is this now a moment of reckoning that Yes, this is real.
	It is not a hoax.
	Okay, no one said it was a hoax.
	This is a moment of reckoning.
	So again, the media's take here is that if Trump had just said the right things, if Trump had been super strict in what he said, then he wouldn't have gotten COVID.
	And this is part and parcel of the media's general take on COVID, which is that the only thing that you can do and receive the media's world wisdom And all of their sycophantic love is just shut everything down, right?
	This is part and parcel of the entire lockdown debate, because their view is that if you lock everything down, then you can be blamed for nothing.
	Whereas if you say that certain things should be open, or if you talk about the gradated risks of COVID, if you talk about the actual fact regarding mask wearing, which is that the evidence is somewhat mixed, given the fact that in Northern Europe they don't mask up, in Southern Europe they do mask up, and there are differential rates, that tend to benefit Northern Europe, or the fact that you actually have to have a class on how to wear a mask properly, or that different types of masks serve differently, right?
	If you mention any of that, then they will say that you are downplaying the effectiveness of masks because it's proven that if you wear a mask, it's better than if you don't wear a mask.
	Okay, well, that is true if everyone properly wears the mask, but it is not true if there are people who are improperly wearing the mask, or if they're wearing it under their nose, right?
	If you mention any of that stuff, they say you are downplaying mask wearing, because we have now conflated, and this is a deeper conversation, we have now conflated in American politics People saying true things and people inferring things from those true things.
	So if I say a fact and somebody infers something that I don't agree with from that fact, the media will hold me responsible for the inference.
	If I say something that is factual and somebody takes it too far, the media will then try to hold me responsible for the inference.
	By the way, this only works one way.
	If you're on the right, this is true.
	If somebody on the right says something and it happens to be a true thing, and then somebody takes that true thing and spins it completely out of proportion and does something crazy based on it, they will hold the right responsible for it.
	On the left, this is never true.
	On the left, you can say virtually anything you want, whether it's true or false, and the media will never hold you responsible for the baseline factual truth or falsity of the situation.
	But this is one of the things that's happened with the entire COVID discussion.
	So if Ron DeSantis in Florida says, here, by age and by preexisting condition, is the death rate on COVID?
	They'll say, ah, look at that.
	People are gonna take that, and now they're gonna be irresponsible, and that's Ron DeSantis' fault.
	Why is that Ron DeSantis' fault?
	Do we have to assume that people don't have agency?
	I mean, the basic bottom line leftist view is that people very often do not have agency.
	Their view is that only the government can mandate things.
	But this ties into how people are responding to all of this.
	Because it turns out that Trump's attitude and what he says are very often in conflict.
	People have drawn messages from Trump that Trump himself has not necessarily said.
	So I'll take a perfect example.
	We'll take a perfect example from the debate.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Let's talk for a second about some of the stuff that Trump has said because very often Trump will say something that is Fairly factual, but said in a particular manner.
	And so the media focus in on the matter rather than on the fact of what he is saying.
	Perfect example.
	Yesterday, Kyle Griffin, who's a senior producer for MSNBC's The Last Word, he tweeted out, Trump doesn't wear masks.
	Trump doesn't promote social distancing.
	White House staff don't wear masks.
	White House staff don't social distance.
	Trump holds large rallies and events where no one wears masks and no one social distances.
	Okay, so there's truth to some of this and there's untruth to some of this.
	So Trump sometimes does wear masks.
	Trump does at his rally social distance from the other people in the crowd.
	I don't know what it means to promote social distancing, right?
	He's literally said in speeches and from the White House rostrum at the press conferences that people should socially distance.
	And he has said that you should wear masks.
	One of the problems for Trump is that he has said so many things on this issue that people can sort of pick and choose from the tree.
	I'm not going to pretend that Trump has been consistent in his messaging because he is not.
	And it's that inconsistency in messaging that politically is coming back to bite him right now.
	The fact is that if Trump had said, listen, if you're under the age of 50, the threat to you is not particularly grave.
	Go out and do what you want.
	And then he had held by that.
	He said, but, Lilliton, I'm 74.
	I'm wearing a mask.
	I'm socially distancing.
	Then you live by that.
	But he's sort of been on all sides of the issue.
	So, you know, the wishy-washiness of it is kind of a problem.
	But it is not true that Trump never wears masks.
	It's not true that Trump never promotes social distancing.
	As far as White House staff not wearing masks, some White House staff do wear masks.
	Other White House staff do not wear masks.
	As far as White House staff not socially distancing, some White House staff do, some White House staff do not.
	I know many members of the White House staff.
	And as far as him holding large rallies and events where no one wears masks and no one socially distances, again, the media don't really have that much of a leg to stand on here, given the fact that they have been promoting huge open-air rallies with people not masked dancing around like idiots in the streets for months at a time.
	So there's a bit of hypocrisy there as well.
	Okay, so perfect example of the difference between Trump saying something that happens to be kind of factually true and the implication taken away from it and Trump being blamed for the implication.
	I think sometimes that's fair.
	I think sometimes that's not.
	Trump attitudinally doesn't like the mask.
	You can tell, right?
	Attitudinally, Trump is not a fan of the masking.
	He's been very wishy-washy about it from the beginning.
	Does that mean that he has overtly told people don't wear masks?
	No, he has not said that.
	But we'll take an example.
	So during the debate, here was Trump mocking Biden for wearing a mask uselessly.
	Now people are going to ignore the last word of that sentence.
	Uselessly.
	He was asked, do you wear masks?
	Why aren't you pushing masks?
	And here was Trump's response to the debate just a couple of nights ago.
	Are you questioning the efficacy of masks?
	No, I think masks are okay.
	You have to understand, if you look, I mean, I have a mask right here.
	I put a mask on, you know, when I think I need it.
	Tonight, as an example, everybody's had a test and you've had social distancing and all of the things that you have to, but I wear masks when needed.
	When needed, I wear a mask.
	Okay, let me ask.
	I don't wear masks like him.
	Every time you see him, he's got a mask.
	He could be speaking 200 feet away from me and he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen.
	Okay, people took this clip and they said, okay, that's Trump not promoting mask wearing.
	Okay, but if you actually read the text of it, he is saying, Joe Biden is over here, not wearing the mask, like 200 feet away.
	He's like 200 feet away from people when wearing a mask.
	That's very silly.
	Okay, it is silly to wear a mask if you're 200 feet away from other people.
	There's no reason to do that.
	But people took that as Trump is dismissive of masks overall.
	And this does go to the power that I think that many members of the media and many members of the left think that political figures have over people's lives.
	So people on the left believe that the reason that Joe Biden should wear a mask is because he needs to model to the American public that you need to wear a mask in all circumstances.
	And that if he is wearing a mask 200 feet away from everybody else, then you should certainly be wearing a mask in close quarters.
	Whereas Trump doesn't tend to model that behavior very well.
	There's a lot of pictures of him not wearing a mask when he is fairly close with other people.
	And he's not modeling the behavior.
	And the case up till now has been, well, he's not modeling the behavior because he's one of the most tested people on earth.
	He's surrounded by a bubble.
	And You know, that's the way it works.
	I mean, people around him are being regularly tested, presumably.
	Well, now that he's gotten that, that's come to bite him in the butt, for sure.
	But if you watch that clip, he's not saying never wear a mask.
	The media take that as he's saying never wear a mask.
	And this has become the media's talking point, is that masks are some sort of full-on guarantee.
	So here is Chris Cuomo, the other block of wood over at CNN, saying that Trump wouldn't have needed to quarantine if he and his staff wore masks all the time.
	The president may have to self-quarantine.
	That's how it should be.
	That's how it should be.
	And if she had had a mask on, and if he had had a mask on, the chance that she would be sick now... This is more about the person at the top setting the example.
	If the president had said, if he had made it mandatory in his meetings when he is in contact with her to wear a mask, Then we may not be in this situation.
	They just needed to pull a Biden.
	If he had had that mask on everywhere, nobody would be making fun of him because he's the only one who makes cracks about masks.
	Okay, so just to point out here, Chris Cuomo had this thing.
	Was Chris Cuomo not masking up?
	Right, Chris Cuomo famously had this thing.
	How'd he get it?
	His entire family, by the way.
	Got it.
	And so, the sort of celebratory nature of a lot of the media coverage of this, which is like, karma has come to get Trump.
	Karma has come to get Trump.
	So, I'll be honest with you, I think that it will have some effectiveness.
	Just politically speaking, I think it will have some effectiveness.
	Because the American public basically breaks down into three groups.
	It breaks down into a group of people who say that the virus is so serious that it's going to kill everyone.
	There are people who are sort of panicked about the virus, to the point where a 28-year-old will say, I'm not... Like, this literally happened at a local school.
	I know a lot of the parents there.
	A 28-year-old teacher who is in good health Send an email to the parents saying, I would come to school and I'd be willing to take a bullet for your kids at school, but I'm not willing to die by getting COVID from your kids.
	She's 28 and in good health.
	That's very silly.
	So there's one group of people who are taking this so seriously that they've actually moved beyond the data point.
	Then there are a group of people who are taking it so not seriously, they've actually moved beyond the data points.
	These are people who are like 70 years old, going to rallies and close contact with other people.
	They have comorbidities.
	Like, that's also not particularly smart.
	And then there are a bunch of people, I think, who are in the middle, who are just kind of cautious about this, and who don't particularly love the masking.
	They don't hate the masking.
	They just are like, okay, what do I need to do to get back to my regular life?
	Like, I take it about as seriously as I need to take it.
	And they kind of waver, day to day, on how serious this thing is, because people do emotionally tend to waver.
	When you see Tom Hanks has it and then you recover, you're like, okay, maybe it's not that bad.
	And then when you see Herman Cain had it and he died, you're like, okay, this is really, really bad, right?
	It could kill a lot of people.
	What happens to Trump personally is now fully tied up with where we go as a country on COVID, which is kind of stupid, but that's how the human brain works, unfortunately.
	The reason I say it's stupid is because public policy should not be attached to anecdotal evidence.
	Public policy should be attached to the best available data.
	Public policy should be about how you make the best policy for the greatest number of people.
	It should not be about your attitude about Trump or Trump's attitude about masks or what you take from Trump's attitude about masks.
	You're supposed to be an independent human being who's able to make their own analysis of the issues and of the data.
	That doesn't excuse people when they take things too lightly or when they take things way too seriously.
	It does mean that you as an individual, responsible human being, you ought to be looking at the data.
	And when we make public policy, we shouldn't be basing it on like, well, did Trump had a super serious case or not super serious case?
	But unfortunately, people are Very frequently dumb animals.
	We are all dumb animals.
	And we have amygdalas.
	We have fear centers.
	And so if Trump gets this thing very seriously, then the chances of future lockdowns are gonna be much greater.
	People are going to skew toward the side that I think takes it so seriously they shut down economies again.
	And if Trump has a very mild case, he's gonna be able to come out and he's gonna say, listen, the vast majority of people who get this are gonna live.
	The vast majority of people who get this are fine.
	The vast majority of people who get this are not going to die.
	I didn't die and I'm 74 and I'm okay.
	And maybe people will be like, oh, okay, well, you know, that's true.
	People tend to respond to anecdotal evidence in a way they do not to data.
	And that is just a flaw in the human brain.
	It also happens to be true that when we discuss public policy on this stuff, it is extremely political.
	So one of the tweets that was getting, one of the clips that was getting tweeted out a lot after it came out that Trump has COVID was this clip from earlier in the day where Trump said that the end of the pandemic is in sight.
	Here's what Trump had to say.
	We have reduced the fatality rate by 85% since just April.
	We're on track to develop and distribute a vaccine before the end of the year, and maybe substantially before.
	And I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight, and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.
	Okay, so he said that, right?
	He said that the end of the pandemic is in sight, we have vaccine development, we're doing all sorts of therapeutics.
	He's not wrong about that.
	He is not wrong.
	I think the end of the pandemic is in sight.
	I think most scientists would say the end of the pandemic is in sight.
	Now, that timeline may be, like, first quarter of 2021, or maybe end of the year.
	But to pretend that we are closer to the beginning than we are to the end, I think, at this point, is probably You know, anti-evidence.
	People are taking that as evidence Trump isn't taking it seriously.
	That's not right.
	Again, public policy is not about whether Trump personally gets COVID.
	Just like the death rate on COVID has nothing to do with what personally happens to me.
	People's unbelievable misunderstanding of the data is really a problem.
	If I were to get COVID and God forbid I were to die, people would immediately go, well, it must be very, very dangerous for people my age.
	It is not very dangerous for people my age.
	I just happened to be the unlucky dude who drew the black marble out of the bag of 1,001 marbles, 1,000 of which were white.
	That does not mean that it's super dangerous for everybody else in my age cohort.
	But unfortunately, people tend to jump to that.
	So people ignore the public policy in favor of the personal.
	It also happens to be true that many Democrats do not take the masking particularly seriously.
	Yesterday, the Democratic Pennsylvania governor and a state rep were caught on a hot mic joking about masks being political theater, which is always a good look.
	By the way, it is true that when Trump has criticized some forms of mask wearing, I don't know about you.
	Everybody's now wearing masks.
	I live in L.A., at least for the moment, and everybody in L.A.
	is wearing masks.
	Many of them are wearing masks improperly.
	Like, you actually have to have a class in PPE when you are a doctor.
	My wife took one.
	You actually have to be told how to don PPE properly.
	If you take a mask, a cloth mask, and you futz around with your hands with it, and then you put it in your pocket, and then when you're drinking or eating, and then you put it back on your face, and you've been eating with your hands, right?
	Is the mask still clean?
	No, right?
	Have you actually done anything to prevent the spread of the disease?
	You may have actually increased the chance that you gave yourself the disease by putting your hands directly on the mask and then breathing it in, right?
	Like, there are serious problems with that.
	That does not mean that you shouldn't wear a mask.
	It means you should be careful in how you treat the mask.
	But people are conflating the ideal with the reality, and that isn't particularly true.
	And here's the thing, a lot of Democrats even know this, right?
	Here's the Pennsylvania Democratic governor joking about mask theater.
	So Wendy, I'm going to take my mask off when I speak.
	I will as well.
	I'm waiting so that we can do a little political theater.
	Okay.
	So that it's on camera.
	Okay, so there they are joking about, you know, I'm going to take the mask off as soon as I'm off camera, but when I'm on camera, I'm going to put the mask back on.
	So much of the, so people on the left will say, okay, yeah, but the virtue signaling is good because you're signaling to people that they should wear the mask.
	It's also possible that the virtue signaling is overwrought because it's now suggesting that people should wear masks in some of the dumbest possible ways.
	Speaking of virtue signaling in the dumbest possible ways, the Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot, she actually went to a press conference dressed as what she called the Rona Fighter.
	Like, for Halloween or something.
	This is the mayor of Chicago dressed as Rona Fighter.
	My God.
	This is our politics.
	Good times.
	It says Rona Destroyer on her cape.
	Okay, can I just point out that Chicago has had a pretty serious bout of coronavirus.
	The Chicago COVID numbers are not particularly good.
	Okay, and they've been kind of steady right now, but they are slowly increasing.
	And there she is posing with a Clorox poster around her neck.
	I'm sorry, everything is stupid.
	Everything is incredibly stupid.
	It just is.
	Speaking of people following the science on the left, in a second, we're gonna get to California, which has decided on standards for reopening.
	And the standards on reopening, shall we say, are mildly anti-scientific.
	When I say mildly anti-scientific, I mean wildly anti-scientific.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Okay, in just a second, we'll get to more science of the left.
	Again, whenever somebody on the right gets this thing, it's like, oh, it's a reflection of the right's anti-scientific viewpoints.
	If somebody on the left gets it, it's like, well, we did the best we could, and then we got it.
	It's because we love science that we got it.
	Or because we love racial justice that we got it.
	The gap is pretty stark.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
	First, I have to mention a few things.
	One, we have another Sunday special coming up.
	You don't want to miss a great episode.
	This weekend, Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight comes on the show to talk about his acclaimed acting career, his journey to conservatism, and an inside look into being a conservative in Hollywood.
	Head on over to dailywire.com or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
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	Now again, the differential media narrative here is that if somebody on the left gets it, it's despite all of their best efforts.
	If somebody on the right gets it, it's because they are uniquely morally deserving of getting it.
	So when the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, got it, and he is one of the virtue signaling maskers, right?
	I mean, he's somebody who masks up, like, all the time.
	Then it was like, well, he did the best he could, and COVID just got him anyway, right?
	He just got it.
	When Trump does it, it's like, well, you know, it's because Trump's evil.
	It's because Trump's evil.
	And it's because he doesn't follow science.
	Here's the problem.
	So much of what we are talking about is not science.
	Nobody's talking about science when they talk about the anecdotal situation in which people get this thing.
	How do we know that this isn't science?
	Let's talk about public policy for a second.
	Because we talk politics.
	I'm far less interested in the individuals who get COVID on a public policy level than the public policies we enact.
	Here's what California is doing on public policy.
	You ready for this stupidity?
	So, according to the Los Angeles Times, California's larger counties will not be permitted to reopen their economies further unless they reduce coronavirus infections in the hardest-hit places where the poor, black people, Latinos, and Pacific Islanders live.
	Under a new state requirement for reopening during the pandemic, counties with more than 106,000 residents must bring infections down in these places and invest heavily there in testing, contact tracing, outreach, and providing means for infected people to isolate.
	LA is one county sure to be affected along with others in Southern California.
	The measure is designed to ensure that test positivity rates in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods do not significantly exceed a county's overall rate, a disparity that has been widespread during the pandemic.
	So in other words, if there is one section of the city where nobody has it, and there's a section of the city where a lot of people have it for a variety of reasons, including that poverty tends to be a sort of comorbidity with this thing.
	People are living in closer quarters.
	People are not masking as much.
	There's also significant comorbidity, racial comorbidities.
	And this exists, by the way, not just in the United States, it exists in Europe as well.
	People of color have been dying at a higher rate of this thing in Europe than they have white people in Europe.
	And we're still trying to discover the reasons why.
	Some of those reasons may include other comorbidities that are not evenly spread across the races.
	Like, for example, diabetes or obesity.
	There have been some possibilities that link this to, for example, genetic predisposition to sickle cell anemia.
	What this does suggest is that now they're going to take the section of the city that has no cases, and they're going to shut it down out of a misguided sense of equity, right?
	That now, if you have a section of the city, you have Beverly Hills, right?
	And Beverly Hills has no cases.
	And then you have South Central Los Angeles, and it has many cases.
	You're gonna shut down both of them because it is unfair that Beverly Hills doesn't have enough cases, while South Central has too many cases.
	Is that science in any way?
	You're going to shut down the entire economy and deprive people of their livelihoods and their jobs?
	And by the way, the ability for people in South Central to work, because many of those people work for companies that are owned by people who live in Beverly Hills.
	You're going to shut down the entire system because of racial inequalities?
	Seriously, like the entire system you're going to shut down?
	Makes perfect sense.
	Makes perfect sense.
	According to the state's acting public health officer, Dr. Erica Pan, our entire state has come together to redouble our efforts to reduce the devastating toll COVID-19 has had on our Latino, Black, and Pacific Islander communities.
	Look, we should be expending resources wherever there is a problem, regardless of race and regardless of income level.
	No question.
	We should be trying to bring down the positivity rates everywhere.
	But you're suggesting we now lock down perfectly healthy areas because there are other areas that are perfectly unhealthy and the healthy areas tend to be whiter and the unhealthy areas tend to be more minority.
	So we're going to punish the white people for not having enough COVID is basically the idea here, which is totally crazy.
	That's totally crazy.
	And if it were the reverse, I would be similarly offended because this is stupid.
	It's the exact same thing as saying that everybody who's 20 has to stay home because a bunch of people who are 80 might die from this thing.
	Okay, how about this?
	How about we just don't have people who are 20 in contact with people who are 80 for a little while?
	How about that?
	Like, there are plenty of ways that you have to look at how this disease pl- like, does this have any- is this following the science?
	We hear science, science, science, and then nobody actually wants to follow the science.
	One of the reasons this thing has become such a mess is because nobody actually cares about the science.
	You'll have Democrats joking about masking as political theater, totally fine because they're good hearted.
	You'll have states that are locking down when they have essentially zero deaths.
	And the way the media report this stuff is completely irresponsible.
	Earlier this week, NBC News was talking about Manhattan.
	And they said, well, you know, all of New York State had 11 deaths yesterday.
	And sure, that's way down from the 800 deaths that they were experiencing on a daily basis back in March and April.
	But it is higher than the six that they were experiencing just a couple of weeks ago.
	It's like, what?
	Those are not equivalent statements.
	The difference between 11 and 800 is not the difference between six and 11.
	It's just the lack of willingness to discuss the science is one of the indicators here of how political this is.
	That doesn't mean that Trump can't have done better or shouldn't have done better.
	His messaging on COVID has been one of the serious shortcomings of his presidency and has come back to bite him in very severe ways.
	So what should Trump do from here?
	This is really one of the questions.
	What should Trump do from here on in?
	So, here's my suggestion.
	On a political level, the president's only hope at re-election at this point, and put aside the health level, right?
	We're all praying for the health of the president and his wife.
	If something goes wrong, it's obviously a far bigger worry than the politics of this.
	But we do have a presidential election coming up in a month.
	So, if you are President Trump, what do you do?
	The answer is you put a camera on you and you keep it on you basically full-time.
	If you are the president of the United States at this point, you should welcome the American public into the experience of COVID because people are taking it as a litmus test for how seriously we should do lockdowns.
	Again, people are not looking at the data.
	People are not looking at the science.
	People are just following their guts on this sort of stuff.
	What Trump should do is he should welcome the cameras in.
	He should say, here I am at my desk upstairs quarantining.
	There's my camera guy.
	He's got the mask on.
	And he is taking a photograph of me, and as you can see, I am not dead, nor am I dying.
	And he should do this basically every hour on the hour until he is cleared of COVID.
	Because otherwise, what's gonna happen is we're gonna get the ramped-up media speculation.
	Today, we had ramped-up media speculation that Nancy Pelosi may end up President of the United States.
	Mike Pence and his wife are negative.
	He's the sitting Vice President of the United States.
	Like, what are you guys even talking about?
	People were saying, what if we have to invoke the 25th Amendment?
	We're not there yet, guys.
	Again, the president has not been incapacitated.
	At this point, apparently, he has a mild cold.
	We'll see where it goes.
	If the president emerges from this thing in five, six, four days, and he says, listen, guys, you know, the symptoms are gone.
	I feel fine.
	This is the vast majority of cases.
	It might be an actually good reminder to the American public, again, that statistically speaking, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people do not die of this thing.
	I keep repeating the stats because I think the stats are way more important than any anecdotal evidence you bring.
	Anecdotal evidence is just anecdotal evidence.
	Unfortunately, again, people tend to follow anecdotal evidence where they do not follow the actual evidence.
	Which is...
	Too bad.
	I mean, too bad for sure.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden, I mean, this campaign has fallen out exactly as you would want to for Joe Biden.
	Put aside the COVID stuff, right?
	I'm not suggesting that Biden is wishing COVID on Trump or anything like that.
	He already issued what I said earlier in the program.
	It was a very nice statement about President Trump and the First Lady.
	But if you are Joe Biden, imagine that you're 78 years old, that COVID is out there, you don't want to be out in public, and you literally just get to sit in the basement and everybody leaves you alone.
	And that's your campaign.
	Your campaign is literally just sit around watching old episodes of Matlock.
	That's exactly what Joe Biden is doing these days.
	And he's able to get away with it.
	Joe Biden yesterday was finally pressed in an interview on court packing.
	He avoided the question three separate times.
	Will there be any blowback?
	Of course not.
	You dodged Chris Wallace's question on that last night about packing the court.
	So let me ask you, do you support the idea of packing the court?
	I'm not dodging the question.
	What I'm doing is staying focused.
	Do you continue to support leaving the court at nine justices?
	What I'm not going to do is play Trump's game.
	If you're president, would you seek to increase the number of U.S.
	Supreme Court nominees?
	You know, that's exactly what they want me to talk about, so we don't talk about how they're violating the Constitution now.
	Absolutely not.
	Absolutely not.
	He's been able to get away with suggesting that he doesn't have to answer a question about whether he means to completely destroy a brand new government.
	He's been able to get away with that because all the focus is on Trump.
	You know, maybe for the Trump campaign, this is a bit of a blessing in disguise.
	Maybe because he's relegated to, you know, not being on the campaign trail and not doing things.
	Take away his Twitter and he'll spend the next 10 days, you know, getting healthy.
	And everybody can actually focus in on the fact that we have another candidate for president of the United States who refuses to denounce Antifa.
	And who has spent the last several weeks dodging questions as to whether he plans to pack the Supreme Court.
	Okay, meanwhile, the media continue their mission to apparently be as crappy at their jobs as humanly possible.
	Remember that one time when the New York Times op-ed editor was fired for the great sin of printing an op-ed by Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, suggesting that we might want to use military force to quell insurrectionists inside major cities?
	Remember that a bunch of woke staffers of the New York Times said, this is a threat to me.
	It's a threat to me as a person of color that we would print this op-ed.
	And so they fired the op-ed editor.
	Remember this?
	Well, on Thursday, the New York Times published an op-ed authored by Regina Ip, a Hong Kong official the paper once described as Beijing's enforcer, calling for Hong Kong to accept its relation with China as destiny.
	Ip writes in the pages of the New York Times, no amount of outcry, condemnation, or sanctions over the Chinese government's purported encroachment in Hong Kong's affairs will alter the fact that Hong Kong was part of China and that its destiny is intertwined with the mainland.
	She said the West tends to glorify people as defenders of Hong Kong's freedoms, but they've done great harm to the city by going against its constitutional order and stirring up chaos and disaffection toward our motherland.
	She is a longtime proponent, of course, of the Chinese Communist Party.
	Hip resigned in 2003 as Hong Kong's Secretary of Security because she was, quote, widely seen as Beijing's enforcer, sending police and immigration officers to perform sometimes politically controversial raids.
	So the New York Times just ran straight Chinese propaganda.
	I'm waiting for the woke staffers to really get on top of this.
	I need to hear from the woke staffers.
	Are they upset about the violation of the rights of Hong Kong citizens?
	Oh no, they have nothing to say about that?
	There's a giant shock.
	I just can't believe it.
	Meanwhile, however, they are definitely on top of the main narrative they want to push.
	So the narrative that they will not let go of is that Trump is a vicious racist.
	This cropped up again during the debate, when of course there was this exchange with Chris Wallace in which Chris Wallace asked him to to condemn white supremacy and right wing militias.
	And he said, sure.
	And then Chris Wallace said again, are you willing to do that?
	And he said, sure.
	And then Biden was like, do it.
	And Chris Wallace was like, do it.
	And he said, what do you want me to condemn?
	I feel like I just condemned that.
	And then Biden was like, the Proud Boys, who by the way, are not a white supremacist group.
	And then, according to CNN.
	And then Trump says, stand back and stand by.
	And people took that to mean that he was somehow encouraging the Proud Boys.
	My favorite thing about this is the media taking the Proud Boys so seriously, that the Proud Boys, who are a troll group, okay?
	They are a group of trolls.
	If you are not familiar with the Proud Boys, half of their media is just trolling, right?
	They're members of the sort of alt-right and they're sort of on the borderline between the two.
	And what they do online is troll.
	So they took that stand back and stand by slogan and they put it on shirts.
	And then the media were like, If Trump had really discouraged them, would they be putting it on shirts?
	Sure, they'll put anything on shirts as a prank.
	I'm also bemused by the media's new standard, which is that if someone expresses support for a politician, the politician is now responsible for that support.
	So I hope that next we get to reanalyze the congressional baseball shooting in which a Bernie Sanders supporter literally attempted to assassinate Republican members of Congress over health care.
	Okay, but in any case, the narrative was that Trump has not condemned white supremacy, as I've been saying over and over for days now.
	That's not true.
	Even in 2017, when I thought that he was being deliberately vague about the alt-right, when I criticized him very heavily for, in his original statement, saying that there were bad people on many sides on many sides without any explicit reference to white supremacy, He corrected that the next day, and he explicitly said that the good people did not include neo-Nazis and white supremacists, who I condemn totally.
	That is a direct quote from Donald Trump circa 2017.
	Okay, so, since then, he's made multiple statements condemning white supremacy, like a lot of them, and the media refused to accept the answer.
	They refuse it.
	They are so committed to the narrative that Trump is a racist that they literally... We're now playing Kathy Newman with Jordan Peterson.
	If you've never seen this exchange, Kathy Newman is a supposed reporter for the BBC, and she's interviewing Jordan Peterson.
	And she says to Jordan Peterson, so basically, you're a sexist.
	And Jordan's like, no.
	He says, so what you really mean to say is you're a sexist.
	And Jordan's like, no.
	And she means, and she says, well, by no, I think what you really mean is yes.
	And Jordan's like, no.
	Okay, well, that is the entire media declaring Trump a racist.
	Trump will be like, I condemn white supremacy.
	I condemn it totally.
	Like, why won't you condemn white supremacy?
	And he'll be like, well, no, but I literally just did that one second ago.
	Like, no, you didn't.
	We don't believe you.
	That was one second ago.
	I don't hear you doing it right now, do I?
	That was at least one second ago.
	One second ago was in the past.
	We are now in the present.
	Will you condemn it right now?
	And he'll say, sure.
	He'll say, that's not a condemnation.
	That happened one second ago.
	I want to hear you do it right now.
	Okay, perfect example of this.
	John Roberts of Fox yesterday, he's in the press room with Kayleigh McEnany.
	And he asks her about Trump condemning white supremacy.
	And here's Kayleigh McEnany's response.
	And then, I mean, this is an insane exchange.
	It's just, it's crazy.
	It's just crazy towns.
	As the person who speaks for the president, does the president denounce white supremacism and groups that espouse it in all their forms?
	This has been answered yesterday by the president himself, the day before by the president himself.
	On the debate stage, the president was asked this.
	He said, sure, three times.
	Yesterday, he was point blank asked, do you denounce white supremacy?
	And he said, I've always denounced any form of that.
	I can go back.
	I can read for you, in August 2019, in one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.
	In August of 2017, racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.
	I have an entire list of these quotes that I can go through with you.
	He has condemned white supremacy more than any president in modern history.
	Just to clear it up this morning, can you, naming it, make a declarative statement that you did not that the president denounces. I just did.
	I mean, it's unbelievable.
	She literally reads him a statement with a bunch of statements with Trump condemning white supremacy.
	He's like, yeah, but will you do it right now?
	And she's like, like, I literally just did that.
	Because what he wants her to do, of course, is he wants her to say the president unequivocally condemns white supremacy.
	And then he'll say, well, why doesn't he just say so?
	And she'll be like, well, here's a list of quotes.
	But why isn't he doing it right now?
	Now's in the present, guys.
	OK, then Roberts goes on national TV and then he gets visibly angry at Trump not condemning white supremacy, even though Trump literally condemned it during the debate, condemned it the day after and has condemned it at this point, I believe, about 100 times since Charlottesville.
	Here is John Roberts getting visibly angry again on TV to the delight of the folks over at CNN.
	For all of you on Twitter who were hammering me for asking that question, I don't care!
	Because it's a question that needs to be asked, and clearly, the President's Republican colleagues, a mile away from here, are looking for an answer for it too.
	So stop deflecting, stop blaming the media.
	I'm tired of it.
	I'm so tired of it.
	Nobody was deflecting.
	That's not a deflection.
	Crappy reporter from Vox, Erin Ruppar, said she's dancing around the question.
	There's no dancing around the question.
	They're so interested in ignoring what Biden is doing that they are willing to just create this narrative out of a whole cloth.
	And by the way, let's not pretend that this isn't a little bit pre-planned, this entire narrative.
	Dean Beckett, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in the aftermath of Russiagate that he was deliberately taking staff and staffing them up on the racism angle.
	This is in 2019.
	And in shock of shocks, right before the election, we were going to get six months of racism discussion.
	Who could have predicted such a thing?
	Kayleigh McEnany yesterday rightly pointed out, you know, you guys have been paying an awful lot of attention to Trump supposedly not condemning white supremacists, which he has done, or militia groups, which Trump again did yesterday.
	I noticed that what you're not paying any attention to is Joe Biden legitimately and clearly refusing to condemn Antifa in any way while Antifa has conducted acts of violence in major American cities across the country for months on end.
	She's, of course, totally right about this.
	Here is Kayleigh McEnany.
	Something else lost upon the media is the absolute turning of a blind eye to Antifa.
	Carrying the water for Democrats, the media apparently agrees with Jerry Nadler that Antifa violence is a myth.
	In August Senate hearings, Democrats refused to condemn Antifa.
	Again, no journalistic curiosity here.
	Ideas do not target police officers.
	Ideas do not burn down buildings.
	Ideas do not kill innocent Americans.
	Organizations do.
	And Democrats should condemn the shameful group in the same manner President Trump continues to condemn.
	I mean, she, of course, is completely, completely right about this.
	She's completely right about this.
	OK, but that is not going to change the media's math here.
	It just isn't.
	So Joe Biden, of course, went on this rant yesterday about this.
	Joe Biden showed off the Proud Boys logo.
	By the way, it was Joe Biden who brought up the Proud Boys in the first place.
	Well, the Proud Boys didn't think that.
	the Proud Boys exactly what they want, which is insane levels of publicity that they never would have gotten without Joe Biden bringing them up.
	Because again, the left's whole tactic here when it comes to the riots in America's major cities is to somehow swivel this. So it's the fault of the white supremacists and the right wing and all, despite the fact that it's been riots in major American cities driven predominantly by the left. So here is Joe Biden touting Proud Boys merch yesterday. This is good stuff. Well, the Proud Boys didn't think that. Go online.
	This is the says the proud boys.
	That's their symbol, right?
	It says stand back and stand by.
	Nobody has ever, ever, ever, ever sent that kind of message in American history.
	Nobody.
	And it's simply wrong.
	Okay, by the way, Joe Biden did not call him on it in the debate because Joe Biden did not actually believe that's what Trump was saying.
	And if we are now going to quote the trolling statements of members of the Proud Boys as though they are serious analysts of politics, then we're going to have to wonder exactly why Richard Spencer declared himself a Joe Biden supporter a little bit earlier this year.
	Also, I was told, by the way, that Donald Trump does not condemn white supremacists or condemn the Proud Boys.
	Here he was yesterday condemning the white supremacists and condemning the Proud Boys.
	I have to say, I've said it many times, and let me be clear again, I condemn the KKK.
	I condemn all white supremacists.
	I condemn the Proud Boys.
	I don't know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.
	But he should condemn also Antifa.
	Antifa is a horrible group of people.
	But apparently he's unwilling to condemn them.
	This is gonna be the narrative, unless the narrative, of course, is that Trump deserves the COVID that he has gotten today.
	Meanwhile, how vicious are the media?
	They're going after Melania Trump, too.
	I mean, imagine if anybody had leaked audio of Michelle Obama, like private audio of Michelle Obama during the Obama administration.
	You think the media would have given that at the time, would they?
	Or would they have said, she's off limits, she's the first lady, she wasn't elected, she has nothing to do with anything.
	Doesn't matter.
	Now they're very excited because an ex-East Wing advisor made audio.
	I mean, that's true friendship, is an advisor who makes audio recordings of you, as we learned during the Monica Lewinsky days.
	Here is a member of, at least their shoes, making recordings of purported, you know, politically relevant activity by the President of the United States himself.
	In this particular case, Melania is the First Lady.
	And now we're getting all these leaked recordings of Melania.
	And they're supposed to make Melania look bad.
	The media are miscovering them.
	They don't actually make Melania look bad.
	Here's Melania defending the treatment of immigrant children, and this apparently is supposed to be very bad.
	Here's Melania.
	All these kids that I met, they are here in the shelters because they were brought by it through coyotes.
	The people were trafficking, and that's why they put them in jail.
	And the kids that they go in shelters, and the way they take care of them, They even said, the kids, they say, wow, I will have my own bed, I will sleep on the bed, I will have a cabinet for my clothes.
	It's so sad to hear it, but they didn't have that in their own country.
	Okay, so that is apparently her being unsympathetic.
	I'm confused as to how that's her being unsympathetic.
	But again, the media are willing to run with any anti-Trump narrative, including anti-Trump narratives that hit Melania for some odd reason.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here on Monday for all of the latest updates.
	Again, have everybody who has COVID-19 in your thoughts and prayers this weekend.
	It was hard to imagine this news cycle could have gotten any crazier, but God apparently decided to dump out all the crazy in 2020, which means I would hope that 2021 might be slightly calmer, since maybe he's exhausted the supply.
	If not, well, I don't know what to tell you.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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