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Oct. 5, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:33
The Covid Botchery | Ep. 1108
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President Trump's communications team can't set the record straight on the president's health, Trump takes an ill-advised ride around the hospital, and Democrats try to conceal their glee as they politically maneuver.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Stand up for your digital rights.
Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben.
We'll get to all of the news in just a moment, but the news may have you thinking these days a little bit about your health.
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OK, so first, let's start with the state of the race, because thank God it looks like the president is going to be fine.
It looks like he's going to be totally OK.
We'll watch the health as it progresses over the course of the next week.
We'll get to his health condition in just a moment, because it turns out that it's really more about the sort of topsy-turvy comms of it all, the communications of it all, over the weekend, rather than the president's actual health.
But the state of the race seems to be breaking very strongly in Joe Biden's direction.
That is not a great shock.
After President Trump's very bizarre debate performance last week, and then after his COVID diagnosis, you would expect that the polls would begin to open A fair amount.
And as you see from the new Wall Street Journal NBC News poll, this is exactly what you see.
Joe Biden now leads the president 53 to 39 among registered voters in the new poll.
Now, registered voters isn't really what you're looking for.
Really, you're looking for likely voters.
That is a large lead, however, for Biden.
He has increased the lead from an 8-point advantage last month to a 14-point lead today.
That came just before Trump tested positive for COVID, which of course is bad news for Trump.
The survey actually found that the individual news event, the debate, was having a material effect on Trump's political standing, at least for the moment.
One of the reasons, again, was because Trump sort of reinforced the fact that he was at the center of the race.
As I have literally been saying for years at this point, if this race is a referendum on Trump, he's going to lose.
If this race is a referendum on Biden and the radicalism of the Democrats, then maybe the Democrats lose.
But there are certain areas where Trump is really starting to trail heavily.
He was always trailing among women.
In this particular survey, he's trailing 60 to 33 among women.
More importantly, among elderly people, he's really dropping in terms of his level of support.
And he won elderly voters last time.
Right now, he's losing elderly voters pretty significantly.
And even in this poll, which was before Trump got COVID, the poll showed that 52% of Americans believed that Biden would be better at handling COVID, 52 to 35.
So, all of this is bad news for Republicans, obviously.
It's bad news for the Senate.
The worse the president performs, if it's a close election and he loses, maybe the Republicans hold the Senate.
Right now, Republicans, in order to hold the Senate, need to hold five of eight contested seats.
Right now, that looks pretty dicey.
They would need to hold, among others, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina.
A lot of very, very contested seats.
A lot of hotly-fraud seats right there.
So we'll see how all of this turns out.
It is likely that the president's poll numbers are going to drop further in the immediate aftermath of the COVID diagnosis, specifically because there is a poll from ABC News Ipsos that shows that nearly three in four people think that Trump did not take the appropriate precautions regarding COVID, which again is not a shock considering the kind of rhetoric he puts out there.
As I pointed out last week after the COVID diagnosis, what the government has done is not the same thing as what Trump expresses when he is number one on the stump and number two in his sort of general attitude.
Whenever he talks about masks, for example, he'll say things like, Okay, there's a way to talk about masks that shows that you take them seriously, and then there's a way to talk about them that shows that you don't take them particularly seriously.
Two things can be true at once.
One, Trump can have handled his own rhetoric on COVID in a very bad way.
And two, the media are completely insane, right?
Both of these things are absolutely true, which brings us to this weekend.
So I had the wonderful experience of not being online during this weekend, which honestly, it was great.
And one of the reasons it was great is because I missed all of the chaos and discombobulation.
See, I came off my Jewish holiday late last night.
And my first thing was, okay, is Trump okay?
And I checked, he was okay.
And I thought, okay, well, that's the news.
No, wrong I am, because we live inside a reality TV show, and the only thing that matters is how the media cover what Trump is doing today and what Trump is doing today.
And so what you got over the weekend is really in microcosm, the last four years of the news cycle, which is Trump does a bunch of things, some of which are good, and some of which are tremendously ill-advised, and the media treat all of them individually as the end of the world.
And when you come away at the end, Trump's basically okay, the media's basically okay, everything's basically okay, right?
That was the story of the weekend.
Nonetheless, two things can be true.
Once, there was a botchery in terms of exactly how this was handled from the White House, without a doubt.
And also, the media decided to turn everything, even stuff that was pre-approved with the health professionals, they decided to turn everything into some sort of crazy scandal.
Okay, so let's begin with early on in the weekend.
So on Friday, President Trump cuts an 18-second video just showing that he's okay.
Then he proceeds to get on Marine One, and then he flies to the hospital.
It is worth pointing out at this point that Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post says, why is he getting in a helicopter?
Why doesn't he just take a car?
Probably it's because he's super sick, so he should take a car.
The relevance of the car will become apparent in just a moment.
Okay, so then, on Saturday, President Trump puts out another video, and this one is a four-minute video, because there are questions about the 18-second video.
Is that all he could do?
Right, how sick was he?
So on Saturday, he puts out a second video, in which he speaks for four minutes, and he talks about how he's going to beat this thing, and he's learning about COVID the hard way.
And frankly, he looks, you know, a fair bit better than he did on Friday.
It's been a very interesting journey.
I learned a lot about COVID.
I learned it by really going to school.
This is the real school.
This isn't the, let's read the book school.
And I get it and I understand it.
And it's a very interesting thing.
I'm going to be letting you know about it.
In the meantime, we love the USA and we love what's happening.
Thank you.
Okay, so obviously he doesn't sound bad there.
I mean, he looks like he's pretty high energy, kind of typical Trump.
He looks like he's getting through this thing.
And the media went crazy because, oh my god, it looks like he's signing a blank paper.
First of all, it's not clear the paper is blank.
Number two, like...
He might be dying, guys.
As far as you know at this point, he could be dying.
So that seems like that is a last priority.
They also went crazy because there are two pictures of him that were released.
One of them, he's wearing a jacket.
One of them, he is not wearing a jacket.
And they're like, he took those two minutes apart!
And then he pretended that that was him doing work all day long.
Okay, seriously, it was amazing.
Over the weekend, members of the media were like, you know, other people, other presidents have lied about their state of health in the past.
Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK.
I've seen presidents lie about their health in the past, but they're good at it.
Well, no, the difference is that back then, the media were actually complicit in lying about the health of the president of the United States when they felt that it had national security implications.
Here, they're obviously trying to pick apart the health state of President Trump based on whether he is signing a blank sheet of paper or not.
Okay, so that was Saturday.
Okay, then, on Sunday, as we will see, President Trump decided, you know, it's Sunday.
Let's go for a drive.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So it was a Sunday and the president was feeling better.
And so he decided it was time for a drive.
So he released another video in which he said, guys, you know what?
I'm missing all y'all.
And sure, I have a window right here and I could just like go there and open it up and just wave to everybody like Ronald Reagan after he got shot in 1980.
But instead, I need to drive around in a car.
He's going riding in his automobile.
Okay, so here is the video of President Trump riding around in his car.
There he is waving. He's wearing a mask inside the car and you have a bunch of Trump supporters outside cheering.
Okay, everybody in the media went totally crazy about this, and you knew they would, right?
You knew they would, which is why, was this like a wonderful idea on its face?
No, I mean, if you're sick, the way you are supposed to be sick with COVID is you're supposed to quarantine.
Quarantining means you're not supposed to do stuff like this, right?
Now, again, Jennifer Rubin, who five minutes before was like, why didn't he take a car to the hospital?
Now she's like, why is he even in a car at all?
He should get back on Marine One!
Okay, but the rest of the media, again, decided to go absolutely bananas over this thing.
Now, again, for the thousandth time, two things can be true at once.
Is it a good idea to get in a vehicle and drive around in the vehicle while you have COVID?
The general answer is no.
It is not a good idea to do this, right?
We all made fun of Chris Cuomo when he had COVID, and then he decided to jet set out to his second property and check the place out while he had COVID.
But is it also true that the president is likely working with medical professionals when he decides to do this?
Of course that's true.
But it doesn't matter.
Our Twitter medical professionals decide to go absolutely nuts about this.
So Dr. James Phillips, MD, who is the Chief of Disaster Medicine at George Washington University Emergency Medicine, and he's an attending at Walter Reed, which doesn't mean he's Trump's attending.
It just means he is an attending at Walter Reed.
Walter Reed's a very large hospital.
There are many attendings, so it wouldn't be too hard to find some doctor who presumably doesn't like Trump very much.
He tweeted out, every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary presidential drive-by just now has to be quarantined for 14 days.
They might get sick.
They may die for political theater.
Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater.
This is insanity!
Okay, and then you had Dr. Liana Nguyen, who is the contributing columnist for the Washington Post and CNN medical analyst.
I believe former head of Planned Parenthood, correct?
So Deanna Nguyen, who again has her own political priors, she tweeted out, if Donald Trump were my patient in unstable condition and contagious illness, and he suddenly left the hospital to go for a car ride that endangers himself and others, I'd call security to restrain him, then perform a psychiatric evaluation to examine his decision-making capacity. Well, then you're probably not like a very good doctor because it turns out that the Walter Reed physicians cleared him to do this.
According to Catherine Herridge over at CBS, doctors okayed the president's drive by supporters.
Deputy Press Secretary tells Mark Knoller appropriate precautions were taken in the execution of this movement to protect the president and all those supporting it, including personal protective equipment cleared by the medical team as safe to do.
So apparently the Secret Service agents were not just wearing masks along with Trump.
They were also wearing goggles.
They were also wearing Like full-on gowns, basically.
They're wearing whatever personal protective equipment they needed in order to be safe.
And for all of the members of the media who are fulminating, look at Secret Service.
Secret Service being put at risk.
It's so terrible.
Again, is this a good idea by Trump?
No, it is not actually, but...
With that said, Secret Service, you guys are very, very worried about the Secret Service today.
Let me just point out that over the weekend, there were a bunch of Black Lives Matter protesters protesting, and they were doing it at the White House, which means the Secret Service is right there.
And there are videos and photos of people shouting directly in their faces, people screaming directly in their faces.
And you guys didn't have one word to say about the safety and security of the Secret Service agents.
Because apparently that's deeply necessary.
It's very necessary to have people scream without masks directly in the face of Secret Service agents, because at least they are screaming for racial justice or whatever cause of the day is.
And so, forgive me my skepticism about your motives, media, when you talk about how deeply you care about the protection of our Secret Service agents.
Then, my favorite thing, the White House Correspondents Association, they couldn't even get the message straight.
So, was it bad for Trump to go on the drive, or was it bad that he didn't invite the press to also go along with the drive?
According to The Hill, the White House Correspondents Association on Sunday blasted President Trump's brief foray out of his hospital room to wave to supporters from an SUV, calling it outrageous and criticizing the lack of transparency around the photo op.
White House Correspondents Association President Zeke Miller said in a statement, So it's terrible, terrible, terrible that Trump would go outside.
Also, he was endangering everybody.
amid a health crisis, without a protective pool president to ensure the American people know where their president is and how he is doing.
Now more than ever, the American public deserves independent coverage of the president so they can be reliably informed about his health.
So it's terrible, terrible, terrible that Trump would go outside.
Also, he was endangering everybody.
Also, why didn't we have reporters in the car with him?
So that's solid stuff right there.
Okay, so what exactly is Trump's health condition as of right now?
Apparently, he's okay.
People are trying to blow it out of proportion that he's taking a steroid.
Okay, lots of people take steroids.
I mean, seriously.
Steroids are a very, very commonly used medication.
They are safe for use in children, as designated by the FDA.
The use of a clinical steroid in order to presumably help tamp down COVID, or work on the immune system so as to tamp down COVID, that is not like the end of the world.
However, there was confusion about his condition over the weekend.
We'll get to that confusion in just a moment.
First, it now looks as though pretty much everybody around Trump has been infected with COVID.
So Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, he tested positive for COVID.
Attorney General William Barr has not tested positive for COVID, but he's gonna self-quarantine anyway, just in case for the next few days.
We also have Chris Christie being diagnosed, and Christie obviously is also in a high-risk bracket, considering that he is obviously heavily overweight.
We have a bunch of people who are at the Cleveland Clinic debate who apparently got tested and came out positive.
So, this has turned into its own little super-spreader core, which is why, again, Should the president have been downplaying the way that he did masking?
Just in his attitude.
Not even in so far as what he says, but his attitude?
No.
Should there have been at this White House Rose Garden ceremony people who were hugging each other and all up on each other even if they had already been tested?
Probably not.
None of this was kind of CDC standard.
I get it.
I get the narrative.
I do.
And again, two things can be true at once for the fifth time.
Two things can be true at once.
Botched by the White House.
Media's bad at this.
Okay, so the New York Times is looking at the use of dexamethasone to treat Trump as suggesting that he had severe COVID.
According to the New York Times, on Sunday, Trump's doctors offered rosy assessments of his condition on Sunday, but the few medical details they disclosed, including his fluctuating oxygen levels and a decision to begin treatment with a steroid drug, suggested to many infectious disease experts that he is suffering a more severe case of COVID-19 than the physicians acknowledged.
And this is where we get off into cuckoo land territory.
So now we have the New York Times and many other publications running full-scale speculation about the president's health while you have actual doctors out there speaking about the president's health.
That seems irresponsible to me.
It seems irresponsible to have Sanjay Gupta, you know, talking about the president's health condition when he couldn't even correctly diagnose Chris Cuomo.
On air, he said that Chris Cuomo had leakage into his lungs, which apparently is not even a thing.
But over the weekend, he was like, I don't trust the medical information being put out by the medical team.
Now, as we will see, there are some basis provided to this distrust by the White House communications team and the White House and the White House doctors.
Everything's a mess.
Everything's a mess.
If this White House acted professionally, it would tamp down two-thirds of the problems that have happened inside this administration easily.
That's been the problem with this administration from the very beginning.
Lots of great policy, horrible communication strategy.
Hey, here's Sanjay Gupta on CNN.
You've got to be honest.
You've got to be transparent.
And all these details matter.
I mean, he's coming out to brief the public about the president.
That's the briefing that's happening.
If you're going to do that, then you have to be absolutely honest.
And it wasn't just sort of conveying an upbeat attitude.
It was purposely misleading yesterday about a very basic issue, which is whether or not the president had been on supplemental oxygen.
Okay, and so they've taken whatever confusion came out of the White House and then painted the gloomiest possible picture.
Now, is that because many members of the media are actually kind of hoping for the gloomiest possible picture for Trump?
And it's going to be anticlimactic if Trump emerges with the V for Victory sign and then says, I just did COVID, and you know what?
It was not great, but all right.
Is that something they're going to live with?
Hmm.
We'll find out in short order because it appears the president is getting better to the disappointment of a great many blue check marks on the left.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so over the weekend, the White House team, the medical team, was not particularly I would say transparent about the health of the president of the United States.
You can see the message change over time.
So on Friday, they said originally that he was asymptomatic.
Then they said that he had mild condition.
Then they said that he had a moderate condition, according to Mark Meadows.
And then on Saturday, Dr. Sean Conley, who's the White House physician, came out publicly and he did a presser in which he kind of refused to give answers on whether Trump had received oxygen.
He has not received any supplemental oxygen.
He's not on oxygen right now.
That's right.
He has not received any at all?
He's not needed any this morning, today, at all.
Has he ever been on supplemental oxygen?
Right now, he is not on oxygen.
I know you keep saying right now, but should we read into the fact that he had been previously?
Yesterday and today, he was not on oxygen.
So he has not been on it during his COVID treatment?
He's not on oxygen right now.
Okay, so he kept saying over and over, he's not on oxygen right now.
And then Saturday morning, Sarah Cook of NBC reported that a source familiar with the president's health said, quote, the president's vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care.
We're still not on a clear path to a full recovery. And people on the right went nuts. How could Sarah Cook report this?
It's in an anonymous source.
If you're going to say something like, the president might be dying, then you probably need to source that.
Well, as it turns out, the anonymous source was, in fact, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
This is according to Jonathan Swan over at Axios.
Here was Mark Meadows on Saturday saying, oh yeah, he did actually receive oxygen, as it turns out.
Now, that doesn't mean that Conley was lying.
Conley was not lying.
Conley was doing the Bill Clinton is, is in present tense, and was in past tense, right?
He's saying, well, you know, right now, like this very moment, he's not on oxygen, but...
And here's Mark Meadows getting rid of the narrative.
He had a fever and his blood oxygen level had dropped rapidly.
And yet, in typical style, this president was up and walking around.
Okay, so there you have Mark Meadows undercutting the original narrative by Conley that Trump was not on oxygen.
He says, no, actually he did have oxygen, actually a couple of times.
So then on Sunday, Conley was asked about why he didn't actually just give real information.
Now it was pretty obvious again from that original clip that he was being studiously, I'd say he was studiously avoiding saying that Trump had been on oxygen.
So then on Sunday he comes out and he says, I was trying to convey an upbeat attitude.
I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, that his course of illness has had.
I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction.
And in doing so, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true.
And so here I have it.
The fact of the matter is that he's doing really well.
Okay, so the last thing is the one that matters, but is this a good comms strategy?
No.
And as it turns out, it was a comms strategy that was designed at the top as per our usual arrangement.
When professionals actually do the comms, things turn out okay.
When President Trump does the comms, things do not turn out okay, meaning the communications strategy.
I mean, this puts now the White House doctor in a position of not really being able to be believed.
And Sunday Conley was asked about this at the White House.
He was asked, you know, how are we supposed to believe you when you basically would not give us information yesterday?
Yesterday you told us that the president was in great shape, had been in good shape and fever free for the previous 24 hours.
Minutes after your press conference, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters that the president's vitals were very concerning over the past 24 hours.
Simple question for the American people.
Whose statements about the president's health should we believe?
So the chief and I work side by side, and I think his statement was misconstrued.
What he meant was that 24 hours ago, when he and I were checking on the president, that there was that momentary episode of the high fever and that temporary drop in the saturation.
Okay, so the way that they actually ended up clearing this up is by saying that, originally, the timeline had been conveyed wrong.
It wasn't over the prior 24 hours.
It wasn't over the prior 48 hours.
It was over the prior 24 hours.
People on the left have been speculating that Trump tested positive as early as Wednesday.
It turns out that that is not the case, as far as we know.
It turns out, actually, that Trump tested positive, I guess, as of Thursday.
And then, after he tested positive in a rapid test on Thursday, He went on Sean Hannity's show, and while he was on Hannity's show, he didn't then convey that he had tested positive because he was waiting for the more certain PCR test to come back.
Now, that's not lying, right?
I mean, if you test preliminarily positive in a rapid COVID test and you're president of the United States, and you are now waiting for another test to come back, and somebody asks you and you say, I don't know yet, that's not lying.
Or if you just don't volunteer the information, that's not really lying either.
It's not great.
Like, if you're Trump, probably just cancel the interview with Hannity.
Like, why wouldn't you cancel the interview?
But again, com strategy run from the top.
The great lie of the Trump White House for a long time is that Trump is a communications genius.
He is a branding genius.
He is not a communications genius.
These are two different things.
A branding genius is somebody who knows how to put together a pithy slogan, somebody who knows to put together a pithy pitch.
A communications genius is somebody who knows how to actually message complex ideas into the simple and how to be transparent enough with the American public that you gain their trust.
And Trump is not a com strategy genius.
He is a very, very good branding guy.
That divide has never been greater than it is right now.
Now, with that said, the media, again, have lost their ever-loving minds over all of this.
We've been told that him riding in a car literally is murdering people.
We've been told that his doctors are openly lying to the American public.
How can we trust them?
To the point where we even had people like Joy Reid suggesting Trump may not even have COVID.
Maybe this is just all a sympathy play.
Mm-hmm.
She said she was getting those sorts of texts from her friends.
That lady has a show on MSNBC.
We'll get to more of this in just one second, but it does point to a shortcoming in the president's personality that's being reflected in the polls, and it is common between the debate and between the COVID treatment handling.
We'll get to that in one second.
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And so, President Trump apparently was running the comms strategy here, top down.
According to the New York Times, he said, I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction.
This is Dr. Conley, and in doing so, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true.
Alyssa Farrah, who actually is very good at her job, she's a White House comms advisor, she conceded Dr. Conley had been speaking to an audience of one during a Saturday briefing, quote, when you're treating a patient, you want to project confidence, you want to lift their spirits, and that was the intent.
Well, okay, the intent of Conley even being, if you don't want to do a presser, don't do a presser.
But if you're going to have a presser, then you actually have to be transparent about the health condition.
What's amazing about this is that Trump is now mimicking a lot of the same flaws as the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
In 2016, there were serious questions about Hillary Clinton's health.
You remember this, right?
She kept coughing.
She wasn't doing long interviews.
And then, you remember, she kept saying, everything's fine.
It's fine.
It's totally fine.
And then she collapsed into a van.
And then the answer was, well, she had dehydration, right?
That was the original answer.
She got dehydrated.
And then it turns out she had walking pneumonia or something.
And we had not been given that information and people started to have real doubts about her health.
Well, the same thing has happened here with President Trump.
Now, it looks like, apparently, according to Dr. Brian Garibaldi, another physician treating the president, that Trump could be discharged as early as today and head back to the White House, which, of course, would be good.
In addition to steroids, Trump has received an experimental antibody cocktail and is in the midst of a five-day course of remdesivir, which is an antiviral.
The White House does have a medical unit capable of responding to the president's health troubles.
They don't have the sophisticated equipment available at Walter Reed, but more of that is for evaluation.
Trump apparently wants out.
If his Twitter account is any indicator, the president is feeling a lot better.
He was pretty silent on Twitter on Saturday, blessedly.
And then on Sunday night and Monday morning, he went wild on Twitter and just started tweeting everything in the world.
Apparently, President Trump was very frustrated with a lot of the media coverage.
And so he had a conversation with Rudy Giuliani reported by the Daily Telegraph, in which a Daily Telegraph columnist now has unveiled the comments.
She says, I have a good update for you from Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, I spoke to him about an hour ago.
He just got off the phone from the president.
Apparently, the president gave Giuliani this statement, quote, You can go and tell people I'm watching this coverage, which is basically saying he's taking a turn for the worst.
I feel I could get out of here right now, but they're telling me there can always be a backstep with this disease.
I feel like I could go out and do a rally.
I'm president of the United States.
I can't lock myself in the room.
Apparently, the president said I had to confront the virus so the American people stopped being afraid of it so we could deal with it responsibly.
Now, that could be president's actual message coming out of this.
There are gonna be two dueling messages.
Coming out of COVID, assuming that Trump is fine, God willing.
Okay, message number one is gonna be the one pushed by Democrats.
He was irresponsible.
His irresponsibility led him to be in rooms with people he should not have been in rooms with.
He did not protect himself, and he did not protect others.
And in fact, Chris Christie has said, for example, that during debate prep, Trump was not wearing a mask.
He was within six feet of Chris Christie, and Chris Christie now has it.
We now know that Senator Tom Tillis has it.
We know that Senator Mike Lee has it.
Like, a lot of people who are in Trump's kind of immediate circle They'll step in, the president's campaign manager has it.
That's gonna be the narrative, is Trump was irresponsible, and so when Trump got it, it was just a sign of his irresponsibility, which again, is completely at odds with the administration's actual activity on COVID.
This is one of the great frustrations.
It is a true frustration for me, because here's the deal.
Here's what Trump could have done back in March and April.
What if President Trump had said, you know what?
Lockdowns don't work.
Lockdowns are a bad idea.
What if Trump had said this?
Total lockdowns are a bad idea, because as we're gonna see, what's happening right now is the debate over Trump's health and his, Obtaining COVID is now being telescoped.
It's being telescoped into the debate over broader lockdowns, which are going to reemerge as we enter the fall.
What if Trump had said, listen, lockdowns are a bad strategy.
Everybody should go back to work if they are healthy, and they should wear masks, and they should socially distance.
People are capable of being responsible.
This is exactly the case I was making in April.
Go back and listen to the show.
I literally said lockdowns are a bad idea, and I trust people to be responsible.
And by and large, people are responsible.
Okay, but it's easier to make that case when you are not personally being kind of irresponsible.
It became even more politically inept when he started doing these large rallies.
I said at the time, on the show, over and over, as soon as the Democrats said, That was morally admissible for you to go out and protest and shout in people's faces and spread COVID as much as you wanted.
So long as you were shouting about how the police were evil and America was racist and George Floyd, as long as you were doing that, it was totally fine.
Trump should have said, listen, I'm not doing rallies.
I don't know why you guys are green lighting all this stuff.
Whatever happens next is on you.
I've said people should be responsible.
You guys have engaged in pure irresponsibility, not only On a moral level, by backing anti-police propaganda from the far left.
But on a health level, you're being irresponsible by saying it's totally fine to go out in the streets with millions of people doing it.
Instead, Trump was like, well, you know, if they can do it, I can do it.
Let's have some rallies.
And that, of course, allowed the media back in to say that Trump was being irresponsible.
And because Trump is anti-lockdown, And then he got COVID, the case is gonna be made that Joe Biden, who is pro-lockdown and has not had COVID, has the right strategy here.
Even though, again, anecdotal evidence is not the basis of good policy.
But that's how people are going to use it.
It was stupid, okay?
I'm sorry, that was a stupid strategy.
And that's not an argument for mask mandates.
Again, my whole case is that people can be trusted, responsibly, to put on masks when the caseloads are rising.
You see this in LA, where everybody is wearing a mask.
You saw this, by the way, in Florida.
And I was in Florida for three weeks during the uptick.
And people were, in fact, wearing masks, in widespread fashion, in much-maligned Florida.
By the way, Florida, Texas, Georgia, all of them had a much, much lower second wave, or first wave, as the case may be, than New York had.
And New York is now having a bit of a second wave, or it looks like they're upticking into a second wave, because when you lockdown very harshly, in consummate fashion, you will have a bump after the end of that lockdown.
We'll get to more of the public policy ramifications of all this in just one second.
Also, more kind of media craziness over all of this.
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Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second, how the Democrats are trying to turn this into political hay.
But first, in case you missed it, we had another great episode of the Sunday Special yesterday.
Academy Award-winning actor, Jon Voight, joined me to discuss his illustrious acting career, his journey to conservatism, and an inside look into being a Hollywood conservative.
So head on over to dailyware.com or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
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And it's a really, really interesting and fun Sunday special.
A lot of Hollywood talk, actually.
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And I think it's fascinating, especially if you love classic and modern Hollywood material.
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So there are two ways in which Democrats are attempting to play this particular COVID scenario into a broader political discussion.
Way number one is they're trying on a very practical level to kill the vote for Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court, right?
Their goal is we have enough senators who've been infected.
They need to stay home.
If they're at home, they can't vote.
Okay, there's only one problem with this.
The virus either runs its course or it does not run its course.
Once it runs its course, that's usually like a 10-day period.
The CDC says you're supposed to quarantine for 10 days.
Once you are post-symptomatic, you typically are not transmitting the virus.
Once you are post-symptomatic, you might be doing some viral shedding, but it's not much, and there's not a lot of evidence that once you are post-symptomatic, you are really a grave threat to anybody else.
Also, you're now immune.
So, I mean, on President Trump's level, I think that there's a good shot that within three weeks, you see President Trump body-surfing the crowd, right?
That he actually just goes to rallies, and he's like, whoo!
Like, whoo!
Yeah!
Just jumping out in the crowd, waving to people, and being carried around on their shoulders, eight of them.
That's a possibility.
But one of the things the Democrats are trying to do is kill the Amy Coney Barrett vote, saying there are not enough Republicans available to vote.
Because right now, there have been several Republicans who have been affected.
Mike Lee has it.
Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin has it.
And Senator Tom Tillis has it.
Well, recall you this.
Republicans right now have 53 votes in the Senate.
Susan Collins of Maine has already said that she may or may not vote this way, and Murkowski says she's not going to vote this way.
So you actually need all those people present in order to get Amy Coney Barrett on the court.
Democrats are praying that Republicans actually don't have the SCOTUS votes.
According to The Atlantic, suddenly Amy Coney Barrett might not have the votes.
For the moment, COVID-19 diagnoses have jeopardized three votes that Republicans can't afford to lose.
This is according to Russell Berman.
September 26th was a festive day for Republicans in Washington.
Under overcast skies, President Donald Trump strode to a podium in the White House Rose Garden to introduce Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A military band played Hail to the Chief, and about 150 guests, including senior members of the Republican Party, the President's Cabinet, and the Senate, Sat shoulder to shoulder and mostly without masks as they cheered for the nomination of a 48-year-old conservative to a lifetime seat.
The mood was upbeat, in part, because Barrett appeared to have the votes for confirmation before the president even uttered her name.
Just over a week later, Trump's Rose Garden event suddenly seems far more ominous.
The idea of Barrett's pre-election confirmation is in doubt.
What had been a celebration now appears, in retrospect, to have been a super-spreading catastrophe.
The president is hospitalized with COVID-19.
Several infections of high-ranking government and Republican Party officials have been plausibly linked to the event.
Among those who have taken ill are the chair of the RNC, Ronna McDaniel, the president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, the current and former Trump advisors, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway, and the president of University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins.
The coronavirus cases that could be the most problematic are Mike Lee, Tom Tillis, and Ron Johnson.
Lee and Tillis both serve on the Judiciary Committee.
They could, of course, have Zoom sessions, and they probably will.
Republicans have a 53-47 majority.
Two of the members have said they oppose holding a vote to confirm a SCOTUS justice before the election.
The Senate isn't expected to hold a final vote until the end of the month.
But if these three senators couldn't show up, Republicans would not have the vote.
It's also possible that more Republican senators will come down with the virus in the next few days.
Apparently, everybody is basically going to quarantine for the next week or so.
This is exactly what Democrats are desperately, desperately hoping for.
They've been looking for some sort of miracle to happen.
And like Hans Gruber, they may get the miracle that they want.
Chuck Schumer could barely conceal his glee a little bit earlier over the weekend, as he says that President Trump put a lot of people at risk.
And also, by the way, maybe we shouldn't vote on Amy Coney Barrett.
We need full transparency.
We all know the president's cavalier attitude towards COVID, towards masks, towards social distancing has endangered many people, including himself.
As again, this picture shows.
But it happened over and over and over again.
So now, at the very minimum, we need full transparency.
We need to know exactly the level of the President's health.
Okay, but is it really about that, or is it really about the political game?
Well, color me skeptical that it's about the actual human problems of COVID-19 here, especially when The Atlantic, on the same day they're running pieces talking about how the vote for Amy Coney Barrett could be in doubt, ran another piece by Quinta Jurecic, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and managing editor of Lawfare, and Susan Hennessey, an executive editor of Lawfare, called the reckless race to confirm Amy Coney Barrett justifies court packing.
They say, we used to reject court packing as a dangerous game.
Now we believe it may be the best way to restore the court's legitimacy.
Shocker, they've now flipped and they say that it is now time to just toss justices willy-nilly onto the Supreme Court.
Very exciting stuff.
So it feels as though they have a pre-existing narrative here, and now they're just looking for an excuse to fulfill it.
Okay, so narrative number one from the Democrats is there aren't gonna be enough votes in the Senate, or even if there are, people are gonna be sick, and so we shouldn't hold hearings.
And so, just conveniently, Amy Coney Barrett shouldn't make it on the court.
Mitch McConnell's not gonna listen to that.
Amy Coney Barrett will end up on the court.
Then, there is the second narrative that is being promulgated, and that narrative is more damaging to Trump.
That narrative is, again, he was not particularly careful.
Republicans have not been particularly careful.
And so when they say that you can be trusted, they can't even be trusted.
So why should you be trusted?
Therefore, lockdowns.
And if there are continued lockdowns from now until the end of the election, or from now until January, or from now until February, the economy is just going to skid.
It is just going to go off the rails.
We had an economic report last week.
It showed that there were some 644,000 jobs added nationwide.
That's not bad, but it ain't great.
It's not like the recovery is just doing amazing.
It turns out that we are seeing the recovery stall out for a wide variety of industries, including the airline industry and the theater industry.
Regal Cinemas is now suspending operations at all U.S.
locations.
According to the Wall Street Journal, they are the second largest cinema chain in the United States.
They're closing every one of its locations nationwide after reopening in August.
That followed a cascade of postponements for big-budget Hollywood films, most recently the new James Bond movie.
The studio behind the film, MGM Holdings, said Friday it was delaying the film for the second time to next April.
From this November, it had originally been scheduled for release in April of this year.
So they said that they don't have enough movies.
Meanwhile, you saw Disneyland cut like 28,000 jobs.
You saw that the airline industry was cutting tens of thousands of jobs.
According to the National Association of Theater Owners, if status quo continues, 69% of small and mid-sized movie theater companies will be forced to file for bankruptcy or to close permanently.
So these lockdowns do have severe consequences, not just for obvious industries like the theater industry, where you are packed tightly into small areas in confined spaces with air conditioning and re-ventilation, but The airline industry, which has similar conditions, the restaurant industry, where you're going to see huge numbers of small businesses go under.
So as we hit the supposed second wave season, right, as we hit the cold season, the flu season at the end of the year, as people begin to go indoors because it's too cold outside, in the Northeast, there's going to be widespread debate over what is the proper policy to take.
And with Trump having gotten COVID, with Ron Johnson, for example, having gotten COVID, and then apparently Senator Johnson, who I know Senator Johnson a little bit personally, very nice guy, but apparently he went to an Oktoberfest party while he was waiting his COVID-19 test results.
Not kidding.
Apparently, according to the Daily Beast, he didn't reveal his diagnosis until Saturday.
He apparently chose to attend this bash on Friday evening, even though he knew that Trump and many of his inner circle had tested positive for COVID-19.
There's also talk about when Trump knew that he was sick.
He knew that Hope Hicks apparently was sick on Wednesday, and then he went to a fundraiser anyway.
Johnson said that he only took his mask off when it was time to address the crowd.
He also insisted he was at least 12 feet from anybody during his speech at the event, which was sponsored by the Ozaukee County Republican Party.
He said, I feel fine, I feel completely normal.
He said he didn't stick around to mingle at the dinner.
Okay, so these sorts of stories don't look good for the anti-lockdown advocates.
Okay, they don't.
Because again, the case for anti-lockdown is we can all act in responsible fashion and we can go back to work.
These things are not only mutually not exclusive, they're mutually necessary.
Responsibility and ending lockdown, both of these things should happen in tandem.
That is the case.
But the Democrats are fully invested, in many cases, in full-scale lockdown, including in places like New York.
So New York is now seeing a little bit of an uptick.
New York City, over the past several days, has seen an uptick in number of diagnosed COVID cases.
So maybe a couple of weeks ago, in all of New York City, they were seeing something like 500 cases, 800 cases.
If you go back to mid-September, they were seeing, at their peaks, something like 900 cases, 860 cases, 880 cases.
Well, over the weekend, they jumped to 1,731 cases.
So this has led to talk of New York City adopting restrictions in harder-hit areas.
According to the New York Times, for many weeks, public health officials had expressed concern that a second wave of the coronavirus would hit New York City, which until recently had achieved striking success in beating back the outbreak after a devastating spread that left more than 20,000 residents dead.
On Sunday, with those fears growing, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an emergency crackdown, saying he intended to impose new restrictions in 20 hotspots in Brooklyn and Queens that have been experiencing rising positivity rates.
The plan is a major setback for New York City, amounting to the first significant reversal in the reopening and offering further evidence of the challenges in curbing the pandemic.
The city over the last month had taken several strides forward, allowing indoor dining for the first time, becoming the first major school district in the country to bring back children into its public schools.
But under the new restrictions, de Blasio would close every school, public and private, in nine of the city's 146 zip codes, as well as all non-essential businesses.
Indoor and outdoor dining in restaurants in those areas will not be allowed.
Even outdoor dining, right?
Now we are back to full-scale lockdown under Bill de Blasio.
Now, even as a person, I happen to be pretty COVID cautious, right?
I have parents who are 64.
You know this, right?
When I was sheltering, I literally sheltered in place for several months there.
With my parents, because I did not want them to risk their health.
Even today, when my parents are over with us, we tend to be outdoors.
When we are indoors, my parents wear masks.
They wear masks around my kids.
I tend to be much more COVID-cautious than some of the people who are on the right.
But even I believe that it is nuts to ban, for example, outdoor dining.
Outdoor dining is not a chief vector of transmission.
Schools.
Particularly for people who are under the age of 10, right?
For small children, these are not a chief vector of transmission.
It is one thing to talk about closing middle schools or high schools.
Once kids have a more mature immune system, apparently they can now pass it to people because their bodies act like adult bodies.
But if you're talking about five-year-olds, they are not apparently passing this in anywhere near the same numbers.
And if they do get it, they're not really getting supremely sick according to CDC statistics, okay?
I can quote you all of the CDC statistics.
It doesn't mean the risk is zero.
It does mean that the risk is relatively lower and the schools have been open in Europe for a long time without them becoming a chief vector of transmission.
De Blasio said today, unfortunately, is not a day for celebration.
Today is a more difficult day.
The nine areas have large populations of Orthodox Jews, communities where the virus have been spreading rapidly, and where public health officials have struggled to persuade many residents to adhere to guidelines on mask wearing and social distancing.
Those areas all have had positivity rates in recent days of more than 3%, some as high as 8%, in contrast to the city's overall rate of 1.5%.
The reason for that, presumably, is because in a lot of these Orthodox areas, it is the time of the year where you go to shul a lot, right?
You end up going for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, right?
These are the big communal days.
Sukkot, the high holidays.
The high holy days, holidays.
This is the time of year when people tend to get together in close quarters.
It's a big problem in Israel.
This is why they've had military lockdown, particularly in religious areas.
By the way, I think it is worth noting I do.
I think it is worth noting right here that the media's treatment of Orthodox Jews and other racial groups is quite disparate.
Have you noticed this?
Whenever there's a spiking rate, and it happens among black communities, or it happens in Hispanic communities, the answer is sheer American racism.
Brutal American racism.
Not spiking deaths, right?
Not spiking deaths where you could theoretically talk about differentials in medical care.
Although even there, you're seeing those spiking rates of death vary by racial group, ethnic group.
In Europe as well, you're seeing it.
In Canada, it's very doubtful that America's racist medical system is really the problem here.
Okay, but even when there is a spike in cases in the black community or in the Hispanic community, the media will chalk it up to endemic American discrimination and racism and evil.
When there's a spike in rates in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York, it is because they're refusing to obey mask guidelines and they are going in enclosed areas and then spitting on each other.
So, by the way, I tend to think that the second one is true, meaning that when you have a heavy spread in a particular community, you might wanna look at the activity of the particular community as opposed to differentiating the communities based, one, on the behavior of the community, and two, based on the evils of the American system.
Just gonna note the media bias there, right?
If there's a heavy uptick in urban Chicago, in heavily black urban Chicago, then it must be because America is a racist place.
If there's a heavy uptick in Borough Park in New York, then it must be because those terrible Jews are out there spitting on each other.
And just noticing the disparate treatment right here.
Apparently, reactions to the restrictions began to emerge from Jewish leaders on Sunday evening after celebrations of Sukkot ended at least the first couple of days.
David Greenfield, who represented Borough Park on the City Council until 2017, he said, I think it's unfortunate New York City continues to single out a couple of Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods where there are now 20 neighborhoods with serious spikes.
Many of the 20 zip codes the city is focusing on do have sizable numbers of residents who are not The new restrictions could increase tensions between them and the Orthodox Jews.
Most of the schools set to close are non-public schools, largely as you vote, that have been open for weeks.
About 200 private schools will close, as well as 100 public schools as well.
Okay, so as New York looks to close down again, as more and more blue areas look to close down again, they're gonna look at President Trump, they're gonna look at Ron Johnson, they're gonna look at the Republicans, and they're gonna say, you guys said that people would be responsible, and you couldn't even keep yourself from getting this thing, and you're inside the White House bubble.
So Trump could theoretically come out and say right now, listen, I should have been more careful, I should have socially distanced, you know, I'm in the upper age bracket.
But he should also say, listen, If you are careful, number one, you will lower your chances of getting it.
And having been through this, the vast, vast, vast majority of people who get it do live.
According to the CDC's best current estimates, if you are between the ages of zero and 19 years old, your chances of dying from this thing are extraordinarily remote.
Like the infection fatality ratio is .00003.
If you're 20 to 49, it is .0002.
If you're 20 to 49 it is 0.0002. If you're 50 to 69 it is 0.005.
Right? Which means not 5%, not 0.5%, but 0.5 of a percent.
Right?
And if you're over the age of 70, then it's like 5.4% is your infection fatality ratio.
Which is still, you know, means that 94% of the people who get it above the age of 70 are going to live.
Now once you get above the age of 80, then it starts to climb pretty precipitously.
Trump could say all of that.
He could say lockdowns are ill-advised, we can all be responsible, and I myself am now promoting that we should all be responsible.
We'll see if he does that.
I have my doubts.
But this has some pretty significant ramifications for the future of lockdowns, specifically over the next few months.
Okay, it's not...
It's not wonderful.
And the media play right into it because the media are all in favor of lockdown.
The media wish to foster a sense of chaos, and it is irresponsible for the administration to give that sort of fuel to people who are looking for that fuel to burn down a lot of elements of the free market system.
Meanwhile, final note here.
So I just have to point this out because the hypocrisy is so grand.
So over the weekend, 60 Minutes covered Tara Reade.
Tara Reade, of course, is the woman who accuses Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her back in the Senate in the early 1990s.
60 Minutes covered it in Australia, which makes sense because we have tons of American voters in Australia.
So really, really well done, 60 Minutes.
Long before Joe Biden was a household name across America.
And here is my desk.
Tara Reid worked in his Senate office in the early 90s.
In March this year, Reid came forward with what she said was the full story.
By then, many in politics and the media were already questioning her version of events.
It's an allegation that has received little coverage this election.
And unlike Trump's accusers, Tara has received a barrage of scrutiny.
Do you feel as though if Joe Biden wasn't Joe Biden, your allegations would be taken more seriously?
Absolutely.
Okay, so I'm glad that 60 Minutes saw fit to cover Tara Reid in Australia.
Do you think they would be covering Donald Trump's accusers in Australia, but not domestically here in the United States?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Okay, well, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more, so make sure that you stay tuned for that.
Also, make sure that you go subscribe over at dailywire.com and use promo code DEBATE for 20% off, because we have all sorts of good stuff coming for you in the next few weeks.
We grow closer to the election.
We are just weeks away at this point.
It's gonna be vital for you to tune in, so we'll see you here then.
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Libs draw all the wrong lessons from President Trump's COVID diagnosis.
The president drops in national polls, but gains where it counts, and race hoaxes proliferate around the country.
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