Ep. 865 pits Trump’s adaptive COVID-19 response—15-day lockdown reassessments, FEMA federalism, and debunked media lies (e.g., "hoax" claims, WHO kit refusals)—against Biden’s erratic surrogates and Pelosi-Schumer’s politicized relief stalls. Data skepticism (Levitt/Epstein projections: 150K–200K cases) clashes with fear-driven models, while Trump’s unity framing ("national trial") contrasts with media obsession over ratings. The episode frames Trump as the sole bulwark against economic collapse and authoritarian mandates like Cuomo’s factory seizures, ending with a defense of his crisis leadership as the only path to recovery. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Biden has announced that he will hold regular shadow briefings to correct the briefings of President Donald Trump during the current crisis.
So for instance, when Trump holds a briefing to announce measures to soften the crisis' blow to the economy, Biden will hold his shadow briefing to announce that he can remember when Americans would all sit together around the record player and say the Pledge of Allegiance to Franklin Roosevelt, unless they were black and then they had to sit somewhere else, and that was wrong, and he opposed that, or maybe he was for it.
We can't remember anymore.
But anyway, it was a different time, and we need to pull together like that again and not let Richard Nixon tear us apart or whoever it is.
And when President Trump holds a briefing to announce increased efforts by pharmaceutical companies to find a vaccine while the government tries to dial back regulatory impediments, Biden will hold a shadow briefing to announce that there used to be a guy he knew named Cornpop or popcorn, or maybe it was buttered popcorn because that's awfully good.
And anyway, he was a real tough character who used to make fun of Joe because the hair on Joe's legs used to bleach blonde in the sun and popcorn would say, hey, blondie legs.
So Joe wrapped a chain around his hand and just beat the living crap out of the guy.
And he'll do that to Trump too.
If he's not careful, you just wait.
Biden says he'll also try to make his briefings more entertaining than Trump's by holding fun contests where Joe will try to guess what state he's in and if he gets it right, he wins a nap.
And if he's wrong, he'll just stand there staring into space for a few minutes until his wife comes to take him home.
Biden also says he's devised a new campaign slogan for the crisis.
Vote for Joe.
After all, nobody lives forever.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, let's take stock and try to figure out where we are here.
Throughout the West, governments are shutting down their economies because their computer models are predicting such a large number of virus cases that it would overwhelm medical facilities.
Some places it already has.
They're trying to make the disease spread slower so the hospitals can handle the cases, and that makes sense.
But whatever measures governments take, they're going to have a damaging effect on the economy, which also will increase the store of human misery, possibly by a lot.
And that also needs to be taken into account.
The problem is the emotional power of imagined deaths is stronger than the emotional power of imagined economic depression, which makes everyone skew their decision-making towards safety rather than productivity.
It's also good politics as no one wants to be accused of putting money above human life.
But of course, that's not necessarily the best thing.
A crashed economy can destroy lives in so many ways that are hard to calculate.
It's worth measuring the effects of the cure against the effects of the disease, and our response depends on what the numbers are.
Here's the thing.
We don't know what the numbers are.
We're still not sure of the percentage of people who die from the disease because we're still not sure how many people actually have the disease, so we can't calculate the percentages.
And also, percentages spike and they fall at different times.
There have been moments when flu was killing almost 8% of the people who got it, but on average it's 0.1%.
The numbers out of Italy seem very bad, but they're a very unhealthy society.
Some years they actually lose more people to flu than we do.
And their record keeping sucks.
They're counting traffic deaths as part of the coronavirus fatality rate.
The Russian and Chinese are complete liars and you can't trust them.
And that's true also of NBC News, which runs propaganda from China as if it were true, and the New York Times, a former newspaper, which is running hyper-emotional individual stories guaranteed to spread fear without increasing our store of information.
Everywhere we turn, good information is hard to find.
I got an email over the weekend from a friend of mine.
He's in one of the more mathematical sciences and he uses computer models a lot.
He's been right about a lot of things in the past, especially debunking climate hysteria.
I've used him before without mentioning his name.
He's always been fascinated both with epidemics and with fake news, and he's been following the spread of flu Manchu since January.
He says there are two basic ways to try to predict what will happen, computer models that basically extrapolate from present numbers and calculations that include on-the-ground numbers and human reactions.
Some of the computers are predicting 250 million Americans could get sick and 5% of them could die.
That's devastating.
That's unimaginable.
My friend's math says it's going to be many, many fewer cases, down around 150,000, maybe 200,000, and many fewer deaths, somewhere around two and a half weeks worth of traffic fatalities.
Similar doubts about the big numbers are being raised by people like Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, and Richard Epstein, a lawyer who worked on the AIDS epidemic and others.
Now, we know that computer models on climate change have been absurdly disastrous, and they've been made even worse by the bad reporting of the press and the stupidity and vanality of leftist politicians like Alexandria Casional Cortex.
It's hard to know who to believe, and there's such a vast difference in the predictions that it's almost impossible to know how we should react.
The amount of knowledge we don't have right now is enormous, and so is the amount of certainty among non-experts on social media declaring what we should and shouldn't do.
The great Socratic wisdom of admitting you don't know what you don't know is overwhelmed by the great benefits of pretending you do know and thinking that you do know, because people respect certainty and they search for certainty, even when certainty is the stupidest reaction available.
You have to understand that just like us, our leaders have to make decisions in a state of unknowing.
They don't have any other choice.
That's what the situation calls for, action in relative darkness.
My best guess right now, as a non-expert at a time when even the experts don't know, is that these lockdowns and the social distancing measures have been the right way to go for the present, but we can't lock people down forever without the economic and social results being so bad as to outweigh the results of the illness, which eventually will peak and start to fall off, one hopes.
At some point, with due precautions, people have to start returning to work and normal life with extra health procedures in place.
Then tell me it's safe, because obviously the most important thing is that we save the clavin.
I think it would be very helpful if the administration would start talking about time more.
Give us a realistic sense of when we can stop and reassess the current situation more realistically.
Now, several hours after I wrote those words yesterday afternoon, several hours after I wrote those words, because President Donald Trump and I are like one, our minds are just working exactly as one, Trump tweeted this.
He tweeted, we can't let the cure be worse than the problem itself.
At the end of the 15-day period, we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.
This is exactly the right thing to do.
It's helpful for us to know when we'll get an update and reassessment, and it's helpful for us to have a specific date so people don't just throw up their hands and lose patience and start doing stupid stuff thinking they know what they don't.
Well, this tweet was met exactly as you would expect.
Tweets saying Trump cares more about the stock market and his reelection than he does about human life, or this from Joe Scarborough.
Mike, it would be an act of suicide for our society if the president did that, an act of suicide for millions of Americans.
It would be the height of recklessness and irresponsibility, as every medical professional says he needs to do just the opposite.
And he's been told that for two weeks.
Shame on them.
Shame on them.
Trump didn't say what he would do.
He just said that he would reassess.
And that is exactly right.
And we need to hear it.
Loudmouths telling us we're going to be locked down for a year and a half should be tarred and feathered.
They don't know.
And the damage from that would be incalculable.
So Trump is doing the right thing.
He's proceeding as he should.
As for we, the people, our first job is dealing with our loved ones and our emotions.
We have to practice steely patience without collapsing into sheepish acceptance.
We need to gather information, which is hard when our media is failing us so badly.
And we need to stay cool and protect our freedoms without abusing our freedoms stupidly.
We need to know what we don't know and not get off on talking like we do know.
We need to show our loved ones what courage looks like so they can have courage.
And we need to learn to be still and know that God is God.
I've lived through a lot of bad history, presidential assassinations, nationwide riots, wars 9-11, and that YouTube song about it's being Friday.
This is genuinely a tough situation, but it will pass.
And I think it's going to pass sooner than we fear.
What's going to matter in the end is how we behave during the worst of it.
This is when we learn who we are and whom we can trust.
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I definitely will wear them as soon as I can get out of here.
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You know, Scott Gottlieb, who is the, he's the doctor who is at the FDA and he's been following this and working with Trump.
And he says, he says our testing abilities are ramping up.
He says exactly what I just said, that we're going to be able to reassess shortly.
This is supposed to get very bad in the next two weeks as the numbers come in and as the peak spread begins, it's already very bad in New York.
We're going to see this stuff spreading.
It's going to be scary and people are going to get scared and people are going to sell you fear like the New York Times who want you to be afraid because they want you, they want power to increase in the government and they want themselves to have power and they're manipulating you and they're doing a very bad thing.
However, Gottlieb says our testing abilities are ramping up.
He wrote in the Wall Street Journal today.
He says if the worst numbers appear, they're going to appear in the next two weeks.
And Trump is right, exactly right.
That's when we should reassess.
He says by the end of next week, we'll be able to test 75,000 people a day, which will bring us to the point where we can start to do what South Korea did, which is test people, know who can go to work and who can't, know who can get out and who can't.
And some of these tests apparently can get results in 45 minutes.
So we're ramping that up.
It's a really important part of dealing with this.
So this, the state we're in, see, and this is the stuff that computer models, they can't test.
The computer models just extrapolate from what they've got.
They're just extrapolating numbers.
And that's why they'll tell you that the tide is going to come in and wash your city away when really what the city is going to do is take steps to make sure that doesn't happen.
And that's what's happening now.
And obviously we need a vaccine.
Here's Gottlieb talking on Facebook Nation about that.
Well, I think it's going to be a slow transition.
I think that the epidemic right now that's underway is probably going to peak sometime in April, probably late April, and tail off into May and June.
And hopefully transmission will be broken off in July and August.
We need to plan for what we're going to do in the fall to prevent another epidemic and outbreak.
But life's never going to be perfectly normal until we get to a vaccine.
We're always going to have to implement some measures, but they could be case-based measures where we look at individuals and screen very aggressively for the virus and quarantine and isolate individual people rather than quarantining mass populations.
That's what we need to get to.
That's going to be a transition, but we can get there.
There is a light at the end of this tunnel.
So again, he's talking about what is happening.
This is stuff that computer models can't talk about.
Once there's a vaccine, obviously that's going to make all the difference in the world and they're rushing it and they're also dialing back some of the regulations that keep things from happening.
Our regulations have been so stupid that even people with fatal diseases, diseases that were going to kill them in short order, have had a difficult time getting experimental drugs because they say it's dangerous.
I mean, that's the way government operates and the way they think it's crazy.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have really shown themselves to be, you know, I said the other day that Nancy Pelosi is not a monster.
I hope that's right, but she really acted badly.
The Democrats and the Republicans have been working on a bipartisan bill to help businesses get through.
And that's really, really important, obviously.
And they were in the various work groups doing bipartisan stuff and working very well in a bipartisan way and moving forward with a package that looked good.
The economic people were saying, yes, this is what we need.
This is what's going to get us through this.
And it was expensive, but it was going to get us through this.
Whereupon, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer swammed in with a bunch of non-related asks.
And you can guess the kind of things they were, huge expansions on unemployment things and just things that are going to last beyond the crisis, just trying to use the crisis to make the government bigger.
And they scuttled this bill, not by voting it down, but by voting on a procedural measure, after which, if they had just let the procedural measure go through, after which they still could have debated.
So it was a purely political move.
Mitch McConnell ripped them a new one.
Here's a cut of that.
Now, the build-up to this, so everybody fully understands, is that we had a high level of bipartisanship in five different working groups over the last 48 hours where members who were participating were reaching agreement.
And then all of a sudden, the Democratic leader and the Speaker of the House shows up.
And we're back to square one.
So we're fiddling here.
Fiddling with the emotions of the American people, fiddling with the markets, fiddling with our healthcare.
The American people expect us to act tomorrow.
And I want everybody to fully understand, if we aren't able to act tomorrow, it'll be because of our colleagues on the other side.
So they're supposed to be voting on this again now.
Even Mitt know how bad the Democrats behaved.
Even Mitt Romney attacked them.
Fiddling with America00:03:54
Mitt Romney took time off from attacking Donald Trump to attack the Democrats.
He says he has not been shocked before in the Senate, but he was shocked at the behavior of Pelosi and Schumer.
They really, really blew it on this because this was a decent bill.
This was a thing that needs to be done.
It has to happen.
This is not the time, obviously, to seize.
Here's Schumer trying to explain it away.
We, Senate Democrats, have a plan that's called workers first.
We want the help to go just to the people who use it, who are losing their jobs and have to pay monthly bills, not just a one-time shot of money.
And then what do they do next month when they have a mortgage or a rent or food?
Now, I don't think it takes a lot of intelligence to understand why that's ridiculous, right?
Obviously, where are the workers' money going to come from?
They're ultimately going to have to come from their job.
People are going to go back to work and get their paycheck.
If they don't, it's impossible that we're going to support them forever.
Then we're going to have a genuine depression.
So what Trump and the Republicans and the Democrats, until Schumer and Pelosi came in, were trying to do is keep businesses afloat so there'll be jobs for people to go back to.
Give the people, the workers, money as you have to, as they need it, and then you hope that they're going to go back to work because it is the free market that creates the money that we need.
And this is just this kind of power grab.
You know, it really is interesting, to me, absolutely fascinating that all this time, all this time, we keep hearing what a Nazi Trump is.
Trump's a Nazi, Trump's a Nazi.
And it just is amazing that, and especially when they kept using that burning of the Reichstag thing, which was mentioned numerous times, that the minute there's an emergency, he's going to have these, he's going to get rid of our democracy and take all this authoritarian power.
And in this genuine emergency, who is calling?
Who is calling for the government to take everything over?
I mean, Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, was calling for this.
He's saying, nationalize the factories is Cut 16.
I think the federal government should order factories to manufacture masks, gowns, ventilators, the essential medical equipment that's going to make the difference between life and death.
It's not hard to make a mask or PPE equipment or a gown, but you need companies to do it.
We have apparel companies that can make clothing.
Well, then you can make a surgical gown and you can make a mask, but they have to be ordered to do it.
It's utterly ridiculous and it's utterly wrong.
And Trump, oddly enough, gets it exactly right.
Trump says he rejected this, Cut 17.
Why not use it now if that would answer their pleas for help?
Well, we are using it now.
The fact that I signed it, it's in effect.
But you know, we're a country not based on nationalizing our business.
Call a person over in Venezuela.
Ask him, how did nationalization of their businesses work out?
Not too well.
The concept of nationalizing our business is not a good concept.
So it's fascinating and worth remembering.
It's worth remembering who stood up for our system.
Play the Pence cut of Pence describing why they're not taking power away from the states.
It's extremely important that the American people recognize that one of the things that makes America different is that we have a system of federalism.
And that by putting FEMA in the lead, the president has emphasized that our response to the coronavirus is in the anthem of FEMA.
FEMA, it is locally executed, state-managed, and federally supported.
We want the people on the ground, the decision makers, to have what they need.
We want states to be able to manage the unique circumstances in their states.
FEMA's Role Clarified00:15:11
Ideas expand to fulfill their natural conclusions.
That's what they do.
They go to their absolutely natural conclusions.
And so the people who believe in government are always going to make government bigger and they're always going to be, you know, scratch a socialist, you find a tyrant every single time.
It is the belief not in nationalism, not in any ism.
It's a belief in human beings, in human freedom and the things that make businesses work and the things that power people.
That's what really works.
And that's what we're seeing now.
We're seeing the good ideas reach their natural conclusions as well as bad ideas.
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There are no E's in Clavens.
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K-L-A-V-A-N.
The people who are so we're seeing who people are, as I keep saying.
This is these crises, they reveal personality.
But the people who are failing most of the press, the press have been absurd.
They cannot, you know, it is interesting.
You can trace some stupid stuff, Trump has said.
I've said this.
I mean, Trump's, most of Trump's flaws are located beneath his nose and above his chin, you know, in the mouth.
And he says stuff I wish he hadn't said.
And he has said stuff, you know, this is all going to go away.
And we've only got 15 people who are sick.
And that's the way, you know, I mean, he did say all that stuff.
There's no question about it.
Perfectly fair to attack him for it.
But he's adapted.
And the press just won't.
I mean, you know, I made that joke about Joe Biden doing shadow briefings.
He actually did that today.
Let me show you a clip of that.
Back in those days, rich men would ride around in zeppelins, dropping coins on people.
Okay, maybe that wasn't it.
Let's play the real one, though.
It's worse.
Activate the Reserve Corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with these crush of cases.
And in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that we can't know why he's gesturing to the people.
Help me out here.
Give me something.
I'm lost.
I've lost my.
Oh, my goodness.
So these are the guys that the, and Bernie Sanders is saying, we need new thinking.
New thinking he hasn't had a thought since 1932.
You know, that's the guys they're going to offer us instead.
So Trump, listen, Trump has said things he has, but he's adapted, but the press just wants him.
So he got, Trump got in a fight with Peter Alexander from NBC, or as we call it, the Chinese, the Wuhan News Network.
And I want to play, I want to play the clip that's going around.
There's a clip that is the clip that's going around, which is cut five, okay?
Because Trump just blasted Peter Alexander after he asked what seems like a kind of a harmless question.
When you say the Americans were scared, though, I guess nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick, millions, as you witnessed, who are scared right now.
What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?
I say that you're a terrible reporter.
That's what I say.
I think it's a very nasty question, and I think it's a very bad signal that you're putting out to the American people.
The American people are looking for answers and they're looking for hope.
And you're doing sensationalism.
And the same with NBC and Comcast.
I don't call it Comcast.
I call it Comcast.
Let me just ask for whom you work.
Let me just say something.
That's really bad reporting.
And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.
Let's see if it works.
It might and it might not.
I happen to feel good about it, but who knows?
I've been right a lot.
Let's see what happens.
He lost his temper.
And of course, this is covered.
Oh, my goodness gracious.
They actually thought this was news.
They actually thought it was news that he reamed this reporter and they kept saying it was a softball.
Alexander himself went on TV and said, no, no, no, I was just, it was a softball.
I was just, I was just trying to get him to give us hopes, to please be a leader, give us hope.
Here's Alexander lying.
There was a moment, you and I are baseball fans.
We call it a softball.
It was trying to provide the president an opportunity to reassure millions of Americans.
We're witnessing the death toll now approach 200 and the number of those who have already tested positive for COVID-19 approaching 14,000 or surpassing it, what he would say to Americans who were scared.
The president, as you witnessed instead, took it out on me and said that I was a terrible reporter.
I mean, clearly this was an opportunity for him to be positive and to be uplifting, optimistic as he likes to be.
You're a lying dogface pony soldier.
If Joe Biden hadn't said it, I was going to say exactly that Joe took the words right out of my mouth.
He is a lying, dog-faced pony soldier, whatever the hell that means.
That's what he is.
Because here's the context, okay?
Before, when Trump was saying it might work and it might not, they heard that it sound like he was just asking to give Americans hope.
But play what went on before this.
Oh, wait, let's stop before you play it.
Before you play it, let me just explain.
For those of you who are trying not to watch the news, I understand that.
There's a drug out.
It's a drug that's used for, it's a combination of drugs used to treat malaria.
It's very, it has a very hard name to pronounce.
It doesn't matter.
Trump has been saying, hey, this looks like it's got some promising results.
And Fauci has been saying, well, hold off, hold off.
And they're making it look like Fauci is saying, you know, Trump is lying.
He's covering it up for Trump and Trump is lying.
And all Trump is saying is there's been some hopeful results.
There have been some hopeful results.
And a lot of people are reporting from the front lines.
I've been reading this saying, yeah, we're getting some good results with this.
One guy we had in the Daily Wire who said, I was dying.
This thing saved my life.
So, you know, it's getting hopeful reports.
And Trump has brought this up.
Alexander was hectoring him about that before this began.
Here it is.
Is it possible that your impulse to put a positive spin on things may be giving Americans a false sense of the world?
No, I don't think so.
I don't care this right now.
No, I don't think so.
I think that the not yet approved drug.
Such a lovely question.
Look, it may work and it may not work.
And I agree with the doctor what he said.
May work, may not work.
I feel good about it.
That's all it is, just a feeling.
You know, I'm a smart guy.
I feel good about it.
And we're going to see.
You're going to see soon enough.
So in other words, he was accusing Trump.
It really is aggravating to watch that guy come on TV and just lie about what he was doing, that it was a softball question.
It wasn't a softball question.
He was accusing Trump of giving false hope.
He was accusing him of contradicting what Fauci was saying, which he wasn't.
He was saying, I got a good feeling about this.
I'm an optimistic guy.
And there have been good reports about this.
They really have from the front lines.
Obviously, it's not a panacea, but even Gottlieb in the Wall Street Journal was saying, yes, we have seen some good results from this.
So that's all he was saying.
And Alexander was saying, you're giving people false hope.
And then he went on and said, but what are you saying to people who are scared?
Well, you know, if they're, you're giving them false hope and they're scared.
That's when he went off on him.
And he is a lying dogface pony soldier when he says he was just throwing him a softball.
Just not true.
Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, who is obviously maneuvering to 2024, he's obviously going forward, trying to make, I think he's making Biden look bad because he is a much more intense guy.
He is, I think he's like a really, really bad guy, Andrew Cuomo.
But anyway, he's maneuvering for 2024, trying to look good.
He gave a press conference where he talked about the same drugs.
He talked about the exact same drugs and how they're looking, having some good trials, getting some good results on the front lines.
Here's Brian Stelter, Dan Rather, and who's the other one?
Woodward and Bernstein, Carl Bernstein, discussing that press conference.
Real leadership of the kind the President of the United States should have provided to the American people throughout this crisis and has not.
On the specifics, the governor wants the Defense Procurement Act not only invoked, but used to compel American manufacturers to give the country, the hospitals, the health care system what it needs.
He's been very eloquent about this.
He and the other governors and Larry Hogan, who's chairman of the National Governors Conference, Cuomo is vice chairman.
They are showing the kind of leadership that we need in this country.
We are fighting the fake news.
It's fake, phony, fake.
It's amazing to me.
It is just amazing to me.
Cuomo was saying the same thing, except for the fact that Cuomo wants to nationalize business.
He wants the government to take over business.
You know, and you don't have to, you don't need me to tell you this, that if it happens that people like my friend who say this is not going to be anywhere near as bad as the computers are saying it is, if they turn out to be right, anything that Trump has done is going to have been too much.
I mean, there's no way Trump can come out of this a winner.
They've got him in this kind of whipsaw where if he does a lot, then he's doing too much.
And if he doesn't do enough, he's not doing enough.
I mean, it's just utterly absurd.
Trump, like everybody, is moving in the dark.
They're getting information as fast as they can.
They're acquiring the information and they're trying to adapt.
Which people do you think are going to adapt better?
People like Trump or people like the press who keep doing the same damn thing over and over and over again.
Let's just take at least a look at Trump doing what I think he should do, which is being as upbeat as he can while being as realistic as he can.
This is clip one.
I want to say that I know that this is a challenging time for all Americans.
We're enduring a great national trial, and we will prove that we can meet the moment.
I want to assure the American people that we're doing everything we can each day to confront and ultimately defeat this horrible, invisible enemy.
We're at war.
In a true sense, we're at war.
And we're fighting an invisible enemy.
Think of that.
For those of you who are feeling alone and isolated, I want you to know that we are all joined together as one people, eternally linked by our shared national spirit.
We love our country.
A spirit of courage and love and patriotism.
No American is alone as long as we are united and we are united.
We're very united.
People are saying things now that three weeks ago, they didn't talk that way.
We're very united.
I mean, you know, is that going to get any play?
Of course not.
It's not going to get any play.
They're not going to let him look like the president or anything.
They're not going to put that stuff on.
That's on C-P.
They've got that off C-SPAN.
That's where it's going to.
The press.
What do people care about?
What do you care about?
You care about when this is going to be over.
You care about how do you stay safe?
How do you keep your family safe?
What's the effect on the economy going to be?
Is the economy going to come back after this is over?
I mean, these are big things that people care about.
What don't you care about?
You don't care about Peter Alexander's feelings.
Nobody except Peter Alexander's best friend, maybe his dog, cares about Peter Alexander's feelings.
Nobody cares what these people think of Trump.
Zero people care what they think of Trump.
We get it already.
Believe me, we've listened to three years of this stuff.
They should be reporting the news.
They just have lost the ability to do that.
All right.
Have you been watching the all-access promos?
These are really good.
I did one on Thursday.
I'm going to do one next Thursday as well.
You can go over to dailywire.com and check them out.
Jeremy Boring and Ben Shapiro kicked it off.
They did the first one.
And then we all did one each day.
The only important one is mine, obviously, but you just want to skip ahead to that or maybe just watch some of the others to see how it's not done.
But we'll continue all of this week.
It's at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
All Access Live is a lot more relaxed than our normal programming.
It's less focused on bringing you news and information and more about sitting down with you at the end of a long day.
We've been getting a lot of amazing messages.
I got to tell you, by the way, I love this.
I love communicating with you.
I'd so much rather talk to you than just hear myself talk.
I'm interested in your opinions.
I'm interested in what's bugging you.
I'm interested in your questions and answer them the best I can.
And I just like hearing you're there.
I like hearing you say hello.
I think these live streams are great for not just our viewers, but they're great for us.
So thank you for showing up.
The show is intended for our all-access members, but during this national emergency and time of isolation, we've opened it up to all our members and in so doing so accelerated the launch.
So please let us know what you think of it.
If you're around at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific tonight and all week, join us on the All Access Live Show over at dailywire.com.
Come on over to dailywire.com and subscribe so you get all the good stuff.
So let's talk about Trump a little bit, you know, because I'm not here to blow smoke.
I mean, if he's, you know, I've said he said some dopey things, but it seems to me that he is doing as good a job as anyone could do in the current situation.
The only other path he could possibly take is not do any of this and just let the disease take its course.
It seems that that would be a disaster.
Everybody is saying that that would be a disaster, that that would overwhelm our systems.
So it seems like he's doing the only thing.
Remember that a lot of the shutdowns we're getting, New York, Illinois, and LA, those are state decisions, and those are the hotspots.
Those are the places where things are worse.
So you do want a state-by-state reaction because it's going to be different in places like Montana, where there are six people in a lot of territory.
It's going to be a different situation than it is in New York, where everybody's packed densely onto this little island.
So Biden is, you know, a lot of the things that like Biden has been like Waldo, but he has been sending out his representatives to attack Trump.
Reasons For Concern00:07:53
And he sent out Ron Klain.
Now, if you don't remember Ron Klain, Klain was the chief of staff to Biden, and I think before that, he was the chief of staff to Al Gore, and he also coordinated the Ebola response.
So they've put out an ad of him attacking Donald Trump.
I want to make sure we get the right claim thing.
It is the one, yeah, Cut 15.
A word on how things got so bad.
The coronavirus that's been spreading around the world started spreading in January of 2020.
Some countries acted quickly.
What did President Trump do?
He downplayed it.
It's going to disappear.
One day it's like a miracle.
It will disappear.
Trump's slow response to this crisis is no surprise.
Back in 2015, when I finished serving as a White House Ebola Response Coordinator, I urged President Obama and Vice President Biden to set up a permanent White House Pandemic Prevention Response Office so we'd be ready for the next one.
They did, and that office was doing a great job.
But in 2018, Donald Trump abolished that office.
All right.
So first, I love these guys.
First, the reason I love politics is because corruption makes me laugh.
First, let's take a look at what Klain himself was saying in February, all right, a month after this thing got started.
This is Klain doing an interview in February.
Leading medical experts didn't know it existed six weeks ago.
And so there's just a lot of uncertainty about the basics.
Uncertainty about how infectious it truly is, how much it's going to spread, how much it's spread already in China, how much we should expect it to spread outside of China.
Doubts about how lethal it is.
What will the fatality rate, the rate of serious illnesses wind up being?
So what I'd say is I think we have reason to be concerned.
I think there's reason for the U.S. to be more aggressive in the response than what's been mounted so far in many respects.
reason to be prepared for something, but I think no reason yet to be fearful, no reason to really panic or anything like that.
I just think there are just a lot of unknowns about this virus and what its path is going to be.
He's saying no need to panic.
Absolutely.
Everything's fine.
You know, this is in February when Trump is already on the case closing borders and things like that.
So, you know, again, I understand that people are acting in the dark, and I understand that Trump does say things and always wants to take the optimistic path and all that stuff.
And that's a good trait for a businessman.
Sometimes not the right thing to do for a president.
You have to be realistic as well as being optimistic.
But obviously, people didn't know.
So Matt Margolis of PJ Media, he's put together what he calls the top 10 lies about President Trump's response to the coronavirus.
And I won't read it, but I'll just go through it.
Number 10 was that Trump downplayed the mortality rate of the coronavirus.
And this is the idea that Trump says it wasn't going to be bad when he went on Hannity.
Remember, he said, I think the 3.4% death rate is really a false number.
And Trump was almost certainly right about this.
He wasn't downplaying the mortality rate.
He was talking about the fact that without the testing, we think there are fewer cases than there are.
So the percentage is going to get lower as the more cases come in.
And it does look, it has hovered around 1%, which is still 10 times, I think, right?
Yeah, 10 times worse than the flu.
So it's bad.
It's not a good thing.
But still, we don't even know if that is going to be true because these things do peak at certain times.
We don't know what it's going to be like over time.
And we don't know what drugs they're going to find that are going to help and what's going to help.
Another lie.
Trump lied when he said Google was developing a national coronavirus website.
I didn't cover this because it was so stupid.
But he said, I want to thank Google.
Google is helping to develop a website.
It's going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing.
Google confirmed this in a tweet after Trump's remarks, but the media seemed intent on calling Trump's claim false.
HuffPost literally called Trump's claim a lie because the site was actually being developed by a subservience of Google's parent company.
I mean, this is the way the press is operating.
And think about whether that, you know, again, they have the right to criticize Trump.
Of course they do.
They have the right not to like him.
They have a right to do all those things.
But you do want to have some kind of sense of patriotism.
You do want to understand that people are afraid.
People are locked away.
People are losing money.
All these things are true.
You do want to get some kind of, you do want to say, hey, I know our job is to destroy Donald Trump, but maybe we should put that job aside and actually do something different, like give people the news.
This is the big one that really has bugged me.
Trump dissolved the White House Pandemic Response Office.
Obviously, I read on the air that there was a Washington Post, Washington Post ran an opinion piece by Elizabeth Cameron, who ran the White House pandemic office under Obama, alleging that Trump had dissolved the office in 2018.
And this claim was thrown around by everybody.
But in fact, what he did was he consolidated three different groups, which was saving money and saving and making it more efficient.
So it was completely untrue.
The Washington Post did run an article correcting that.
But of course, the lies go out to millions.
The corrections go out to thousands.
Another one, Trump ignored early intel briefings on possible pandemic.
WAPO, again, was the source of this.
Another bogus claim when they reported that intelligence agencies warned about a possible pandemic back in January and February and that Trump failed to take action.
It was fake news.
The Trump administration had been aggressively addressing the coronavirus threat immediately after China reported the discovery of the coronavirus to the World Health Organization.
In actuality, in addition to implementing various precautionary travel restrictions, the administration fast-tracked the use of testing kits.
In actuality, it was Trump's critics who weren't taking the coronavirus situation seriously.
Joe Biden, I remember this, he even accused Trump of fear-mongering and xenophobia for his travel ban.
I mean, this is, you know, it amazes me.
What I love about this is these guys are like psychopaths.
They do these horrible things.
The press does these horrible things.
And then when they're attacked and when Trump goes off on them, it's like, he's us?
You're attacking us, who everybody loves?
You're attacking, you're attacking.
When you attack us, you attack the First Amendment.
They're liars.
They're liars and they have an agenda and that's what they're selling.
Another lie, Trump cut funding to the CDC and NIH.
That's not true.
He increased funding.
And Trump muzzled Dr. Fauci.
Obviously, Fauci himself said this is not true.
He says, I've never been muzzled ever and I've been doing this since Reagan.
He said, I'm not being muzzled by this administration.
And obviously, he's not.
He's gotten up and sometimes contradicted something that Trump said, or at least said it differently.
Not only is he not being muzzled, Trump is obviously listening to him.
Another one, Trump told governors they were on their own.
We covered that.
That was an amazing thing where Trump said, you know, it's faster to go to the source to get the medical equipment you need.
So go there yourself and we'll back you up if you can't get them there.
But it would be faster if you get them yourself.
And they just said, they cut all that out, just said, get it yourself.
And of course, again, they issue corrections, but the lie goes out to millions.
The corrections go out to thousands and they know it.
They know it.
Trump turned down testing kits from WHO, a political hit piece from early March, claimed that the World Health Organization offered the United States coronavirus testing kits, but he refused to accept them.
Also not true.
There were no discussions between WHO and CDC about who providing COVID-19 tests to the United States.
And the big one, of course, is that Trump called the coronavirus a hoax.
AOC said this on Jake Tapper, repeated this lie.
He never said it.
He said that the way the press was treating it was a hoax.
The way the press was trying to use it as his Katrina, his, you know, his big downfall.
That's what they've been trying to do.
Trump has gotten it right.
He's right.
Trump has gotten it right more often than people give him any credit for.
Elizabeth Moss's Haunting Performance00:03:06
He is doing a good job.
All right.
A final reflection, because, and this is, I think, the most important thing of all.
What do we watch on television while this is going on, while we're locked away?
Interestingly, they're releasing a couple of first-run movies, movies that would be in the theater, and they put them on pay-per-view and on Amazon Prime.
They're 20 bucks, which is expensive, but if you're watching them with your spouse, that's 10 bucks for a first-run movie, so not as bad.
We watched, my wife and I watched The Invisible Man with Elizabeth Moss.
This is by Lee Winnell, who is a talented guy.
He's written a lot of good horror stuff.
I think he wrote Insidious, which was kind of scary.
And he wrote, what did he write?
He wrote Dead Silence, Insidious, and Insidious Chapter 2.
And he's made this film, The Invisible Man.
Elizabeth Moss, really good performances.
Elizabeth Moss, she plays a girl who has escaped from an abusive relationship.
And then the guy allegedly kills himself.
This is early on in the picture.
And now she claims he's come back and he's invisible.
Here's a quick clip.
He has figured out a way to be invisible.
You know exactly what I'm talking about.
He's not dead.
I just can't see him.
Okay.
No, I agree with you.
Adrian was brilliant, but it wasn't because of anything he invented.
It was how he got in people's heads.
You think about it.
He came up with the perfect way to torture you even in death.
So it's a beat-by-beat thriller.
It's nothing really original.
It has two really good scenes in it that are above grade, but mostly it's just a real good programmer, kind of a B-movie, but really well done and very fun and exciting and not too scary.
So my wife would watch it, which I appreciated.
And it's uplifted by a lot of star power.
Elizabeth Moss is excellent.
As you see there, she plays the part really well because she's not like complete, you know, she's a personality who has been almost destroyed by this guy.
And she plays it like that.
She plays it that she's really hurt.
And she plays when she's talking, she looks crazy.
So even you wouldn't believe her, which is really good.
The guy who's sitting next to her, if you're watching the clip, the black guy is named Aldous Hodge.
He's terrific.
I mean, he has very tough to be kind of the male presence in a female-led drama.
You know, it's very tough not to look kind of second rate and weak, but he really plays this part well.
And Storm Reed, who was in another picture called, I think it was called Don't Let Go.
She plays the young girl, Aldous Hodge's daughter, terrific actress.
They really have a lot of charisma is the word I'm looking for, and they all do a great job.
We really enjoyed it.
Took us out of ourselves for a couple hours, which is what you're looking for right now, The Invisible Man, if you can afford the 20 bucks and have somebody to watch it with to cut the price.
Definitely worth your while.
All right.
Stay cool.
We'll be back again tomorrow with more.
And we're going to stay cool as well.
Austin Stevens' Touch00:01:11
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