The market jumps two thousand points, scientific studies show coronavirus hope on the horizon, a new drug is helping patients, and President Trump is calling for America to reopen by Easter Sunday. We will examine all the excellent news after weeks of apocalyptic headlines. Then, the Trump administration announces the largest stimulus package in American history. We’ll break down conservatives’ conflicting emotions on the massive government spending. And finally, Bernie Sanders refuses to drop out of the race, and Sleepy Joe somehow manages to deteriorate even further on national television.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://www.dailywire.com/coldwar. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership.
If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/Knowles
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Scientific studies show coronavirus hope on the horizon.
A new drug is helping patients.
And President Trump is calling for America to reopen by Easter Sunday.
Then the Trump administration announces the largest stimulus package in American history.
We'll break down conservatives' conflicting emotions on massive government spending.
And finally, Bernie Sanders refuses to drop out of the race.
And Sleepy Joe somehow manages to deteriorate even further on national television.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
What a good day it was yesterday.
day.
You know, it's so funny.
There was such great news that came out on the scientific front, on the political front from President Trump.
There's a real irony here, which is that when California went on lockdown, L.A. went on lockdown a little bit earlier, at the Daily Wire they decided, okay, they're going to turn my apartment into a studio so that we can comply with this lockdown.
But my internet was so bad that they had to wait a little bit, you know, and we were just going to the studio.
I'm not exactly afraid of this thing.
So they are fixing up my apartment and everything.
They finally get it ready to go.
And then we get this great news.
President Trump says he wants to reopen America by Easter.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
President Trump gave a town hall yesterday on Fox News.
The thing was great.
He's really shined in these press conferences.
I mean, as we know, President Trump is basically his own press secretary.
This is his...
You know, I mean, he's a reality TV star.
He just knows how to work the cameras.
And so he did this town hall yesterday.
It really calmed a lot of fears.
The market responded during the town hall.
And he said, we are almost ready to reopen America.
You know, the allotted two weeks, but we'll stay a little bit longer than that.
But we want to get open very soon.
I think that was a big reason it's gone up.
I also think that the fact that the Senate and the House, we seem to be getting along as much as you can get along.
We seem to be getting along now on a on a bill.
I think that maybe had even less of an impact than the fact that we're opening up this incredible country because we have to do that.
I'd love to have it open by Easter.
Okay, I would love to have it open by Easter.
I will tell you that right now.
I would love to have that.
It's such an important day for other reasons, but I'll make it an important day for this, too.
I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.
This was an absolutely brilliant announcement for a few different reasons.
First reason is the science.
Increasingly the evidence is showing that this virus, this pandemic, this epidemic, whatever you want to call it, has been hyped by the media.
Increasingly science is showing that actually the mortality rates might be significantly lower than we think they are.
We'll get into why.
I mean, these are not just crackpot theories.
These are coming out of the top research institutions in the country.
So that's one reason.
As the evidence is increasingly in favor of, let's get closer to normal, let's start bringing things back, President Trump is able to bring that to the American people.
You know, he played this pretty cautiously for the last couple of weeks.
Now, however, he's got pretty solid footing to start to get the economy going again.
Second reason this was brilliant is it made news.
You can hear it there.
Bill Hemmer and Harris Faulkner are shocked.
They're the ones interviewing Trump.
And they said, what?
Hold on, you're saying this is about to reopen at Easter?
And they actually kept going back to that talking point throughout the town hall.
And then later on, Trump was on Bill Hemmer's show.
They kept going back to that.
That was obviously the news of the day.
Trump had that in his pocket.
So he knew that was going to be the big story.
But the third reason this is so smart to get this out here is the symbolism of it.
We will get to that in one second.
First, I got to thank our friends over at LegalZoom.
Man, you think the economy is a little shaky right now?
Imagine how it's going to look for you if you fall into legal trouble.
That is why you've got to check out LegalZoom.
I can just speak to this personally.
I have used LegalZoom for years and years, long before The Daily Wire existed, on multiple companies.
They are who I trust to handle all of my business legal-related needs.
I think these guys make it so simple that even somebody who knows very little about the workings of business law can deal with them.
They're so, so great.
LLCs, DBAs, S-Corps.
I've used them for LLCs and S-Corps.
They all mean different things when it comes to paying taxes and limiting your personal liability.
There's a lot to think about.
LegalZoom makes it so you don't need to worry about doing all the legwork yourself to find the right answers.
They have a ton of resources, including their network of independent attorneys and tax professionals.
And since LegalZoom isn't a law firm, you will save time and money while avoiding hourly fees.
Use the guys that I trust.
The price is so unbelievably low and the quality is so unbelievably high.
Get your business on the right track for 2020 by visiting LegalZoom.com.
I wonder if I can use my own code for all the work I do at LegalZoom.
Maybe I'll try to do that, save a little bit of money.
That's LegalZoom.com, code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, LegalZoom, where life meets legal.
So, President Trump announces he wants America to reopen at Easter.
Smart on the science, smart on the news, but the other reason he's really smart is the symbolism of this, okay?
Trump is a guy who understands the power of symbols.
He understands the power of visuals.
The guy is a TV star.
He's been a pop culture icon for 40 years at this point, okay?
If President Trump had done this interview, and Bill Hemmer says, okay...
When do you think you're going to try to get things going again?
He goes, well, I think maybe by April 12th we'll start to get America back on the right track.
No one would have paid any attention.
Now, Easter is April 12th, but that date, it's just like, okay, well, alright, so a couple weeks from now, more than a couple weeks, and then we'll start to ramp up.
But Easter has significance, right?
Easter carries so much more meaning.
Easter is a day associated with joy.
Nice holiday you spend with your family.
Easter is a day associated with spring.
Springtime is here, certainly by mid-April.
That's happier time.
We're coming out of winter now.
And most importantly, Easter is the day associated with resurrection.
And right now, we've ground our economy.
We've ground our whole country to a halt.
We're locked in our apartments doing nothing.
And to have that image, that day of Easter is the day that we are going to break free, we are going to come back to life.
That is so significant.
There is a strange coincidence here, or providence maybe, that this epidemic has taken place during Lent.
It pretty much began on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of this penitential season of Lent.
And now, as some of us had predicted, it looks as though President Trump wants to...
End it.
Wants to bring us back to some sense of the normal by Easter, which would be the end of Lent.
Makes a whole lot of sense.
For it to end on Easter would be poetic, and it's really, really smart for Trump to bring it out that way.
So, that part of the conference went very well.
Why?
Why does President Trump think that we'll be able to do this?
Part of it is our testing has gotten a whole lot better.
And so it's not only that our knowledge of the virus has gotten better, but our testing has gotten better too.
Dr.
Birx, who's one of the health experts on the Trump coronavirus team, also broke this news during the town hall.
I just want to speak to the Americans for just a second, though.
We have to ensure that we still are testing, even though probably by today we will have done more tests than South Korea did in eight weeks, in the last eight days.
In the last eight days, we've done more testing than South Korea.
But we did that because we transformed the testing process as the president spoke to.
I didn't even know, I just heard the number for the first time from Deborah, that in a short period of time we've done more testing than South Korea.
Now, you're not going to read that in the newspapers because they don't like to write things like that.
But I'd love you to say that one more time because that's a big number.
We've done more than South Korea in a short period of time.
We're doing more now than South Korea by a lot.
That's right.
We're doing more on South Korea right now in the last eight days.
Trump just knows the medium, right?
It's the same principle as to why he announces that he wants to end this all on Easter.
He says the newspapers aren't going to report on this, but that's a big number.
We are doing so much.
So...
We're getting maybe a little bit conflicting signals, right?
I actually don't think they're conflicting, but the mainstream press thinks that they are.
On the one hand, Trump is saying we're taking this super-duper seriously.
We're doing so much testing, more testing than South Korea.
We're sending ventilators to everybody.
We're taking this as seriously as possible.
Also, we're going to end this thing by Easter.
Are those conflicting?
I don't really think so.
We'll get into why in just a moment.
This is all great news.
Question is, are we celebrating too soon, right?
We've been told for weeks now that millions of Americans are going to die if we don't completely shut down the country.
Now we're being told, not as big a deal, a couple more weeks and we'll get this thing going again.
Which is it?
Well, you've heard on CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times that From every health expert who says that we're all going to die.
Now some health experts are pushing back on that claim.
One huge heavyweight in particular is weighing in.
This would be the 2013 Nobel laureate Michael Levitt is a Stanford biology professor, a celebrated scientist.
He is saying that his models for the coronavirus do not support predictions that the virus will wreak months or even years of social disruption or cause millions of deaths.
He said, quote, what we need is to control the panic.
We are going to be fine.
Okay, very helpful.
Does he have credibility here?
Yes.
Michael Levitt accurately predicted what was going on in China.
So, his report on China said the country would peak in 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths.
What happened in reality?
China reported 81,588 cases with 3,281 deaths.
It gives you a lot of credibility here.
He's saying, we're going to be fine.
We don't need to panic.
Is it just him?
No.
Two other professors of medicine, coincidentally also at Stanford, are coming out and saying basically the same thing.
So there's an amazing op-ed right now in the Wall Street Journal.
The headline is, is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?
This is by Aaron Ben-David and Jay Bhattacharya.
From the top of the headline, it's true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines.
Then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
But there is little evidence to confirm that premise and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
So, right, if the predictions that we're getting are true, then yeah, of course we should lock down and shut down the country.
But are the prediction models true?
They have a lot of evidence to say that they're not.
Fear of COVID-19 is based on high estimates of its case fatality rate.
2% to 4% of people with confirmed COVID-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others.
So, if 100 million Americans get the disease...
2 million to 4 million could die.
Remember, that's what we were told at the beginning of all of this.
You want to see 2 million Americans dead?
You want to see more than 2 million Americans dead?
Well, if not, you've got to shut down the country.
We believe that estimate is deeply flawed.
The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.
So the point they're making is...
Point that we've started to hear a little bit more in the UK and elsewhere, which is that, hmm, maybe the number of people who have this virus is a lot higher than we think it is.
Because we're just looking at the percentage of people who get sick and they're so sick that they go to the doctor and then they get diagnosed and then either they recover or they don't recover.
But, what about people who just, you know, have mild symptoms, like a lot of young people, and don't even get diagnosed with the virus?
How many people have you spoken to who said, you know, I think I had that virus about a month and a half ago?
I think I told you that.
I think I had the virus about a month and a half ago.
I don't think that right now it's possible to test for antibodies, otherwise I would to see if I had it in the past.
But, if I did have it, I certainly didn't get diagnosed with it.
So, I would not be counted among the people who were infected, and therefore...
If a lot of people who were infected aren't counted then the mortality rate is going to be much higher in the reports than it actually is.
It says, it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills 2 million, of course.
I mean, if you don't, it just depends how many people are in the denominator, right?
So the authors here, the Stanford scientists, use the example of this northeastern Italian town of Vo, near the provincial capital of Padua.
So on March 6th, Every person involved was tested, 3,300 people.
They tested the entire population.
90 were positive, which means 2.7% of the population was positive.
If you apply that prevalence to the entire population of the province, population there is 955,000, And they had 198 reported cases.
That suggests that actually it wasn't 198 cases total.
It was closer to 26,000 infections at the time.
Which is 130-fold more than the actual cases reported.
Now Italy's fatality rate is 8% among those who have been diagnosed with the virus.
But if you factor in this possibly much higher percentage of people who were infected, the fatality rate could be closer to 0.06%, which is what people were suggesting in the beginning when they were making comparisons to the flu.
Really pleased to see op-eds like this coming out from people who have some expertise in this field because so far, I think, a lot of public health experts who have disagreed with the prevailing alarmist consensus have kept their mouths shut because, Because we've been told that if you even suggest that the virus is not as bad as people say it is, that you're going to be responsible for deaths and encouraging people to go out and for killing people.
But now you've got the Wall Street Journal, two major scientists saying it.
You had the Yale scientist come out in the New York Times just the other day, say basically the same thing.
You have this Nobel laureate, Michael Levitt, come out saying basically the same thing.
So you're getting a lot of...
Dissenters on the scientific side.
A lot of people saying, calm down.
And it's not just here in the US. The best scientific news recently is actually out of the UK. So initially, the UK, when they were reacting to coronavirus, followed the more conservative model.
Conservative model being herd immunity.
You take the people who are very at risk, immune compromised, pre-existing conditions, over 70, and you just say stay at home and don't talk to your grandkids and just quarantine yourself.
The rest of us will go out, we will be in the population, we'll be doing things.
And some people will get the virus.
The vast, vast, vast majority, a very small...
The vast majority will be fine.
A very, very tiny minority of people will have complications from this and be hospitalized.
But then people will be immune.
It will be much harder to pass this virus along.
And this is what we've done for...
A lot of other public health issues.
That was what they were doing initially.
Then they changed their mind based on a study out of the UK's Imperial College.
Now it turns out that study might be deeply flawed.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, I've got to thank our friends over at Raycon.
You know how much I love Raycon?
Raycon has a brand new model out.
The Everyday E25 Earbuds.
They are the best earbuds yet.
So you know people are walking around with their very, very overpriced earbuds.
Earbuds, I'm not going to use any names or anything, but they kind of make you look like, Drew says they make you look like a bug, you know, those very popular overpriced ones.
There are so many better options on the market, and they just so happen to come from Raycon.
Raycon's wireless earbuds are comfortable.
They're perfect for on-the-go listening and for taking phone calls.
The sound quality is superb.
I've been giving Raycons to my family members.
I just love them.
They're a tremendous choice.
They'll save you some money, too, and you won't have to sacrifice quality.
They are discreet.
They're much more stylish than the other options on the market.
Get 15% off your order today at buyraycon.com slash Knowles.
That's buyraycon.com slash Knowles for 15% off Raycon wireless earbuds.
Buyraycon.com slash Knowles.
K-N-O-W-L-E-S. So the UK's freakout was based on what looks to be a possibly very flawed study from Imperial College.
The Imperial College study predicted many thousands of deaths, even among young people.
So you had the Boris Johnson conservative Tory government pursuing this herd immunity model where you're not going to shut down the entire economy, you're just going to quarantine the people who are at risk.
Then, this study comes out and says, actually, even the people that you think are healthy are not going to be healthy.
They're going to be in serious trouble.
Many thousands of young people are going to die.
So, Boris Johnson does the only thing he can do.
He switches strategy into the shutdown strategy that we've got here in the United States.
Now, there's a new study out of Oxford which says, much like these other ones, that the death projections are way off because, the same reason, they're significantly underestimating the number of people in the UK who already have the virus.
This is from the new study.
Professor Gupta is the one who is writing this.
She writes, She's a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford.
She led the study.
The vast majority develop very mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.
So there's a chance you're walking around with this thing you don't even know.
Actually, speaking of the UK, it turns out Prince Charles has been diagnosed with coronavirus.
And you think of this as like, oh my gosh, he's in the at-risk age group, the guy's going to die, the monarchy's in question.
The palace reports he has mild symptoms, he's self-quarantining.
Now some people face serious symptoms, but a lot of people do not.
Gupta said, I'm surprised that there has been such an unqualified acceptance of the imperial model.
And that's not just Imperial College's fault, that's the fault of all of us, and especially political leaders.
Activists, and especially the mainstream media, who have looked consistently to the most alarming predictions and accepted those as gospel truth, rather than trying to take a more balanced look.
I mean, President Trump said at this town hall the other day, or yesterday, he said, we've never done this before.
We've never shut down the country over a public health question.
We've never shut down the world economy.
Think about how many people died from H1N1 flu before we really did very much of anything about it.
But we've reacted much more strongly to this coronavirus.
Maybe the science doesn't back that up.
Actually, there's even more good news, which is that the virus is apparently not mutating very much.
Now, if the virus mutates, that means that drugs you develop to fight the virus are not going to be as effective at fighting the virus.
Also, if the virus mutates, it means that if you've already gotten it and you're immune, that you might not be immune forever because you'll have a significantly different virus to fight off in the future.
Luckily, this virus is not mutating very much, which means that the drugs might work and the immunity might hold.
So that's the scientific front.
What does this mean for Trump politically?
Both the virus and the apparently new response to the virus.
Some experts are saying Trump is, experts, I put in quotes, are saying that Trump is totally destroying his political goodwill here.
I think it's exactly the opposite.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, I've got to thank our friends over at Ring.
Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer, right?
Ring gives you protection at every single corner.
Helps you create custom, affordable security for your home.
How does it work?
Ring detects motion when people come onto your property, and Ring's video doorbells let you answer the door and check in on your home anytime from anywhere.
So you could be at home, you could be at the office, you could be in quarantine, you could be who knows where you could be.
You can check in on your home.
I really like this, especially when I'm on the road.
You know, sweet little Lisa's a good shot, but I like to make sure that she's safe.
Whether you're getting a package delivered or whether some guy's trying to bust in and do you harm, you can check it out.
And by the way, if the burglar steals your ring, it gets uploaded to the cloud so you won't lose it.
Get a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit right now when you go to ring.com slash Knowles.
The Welcome Kit includes the Ring Video Doorbell 2 and Chime Pro.
It's all you need to start building custom security for your home today.
Ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S.
That's Ring.com slash Knowles.
So as more experts are coming out saying that maybe we've overreacted, Trump has pivoted back.
And this is confusing pundits who think that this is politically unproductive or counterproductive for Trump.
So initially, right, Trump says, hey, let's not overreact to this thing.
Let's remain calm.
Let's see what the science says.
He had a decent approval rating on the virus, but then the approval rating started to fall as all of the stories about the virus killing millions of people started to come out.
The virus didn't really kill millions of people, but the stories said that the virus would kill millions of people.
So his approval rating drops.
People thought he wasn't taking it seriously enough.
Then he starts taking it more seriously, and the approval rating goes up again.
Okay, that's good.
But now President Trump is saying, maybe we'll be back open for business by Easter.
And his poll numbers are still doing very well.
How do you make sense of this?
Gallup is showing his approval rating surging.
60% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of combating coronavirus.
60%.
Now, that's Gallup.
You know, Gallup isn't always the friendliest poll to Trump.
49% overall approve of his job performance.
That includes 94% of Republicans.
27% of Democrats.
That's too bad.
And 60% of Independents.
That's good.
But what's important here is the movement.
So among Democrats, his approval rating has gone up 6 points during coronavirus.
Among independents, his approval rating has gone up eight points during coronavirus.
How is that?
How is this happening?
People want a president to take it seriously, but we don't want to shut down the entire economy.
And I think Trump is thinking about one week ahead here.
So, So, one week ahead, this whole thing really stops being fun.
You had last week massive unemployment claims, more unemployment claims than we saw at the peak of the 2009 financial crisis.
We are going to see that increase.
I mean, just the other day, Marriott laid off another many, many thousands of people.
So many businesses are laying off people, if not going out of business, altogether.
So Trump is looking ahead.
People might have wanted him to take this virus super-duper as seriously as humanly possible a week ago.
Is that going to be true a week from now?
Probably not.
Especially if the new scientific information that's coming out all over the globe is accurate.
They're not going to want to shut down the global economy if the mortality rate is as low as 0.06%.
I mean, we don't do that for any other...
Threat to our lives or safety or health, do we?
We don't do that for the flu.
We don't do that for car accidents.
This, in particular, for some reason the mainstream media are pushing this.
We'll get to why in just a moment.
The other way you know that the tide is turning on coronavirus is that even some celebrities now are making fun of the reaction to coronavirus.
So, Ryan Reynolds, very funny Hollywood star, he's come out and he's mocking all of these self-obsessed slacktivists who are creating the hysteria.
Well, thank you, Prime Minister Trudeau.
We need to work together to flatten the curve and fight off COVID-19.
I think in times of crisis, I think we all know that it's the celebrities that we count on most.
They're the ones who are going to get us through this.
Right after healthcare workers, of course, first responders, people who work in essential services, ping pong players.
Mannequins.
They're great.
Childhood imaginary friends.
Sure.
Like 400 other types of people.
Look, stay at home.
Practice social distancing.
Wash your hands.
We are going to get through this thing.
We're going to get through this thing together.
And I'd like to nominate these three great Canadians to spread the word.
Mr.
Stephen Page, Constable Terry Reynolds of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Mr.
Seth Rogen of the Alright, so this stands in stark contrast to the Imagine video the other day of all those celebrities, some of whom I've never even seen before, singing Imagine.
It's really sentimental and touchy-feely and come on, guys.
And Ryan Reynolds comes out and he goes, yeah, celebrities should shut up and wash your hands.
Okay?
Like, we'll be fine.
Alright, calm down.
This is all very promising news.
Even if we start winding things down by Easter, though, that's still over two weeks away.
Analysts right now are predicting 20% unemployment.
Huge losses are happening right now.
The market rebounded a lot yesterday, though right now it's unclear how the market's reacting.
So...
What are we going to do in the meantime?
We're going to pass the largest economic stimulus package in history.
Hmm.
How should conservatives feel about that?
We tend not to love economic stimulus packages.
Should we get behind this one, which is truly the largest in history?
We will break down what's going on.
Then we'll get a little bit into the 2020 race.
You remember the 2020 race?
Me neither.
It's been completely out of the news for a few weeks, and that's been very helpful to the Democratic 2020 contenders, because the more you see of them, the less you like them.
Maybe that's their strategy.
We'll get to all of that, but first, you've got to head on over to dailywire.com.
You know, we have launched this new show, All Access Live.
And I say it's a show.
I mean, we turn on a webcam.
That's what the show is.
But this is for our All Access members.
And during quarantine, we've been making this available to all of our members because we know, you know, you're kind of locked in your apartments and we want to hang out.
We're locked in our apartments.
You can see.
Welcome to my humble abode, Shay Knowles.
So it's been a lot of fun.
Ben and Jeremy kicked it off.
I did one last night.
We're going to bring these to you constantly throughout the The coronavirus quarantine.
And even afterward, we're going to bring it, but we're only going to give it then to All Access members.
So head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Do that right now.
And by the way, while you're there, get your mailbag questions in.
We'll be doing that tomorrow.
We'll be right back in just a moment.
We've got the largest stimulus package ever in United States history being passed by a Republican president and Republican Senate.
That's unusual.
That doesn't usually happen, does it?
Here is President Trump's top economist Larry Kudlow announcing the package yesterday.
This package will be the single largest Main Street assistance program in the history of the United States.
The single largest Main Street assistance program in the history of the United States.
Phase 2 delivered the sick leave for individuals, hourly workers, families, and so forth.
Phase 3, a significant package for small businesses.
Loan guarantees will be included.
We're going to take out expenses and lost revenues.
As the President said, eligibility requires worker retention.
We will maintain, the people eligible will maintain their payrolls during this crisis period.
And, on top of that, we will have direct deposit checks of roughly $3,000 for a family of four, and that will bridge to enhanced, plussed-up unemployment insurance benefits that will essentially take those up to full wages.
You know, there's a Yiddish expression, which I can't pronounce because I don't speak Yiddish, but I can give you the English translation.
The expression is, if you're going to eat pork, eat it till your mouth drips.
If you're going to eat pork, enjoy it.
And I think that's what's going on with this stimulus package.
Republicans don't love stimulus packages, okay?
We don't want to be in the position where we've got to pass stimulus packages.
We like the economy to hum along until three weeks ago we had the best economy in the history of the world.
Now Republicans are forced into this position where we have to put a stimulus package out there because of totally...
And so there are two ways to do it.
Either you can do a tepid stimulus that's very small, and you do it kind of reluctantly, or you can pass the biggest stimulus package in history, make sure it has some impact, and if you're going to eat pork, you're going to enjoy it.
This thing is massive, okay?
It includes $2 trillion in direct assistance.
It includes another $4 trillion in Federal Reserve lending power.
So the overall effect of the stimulus package is about $6 trillion.
Now, I guess the silver lining here is that...
Four, four and a half trillion dollars of the stimulus package isn't lending.
It's not in just direct payouts.
So I guess that's a good thing.
Still, what should conservatives think about this?
Remember when we hammered Barack Obama over his stimulus package in 2009?
Remember when we hammered him on that for like 10 years?
Now we're passing a much larger stimulus package.
Still, these are different situations.
Conservatives should always be skeptical of these massive government interventions.
Conservatives should always be skeptical of direct checks from the government to the people.
But this is fundamentally different from the 2009 financial crisis.
In the 2009 financial crisis, the financial institutions that got bailed out were very often responsible for the crisis in the first place.
So not all the time.
In some cases, the government was responsible for putting financial institutions in a position where they had to make decisions that were not very wise.
But in other cases, these big financial institutions just knew that they would get bailed out.
So it was not a fair market.
It wasn't a fair gamble.
It's like going to a casino and saying you're going to play and then if you win money, then you're going to take the money out of the casino and if you lose money, the casino's got to pay.
That's what these financial institutions were doing.
And so the bailout really irritated a lot of people.
This is different here.
The people who are getting bailed out are not to blame at all for what's going on right now.
Coronavirus is to blame.
China is to blame.
But not the individuals who are going to get bailouts, and not the businesses who are going to get bailouts.
These businesses and individuals were doing just fine and dandy.
We had the best economy ever in the history of the world.
And then this damned virus comes out of communist China, and China covered it up for so many weeks that it spread throughout the entire world.
And all of a sudden, the government comes in and says, you've got to shut down your business.
You can't make any more money.
You can't leave your apartment.
That's not their fault.
I mean, if the government is going to come in and do that and force the economy to shut down, then the government has some responsibility to make up the difference here.
People got to eat.
People got to live.
How are we going to do that?
One possibility for how to recover from this total shutdown is to force...
Basically, waiters and bartenders and people who are a little more vulnerable in the economy than big bankers to foot the entire bill.
Retail workers, these are the people who are being laid off, these are the people who are being most hurt by the crisis.
To say nothing of the restaurants and the retail stores.
So you can either force them to pick up the whole brunt of it, or we can all pick up some of the brunt of it.
And we can all pick it up through our duly elected representatives who we put into office who are passing this bailout package.
Kudlow explains this theory here in pretty simple terms.
Strong workforce requires strong business.
You can't have a job without a business to work for.
And the hope here is that the companies that were operating very well at the beginning of the year when the economy was in good shape, we will help them and their employees get through this tough period So they will come out the other side, let's say later this spring or summer, and will continue their operations.
That's the key point.
Alright, I really like Larry Kudlow, and I really like what he's saying here.
Unlike the Democrat bailouts in 2009, there's no class warfare here.
Democrat bailouts any of the time, right?
Even as the Democrats are passing this big bailout, they're talking about the 1% and how evil the rich people are and the financial people.
Larry Kudlow's not doing that.
He's not vilifying the business owners, on the one hand.
He's not vilifying the low-wage workers, on the other hand.
Remember Mitt Romney's 47%?
Mitt Romney said 47% of Americans are basically leeches.
And that was filmed and probably cost him the presidency.
Certainly didn't help his campaign.
Larry Kudlow is not doing either of those.
He's saying, hey guys, this thing happened.
Totally unexpected.
Came out of nowhere.
We've got to help the workers.
If we're going to help the workers, we also have to help the businesses because you can't be a worker if you don't have a business that you can work for.
He's just calling it like it is.
Now, there's a lot of other stuff in this bailout as well.
There are tax deferrals for corporations and individuals.
I really like that.
Pushing the tax deadline.
There's student loan deferrals.
That's probably a smart idea, especially now if students aren't able to even go to class for the next six months or something.
A lot of schools have shut down for the rest of the year.
They're not coming back until the fall.
So it makes sense, I think, to defer those student loans.
Do we need the bailout?
Probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, we ground the entire national economy to a halt artificially, and we can't just let all of those businesses collapse.
If this had been a normal, regular part of the economic cycle, then there's a very strong argument to let things play out as they will.
But this was not normal at all.
There's nothing normal about coronavirus.
The most important takeaway, I think, from all of this is we need to recognize that coronavirus has a cost.
The days that you've gotten off from work, those have a cost.
Those don't just come from nowhere.
Not dealing tougher with China in the past, allowing ourselves to get hooked on cheap Chinese goods, and allowing China to manufacture our medicine for the past however many years, that has a cost.
Open borders has a cost.
We are now paying for that cost.
And the question is, who's going to bear it?
Is it going to be these...
Waiters and bartenders, or are we all going to bear it?
Probably we're all going to bear it.
So overall, this was a great day yesterday for President Trump.
Great day for the markets.
I think it was the single largest market gain ever.
Market rose over 2,000 points.
It was just a great day for America.
So now we see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We need to turn our attention to that other minor political matter, perhaps you've forgotten about it, the 2020 presidential election.
I'm sure you've forgotten about it because it's been completely out of the news during coronavirus.
Joe Biden mostly has this election locked up, doesn't he?
And yet Bernie Sanders is going to remain in the race.
Bernie could have dropped out weeks ago, but he chose not to.
And I told you that he wouldn't drop out.
He wouldn't drop out because he's an ideological candidate.
This is his last serious shot at it.
He could try to run again when he's 82.
No one will take him seriously.
Now they actually are taking him seriously.
The other reason is Joe Biden is just physically collapsing.
I mean, the guy is falling apart.
So Bernie yesterday, well, did my voice just crack?
Maybe I have coronavirus.
Bernie yesterday, I get so excited about 2020.
He holds his own town hall while President Trump holds his town hall.
But Bernie Sanders is not the president.
Bernie Sanders is never going to be the president.
So Trump's town hall, energetic, on point, focused, made some news, funny.
It was a really good performance.
Bernie Sanders' town hall was not quite like that.
Here's a quick peek at Bernie's town hall.
I struggled with biology in college, so it's going to manifest itself now, but I can understand that somebody who has the virus sneezes in the face of somebody else, you cough in somebody's face, the virus is transmitted.
How is it transmitted if I'm simply in a room, somebody has the virus but is not coughing, Oh man, give me the virus.
Put me out of my misery with this town hall.
It was very boring.
It was rambling.
It seemed a little bit fearful.
He didn't seem in command of the room.
It was not a good performance.
And yet Bernie's going to remain in the race because Joe Biden is doing somehow even worse.
Joe Biden was on ABC. He was on The Political View, broadcasting, I take it, from his home because I think he's quarantining himself because Joe Biden is very much at the at-risk age group.
He is asked about the cure, and he forms a sentence that made it seem like he doesn't want a cure for coronavirus, like it'd be better not to cure coronavirus, but really, I don't think you could even decipher what he meant because it wasn't anything resembling proper English.
Hot topics, we talked about Trump saying the government would reassess the recommended period for keeping businesses shut and people at home.
Are you at all concerned, as Trump said, that we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself?
We have to take care of the cure.
That will make the problem worse no matter what.
Yeah, that's the guy I want in charge during a global pandemic.
Yeah, oh man, it'd be so much better.
We'd be handling this so much better if that guy were in charge.
In Joe's defense, he probably woke up five minutes before this interview.
This does not look like a guy who is running for president.
This does not look like a guy who's running for mayor.
This looks like a guy who's been retired from politics for a very long time and barely knows where he is.
And it isn't just this one flub.
It isn't just the millions of flubs we saw before.
He kept it up.
Same...
Same topic, same time period, same living room that he's broadcasting from.
He goes on MSNBC. I almost crawled out of my skin from how awkward the interview was.
And now all of a sudden he is being tough on China.
He's making sure.
And now he's being soft on his xenophobia in the past.
So I just can't figure the guy.
It's like, I don't know, it's like watching a yo-yo.
I shouldn't have said it that way.
It's like watching.
It feels that way.
I want to ask.
That's okay.
Oh, my God.
And the girl at MSNBC is obviously in the tank for Biden.
So she's trying to make this nice and normal.
She's like, oh, Joe, yeah.
No, you're right.
He's like a yo-yo or what?
And Joe knows that that's not a particularly effective talking point, so he stops himself.
No, no, I shouldn't have said that.
What did I mean to say?
What channel am I on?
Where am I? Where am I? He has this other problem in his campaign, which obviously he just seems very old, but that puts him in the position of only reacting to Trump.
So his whole campaign from the very beginning was started on this lie that Donald Trump called Nazis very fine people at Charlottesville.
Never happened.
Go to the tape.
But he started on that lie, and he started it in just pure opposition to Trump.
There's no argument to vote for Joe Biden.
There's only an argument to vote against Donald Trump.
But the politics of opposition doesn't usually work very well.
You know, in every presidential election in recent memory, the more charismatic candidate has won, has beaten the less charismatic candidate.
Trump beat Hillary.
Obama beat Romney.
Obama beat John McCain.
George W. Bush beat John Kerry.
George W. Bush beat Al Gore.
Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole.
Bill Clinton beat George Bush I.
So Joe Biden, if he's just nothing, if he's just the absence of Trump, he's not going to fare very well at all.
He even says it in this interview.
He says, I just, I don't know, I can't figure the guy.
He's, I can't, right.
If you're in the position of trying to figure or not figure the guy, then that makes you a political pundit.
That does not make you the person who is going to defeat the guy in a presidential election.
Joe can't even cough right.
He's not even coughing right.
And he was doing an interview on CNN, and he coughed, hacked up a lung into his hand.
And CNN's Jake Tapper, no conservative, but Jake Tapper, of all people, actually called him out for it.
I have not talked to any individual.
Excuse me.
You know, you're supposed to cough into your elbow.
I don't know, sir.
I learned that actually covering your White House.
Actually, that's true.
But fortunately, I'm alone in my home.
But that's okay.
I agree.
You're right.
It's kind of old school to do it with your hand.
Do it into your elbow.
You're supposed to do it.
Jake Tapper won't even let it go.
This actually, it seems like a minor point.
This is actually a pretty telling comparison here between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
So Joe Biden coughing into his hand on TV is very similar to Trump at the press conference on public health, shaking everybody's hand.
Remember that?
He said, don't shake hands.
Then he shakes everybody's hand.
Both of them got called out for it.
And in Trump's case, he owned up to it.
He said, oh yeah, it's a hard habit to break.
You're a politician, you shake people's hands, but I shouldn't do it.
We're all learning not to do it.
Cool.
Fair enough.
Joe Biden gets called out for coughing into his hand.
He goes, well, actually, it's fine.
Actually, it's really good that I coughed into my hand.
Actually, I'm smart and I'm doing what I should be doing.
Just say, like, dude, just say it's force of habit and you didn't mean to do it.
Biden's making excuses.
Total lib move.
So, of course...
Bernie Sanders is not getting out of the race.
This is the guy he's running against.
And there's a fair chance that Joe just doesn't have the stamina to make it to the nomination.
The left is furious right now because they've got this awful candidate for president who somehow, even amidst a serious economic crisis and a global pandemic, still almost certainly can't beat Donald Trump.
So they're furious about all the good news.
It now seems like it is an active effort to prolong the coronavirus epidemic.
You know, the Nevada governor, Steve Sisolak, is now banning hydroxychloroquine, which is the only drug, apparently, that has shown any promise of treating coronavirus.
He's now banned it for coronavirus patients.
Anecdotally, it hasn't gone through clinical trials, but anecdotally, it's helped coronavirus patients.
But he's banned it.
Based on a bogus excuse that a guy died from taking the drug.
But the guy didn't die from taking the drug.
A guy died from taking fish tank cleaner that happened to have part of the drug in it along with a lot of other poisons.
Total nonsense.
But they're banning it, I think, because they want to drag this thing out.
Democratic governors are now calling for weeks and weeks and months and months more shutdowns, even if that is not necessary, even in the opinion of the public health experts.
Why?
Because they want to keep this economy shut down through November, so it helps them politically.
Nancy Pelosi did her damned best to stop relief for the coronavirus.
She did as best she could to torpedo this stimulus bill.
Why?
Democrats love stimulus bills.
They love government spending.
They love direct checks to Americans, right?
Doesn't matter, because she knows it's going to help, and so she wants to prolong the misery.
Okay, that's fine.
They can try to get that political advantage.
Unfortunately for them, the good news is apparently right around the corner.
We've already gotten a little bit of it, and it looks like the future is promising, so let's bring it on, and let's hope that it continues all the way until Easter.
Get your mailbag questions in.
I'll see you tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Assistant director, Pavel Widowski.
editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixer, Robin Fenderson.
Hair and makeup, Nika Geneva.
Production assistant, Ryan Love.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
The press now wants to censor Donald Trump's press conferences because they're making him too popular.
If they want to replace Orange Man Bad with White Man Stupid, the one they should really censor is Rambling Joe.
We'll take a look at it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
