Five days after President Trump said he hopes the country will reopen again by Easter, the President changed course and announced an extension of federal lockdown guidelines through the end of April. We will examine the Catch-22 of COVID-19. Then, the World Health Organization continues to bungle coronavirus but never fails to parrot China Communist Party propaganda. We will take a look at the WHO and why it needs to go. And finally, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio threatens to shut down churches and synagogues permanently if they have the audacity to hold services during the pandemic.
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.
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Five days after President Trump said he hopes the country will reopen again by Easter, the president changed course and announced an extension of federal lockdown guidelines through the end of April, at least.
We will examine the catch-22 of COVID-19.
Then, the World Health Organization continues to bungle coronavirus, but never fails to parrot Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
We will take a look at the WHO and why it needs to go.
And finally, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio threatens to shut down churches and synagogues permanently if they have the audacity to hold services during the pandemic.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
You know what a catch-22 is.
A Catch-22 is a situation where you are damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.
It comes from the very famous novel Catch-22, and specifically what it refers to is a military bureaucratic guideline or loophole or problem, which is that if you get drafted, you don't want to go to the war, you don't want to have to go fight, you can claim insanity.
And that will get you out of fighting.
But the trouble is, if you claim insanity so that you don't want to go fight, then that's actually proof that you're sane, because nobody wants to go fight in the war, so therefore you can't plead insanity and therefore you have to go fight.
It's a catch-22.
Either way, you're stuck.
That is the situation that the media have put Trump in when it comes to coronavirus.
It is the worst position that they have backed him into during his entire presidency.
What is the catch-22 here?
The catch-22 is, if President Trump wants to win in 2020, then he has to restart the economy.
Because right now we're getting to the point where we're going to have millions and millions of people unemployed.
You could have 20% unemployment rate.
You could have...
Just absolute misery around the country.
Nobody gets elected with those kinds of numbers.
But if President Trump restarts the economy, then he's definitely not going to get re-elected because the left generally, but the media specifically, will blame him for every single death.
Forget death.
Every sniffle that happens as a result of coronavirus.
Even if those numbers of infection, hospitalization, and mortality are dramatically lower than they predicted, even if those numbers Are not even particularly uncommon when it comes to diseases and viruses and flu season and the like.
Doesn't matter.
They'll blame him for every single one.
So if he doesn't restart the economy, he can't get reelected.
But if he does restart the economy, he can't get reelected.
At least in all likelihood.
At least as far as the media is trying to push it.
So he's damned if he does, and he's damned if he doesn't.
That is why he's holding these daily press conferences.
He's trying to instill confidence that he's doing the best job that it is possible to do, even if the strategy keeps changing course.
Don't forget, I think it was five days ago we were told that we're going to try to reopen the country by Easter.
Then yesterday we're told we're going to extend federal guidelines to April 30th.
And in some places, those guidelines and lockdowns might be extended even further.
Places like New York, which is now the center of coronavirus, or Louisiana now, which is blowing up, or other places too.
So the strategy in some ways is changing day by day.
Initially it's not a big deal, then it's a much bigger deal, then it wasn't as big a deal, now it's sort of a big deal again.
But it doesn't matter.
Either strategy the media is going to pin them for.
They're going to knock them on it.
So We're good to go.
That's the big coronavirus update from the press conference yesterday.
The shutdowns are going to continue through at least the end of April.
Remember, initially Trump and the federal government said, 15 days to slow the virus and in 15 days we'll reassess.
Well, 15 days are up.
It's March 30th.
The 15 days are up.
Now we're told we've got another month of 30 days, 31 days to slow the virus.
President Trump made the announcement reluctantly, but clearly, yesterday.
The peak, the highest point of death rates, remember this, is likely to hit in two weeks.
Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won.
That would be the greatest loss of all.
Therefore, the next two weeks and during this period, it's very important that everyone strongly follow the guidelines.
Have to follow the guidelines that our great Vice President holds up a lot.
He's holding that up a lot.
He believes in it so strongly.
The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end.
Therefore, We will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread.
You can hear the reluctance in his voice.
He's dragging on it.
It's like he's trying to look for a way out, even as he's saying it.
Well, look, we don't want to declare victory before the thing is defeated.
Because that would be terrible, right?
Is that you're doing a good job at containing the virus.
You're doing a great job at testing.
Actually, the reason that it now looks like the United States has so many cases is just because we're testing.
We're testing more than anybody else.
And because China's lying and the WHO, the World Health Organization, are covering for them, which we will get to in just a little bit.
But the United States is doing a very good job now on this virus.
So President Trump is saying, well, you don't want it to, like, it's spiking and then we do a really good job of containing it and then we give up on that good job and it spikes again and that will look bad for him.
He wants to defeat it once and for all.
But he's clearly reluctant to do this.
That's why he's contradicting his hope and aspiration from just a week ago or less than a week ago.
He knows.
Not only have the media put Trump in an impossible situation, Trump knows that the media have put him in an impossible situation.
Fortunately, though, as crafty as the media are, President Trump is pretty clever when it comes to outfoxing the media.
That might be his superpower.
That's probably the skill that he has best honed over all of these years.
And so he has a new strategy for how to outfox them, regardless of where they back him into, regardless of what his overall coronavirus strategy is.
We'll get to that in one second.
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So the media put Trump in this terrible position.
Trump has a new overall, he has a new top-line strategy here.
Even if the actual particular strategy on the virus changes, we're going to keep the quarantines, we're going to not keep the quarantines, we're going to shut down, we're going to reopen.
This top-line media strategy is that President Trump is going to harp on the media's own alarmist numbers.
What can the American people expect?
And is it possible that these April 30th guidelines could be extended?
Well, we hope not, but we think it's going to, you know, we have aspirational thoughts.
We would have loved to have been a little bit sooner, but we have to do it right.
We could have done it.
We could have done it on Easter, but there was a good chance that if it's coming down or if it's still going up, maybe it's going to be coming down by then, but we just felt it was too soon.
We can't take a chance.
You know, Again, because of what we've done and because of the fact that we've stopped the flow from China so early, Because the question is, from a lot of my friends, why don't we just wing it?
Why didn't we just wing it?
And I kept asking, and we did models now.
Finally, we got these models in.
And you hear about the 2.2 million people would have died.
I don't mean we would have had 2.2 million cases.
These are 2.2 million people would have died.
2.2 million people.
Listen to how many times he repeats that number.
2.2 million, 2.2 million people.
Where's that number coming from?
That was the number that was touted by the media from the very beginning, that if the coronavirus spreads, then we're going to get 2.2 million people dead in America.
Did you believe that number?
I was always a little skeptical of that number.
But that was the number that we were told by the mainstream media, by the experts, right?
You saw the number from Imperial College in the UK.
That was that one study that everybody said this is the study about coronavirus.
Turns out it looks like there were a lot of pretty serious flaws in that study.
Looks like that number might have been high.
So then you ask yourself, wait a second, why is Trump, of all people, trying to tout this very high alarmist number that the mainstream media touted from the beginning, which put him in this bad position in the first place?
He's using the number against the media because the press told us 2.2 million puts Trump in a bad position.
If he does nothing, every death proves he's heartless and a killer.
Then, if he shuts down the world economy, he still looks terrible.
So what Trump needs to do is take this seriously while still giving himself room to reopen.
And the key to that is managing expectations.
The way to do that is to use the press's 2.2 million number against them, right?
Because what the press wants to do now...
Is say that 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 deaths is totally unexpected, unprecedented, impossible to believe.
Trump has bungled this.
He's got blood on his hands.
Now, of course, we know that 37,000 people die each year of the flu, or more sometimes.
We know that 38,000 people die in car accidents every year, right?
We know that these numbers, people, I think the statistic was a person dies every 37 seconds from heart disease.
So when you, it's kind of morbid, you don't want to focus on these things a lot, but people die.
I mean, 7,500 people die a day, I think, in the United States.
People die.
People are born.
We don't like to focus on people dying because it's sad and it makes us contemplate our own mortality and we don't want to have to do that.
But because we ignore death so much, then when numbers come up, people are shocked.
People are shocked to hear that tens of thousands of people every single year die from the flu.
Because we don't talk about it.
And the press is trying to use that to their advantage to say, well, if 50,000 people die from coronavirus...
This is absolutely shocking and unprecedented.
It's not.
It would be terribly, terribly sad.
100,000 people would be terribly, terribly sad.
But it's not...
Shocking or unprecedented when we were just told that 2.2 million people were going to die.
Certainly 100,000 is a lot better than 2.2 million.
Or 200,000 for that matter would be better than 2.2 million.
So President Trump is trying to not let the press get away with this.
They tout the alarmist number and then they go down an order of magnitude or more than an order of magnitude and try to say that that's just as bad.
Trump is going to hammer this number home now to remind people that even 100,000 deaths or more is actually still a great victory in the face of this horrible Chinese pandemic that threatened to kill so many more people.
So that's the number he's got to keep hammering home, and I think he's going to make the press sorry that they were touting that very likely alarmist figure.
year.
Again, I don't know, but judging by the evidence that has come out since that Imperial College study, it would certainly seem that 2.2 million is a very high number.
Then President Trump wouldn't let the press get away with another key little talking point that they would try to get away with, which is the unemployment checks.
You know, the part of the stimulus bill, the bailout bill, the relief bill, call it whatever you want.
Part of that bill was to allow Americans to get more in the way of unemployment benefits.
Trouble is, the federal government is not administering them, so ultimately Trump is not responsible for how that's implemented.
The states are going to implement the unemployment relief, and if the states mess it up, Trump is going to get the blame.
So he's not going to let the press get away with that lie.
Under this plan, the average worker who has lost his or her job will receive 100 percent of their salary for up to four full months.
The bill provides for these unemployment checks to be delivered through the existing state unemployment systems.
Not us.
State.
And I was opposed to this method because many of the states have very antiquated computer systems that are 45 years old, and they're not prepared to handle this kind of distribution, this kind of money coming in so quickly.
They're not set up for that.
I didn't want to do it, but our opponents wanted it.
So we did it.
And if they don't get their money fast, I'm going to ask that we convene the federal government, that we come back to Congress, and we'll do something where we take care of it, because we can take care of it very easily and quickly.
And I said that.
But a lot of these systems are so old and so antiquated at the state level that they're going to have the money.
They're going to get the money very quickly, but they're not going to be able to distribute it.
So remember, What I said, and we will, if we have to, call Congress back or find some other way of delivery of the money.
Don't blame me.
We didn't want it.
If they screw it up, it's not my fault.
Some people are knocking Trump here because it looks like he's making excuses.
That's not what's going on.
I mean, maybe he is making excuses if it doesn't work out.
But really, if the state unemployment stuff doesn't work out, that isn't his fault.
What we're really seeing here is that Trump is the most transparent president in American history.
And many people don't like that.
Actually, the big attack on Trump for his whole presidency is that he's too transparent.
He's saying too much of what he thinks.
He's tweeting out too much of what comes into his mind.
He's talking too much to people.
I mean, look, he's holding his own daily press conferences.
I bet you, if I said close your eyes right now, picture Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary.
I bet you couldn't do that.
We used to know what the press secretary looked like.
We used to know what Sarah Sanders looked like or Josh Earnest or all these guys who were press secretaries.
Now we don't because Trump is doing his own press conferences because he's so transparent.
Trump is like if you're a school child, if you're a student, he's showing his work.
He's always showing you his work.
He's always showing you how we got from this place to that and why he doesn't quite like this, but it's okay because we had to do this to get here.
And so he's bringing you in on the whole journey.
This is the only way he gets out of this.
He's in the impossible situation.
He's in the COVID-22, right?
The only chance he has of getting out is showing you his work.
So he can say here, look...
I've done everything I can.
If the states screw me on the unemployment relief, you can't blame me for that.
I'm telling you, I'm planting in your mind right now, that's not what's going on.
I know that 100,000 deaths would be absolutely terrible, but what all the experts in the media were saying was 2.2 million deaths.
So it's very clear that even 100,000 deaths shows that we've done a remarkably good job.
He's just showing his work the whole time.
It's the only way he's not going to get totally blamed for this thing.
And even that might not be enough.
So the journalists are giving him absolutely no leeway here.
They don't want to give him any breathing room.
So a reporter brings up this point that Trump has harped on, that I have harped on, that a lot of other people have harped on, which is that the choice here is not between save lives and make money.
Oh my, you're willing to sacrifice lives on the altar of money, you monster, you animal.
No, that's not the choice at all.
I mean, what is the economy?
The economy is just us, right?
The economy is just people doing things.
So there are always trade-offs here.
So let's say you shut down the entire economy.
Maybe you save a life or two.
But maybe one or two people kill themselves because that's what happens during economic turndowns.
And so this report, Trump has made that point.
It's a very good point.
The reporter asks him, excuse me, Mr.
President, you've made that point.
What scientific experts are you citing to make that point?
Again, trying to back Trump into this corner and take away his political power because we've empowered these scientific dictators to In our culture of technocracy and expertise, Trump totally flips it around on the reporter.
You've also said that at one point that you thought more people might die from the economic tragedies and the economic problems in America due to the coronavirus outbreak.
What health officials are telling you that?
And Dr.
Fauci, could you speak to that, the idea that there might be mental health and suicide related to this?
Would that outpace at some point the virus's impact on this society?
Excuse me, what experts are we talking about here?
What a dumb question.
But this dumb question highlights the worst instincts of the left in this pandemic.
And that instinct is to appoint public health dictators to make our political decisions for us.
Excuse me, duly elected president and leader of the free world.
What does Dr.
Fauci say?
Who cares what Dr.
Dr. Fauci says, I like Dr. Fauci.
He's doing a fine job, but Dr. Fauci is not the president.
Dr. Fauci is not ultimately responsible for making these decisions.
And neither are you journalists because I noticed by the way, the journalists only ever want to hear from the public health officials who back up their own preconceived notions.
They never bring on the two scientists from Stanford who said maybe we're overreacting.
They never bring on the 2013 Nobel Stop the alarmism.
They never bring on the authors of the Oxford University study, which undercuts the study from Imperial College in which says the mortality rate might be significantly lower from coronavirus.
They don't do that.
But what they want, they want to pretend that politics is not politics.
That we're not just persuading each other and trying to get along with these eternal questions that we're all grappling with.
They want to pretend that Like Karl Marx did, that politics is actually just a scientific enterprise, that there's a clear scientific rule, and if you just appoint the right expert, they can be the dictator forever and we'll all have a perfect life.
So, very dumb question.
President Trump totally shuts her down.
Ask Dr.
Fauci to come up, but it's common sense.
You're going to have massive depression, meaning mental depression.
You're going to have depression in the economy also.
But you're going to have mental depression for people.
You're going to have large numbers of suicides.
Take a look at what happens in a really horrible recession or worse.
So you're going to have...
Tremendous suicides.
But you know what you're going to have more than anything else?
Drug addiction.
You will see drugs being used like nobody's ever used them before.
And people are going to be dying all over the place from drug addiction because you would have people that had a wonderful job at a restaurant or even owned a restaurant.
I spoke to great people today.
That have done a great job.
And one day, at the top of their business, they're celebrity chefs.
They've got the most successful restaurants.
And in one day, they have nothing.
They've gotten wiped out.
One day.
From our enemy, this invisible, horrible scourge.
Of course, the left is falling into the same trap that the public health experts are.
They're being myopic.
Say, hey, what scientific studies can you point to to show that people get depressed when they lose their job in the economy tanks?
I don't know.
How about common sense?
How about our own eyes?
How about all of the experience of history?
You don't need a scientific paper for that, dummy.
Use your brain.
And Trump's, oh man, his response here was so important.
Because could you imagine if this reporter, whoever it was, asks Trump, excuse me, can you have Dr.
Fauci just talk about like whether you're an idiot and a liar or not?
And imagine if Trump said, okay, sure, Dr.
Fauci, please tell her.
Please, oh, oh, exalted Fauci, please tell her that I'm a good president and that I'm allowed to still be president.
Give me a break.
If he had turned over the microphone at that question to Dr.
Birx or Dr.
Fauci, we wouldn't have a president.
Because even the right here, even the conservatives, even the duly elected president would buy into the left's premise that actually we're just governed by a bunch of appointed health experts.
But we're not.
We're governed by the guy that we elected.
Why are the ratings so good?
The ratings are through the roof.
Trump got in trouble for talking about how high his ratings are.
He's got like the best ratings on TV. Three reasons here.
One, President Trump and the doctors and Fauci and Birx and the other experts and the Surgeon General and everybody else are giving people good information.
And there's a lot of bad information out there about this virus.
People who are giving blazing hot takes that we're all going to die or it's not a big problem at all.
Very little in the way of nuance, very little in the way of precise information.
So they're giving people good information that's up to date.
Two, Trump and the doctors are not scaring people to death.
Very important.
And three, this is my favorite part, Trump is constantly dunking on the people in the media who are scaring people to death and who are spreading false information.
So the best example yesterday, this was egregious even by CNN standards.
CNN opens up a question with a false premise about Trump.
The premise was that Trump says that he needs the governors to show him gratitude personally for what he's doing.
And then President Trump calls out the reporter about this and says, I wasn't just talking about me personally.
The reporter then admits that the premise was a lie.
And then the CNN reporter carries on with the initial dishonest premise.
You were talking about governors of different states and you said, I want them to be appreciative.
You also said, if they don't treat you right, I don't call.
These are direct quotes, sir.
Excuse me, ready?
Ready?
Ready?
Take a look at what I said.
I want them to be appreciative of me, okay?
And then you cut it off because it's fake news.
You and of your administration, absolutely.
Please, let me just finish it.
You just said it again, and you know the answer's a lie.
I could read you your full comments, sir, if that would be easier.
Your statement and your response and your answer is a lie, because here's the story.
You ready?
I said, I want you to be appreciative of me, and then you go on, and then I go on, and you cut it off.
You said, I want them to be appreciative.
I don't want them to say things that aren't true.
I want them to be appreciative.
We've done a great job.
And I'm not talking about me.
I'm talking about Mike Pence, the task force.
I'm talking about FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And how long did it take that CNN reporter to get to it?
Mr.
President, you said people have to be really grateful to you and show you appreciation or else you're probably going to withhold money or something from them.
He goes, that's not what I said.
Mr.
President, I could read you verbatim what you said.
He goes, it's not what I said.
I didn't say it was just about me.
Mr.
President, it's your own words.
Here, I'll read it verbatim.
It's not about me.
And Trump goes, yeah, thank you.
Right.
Thanks for reading it.
And even that, that national humiliation will not derail the CNN reporter journalist from his dishonest narrative.
This is what they're going to do.
And by the way, it doesn't matter how much the media undercut their own credibility here.
Why?
Because even if people don't trust the media, the media still have a lot of power to gin up hysteria.
Okay.
That's not even hypothetical.
We saw just this weekend what the press will do to Trump if he just immediately reopens everything.
We saw it in their treatment of Jerry Falwell at Liberty University.
We'll get to that in a second.
We'll get to what's rotten at the core of the World Health Organization.
You know, throughout this whole pandemic, people have referred to the WHO, the World Health Organization, as the leading authority.
They're not an authority.
They're a bunch of hacks.
They're in the pocket of the Chinese Communist government, and we should stop funding them.
We'll get to why, because no one's talking about that.
In just a moment, first, I've got to thank our friends over at OU. I've got to thank you.
Thank you so much for watching and listening, especially in your quarantine.
If you haven't had a chance to see some of our new content called All Access Live, then you've got to head on over to dailywire.com and check it out.
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You know, you will get one of the things you get with that is the leftist tears Tumblr.
And I've never missed this Tumblr more because when I am at the studio, we made a rule here to not use any washable dishes or silverware or even the beautiful leftist tears Tumblr, just because we don't, we don't want to have the PAs cleaning it and spread germs.
So I've got to use this trash.
I've got to use a disposable coffee cup.
Absolutely awful.
I mean, you can't even, if you put leftist tears in here, it would just dissolve the bottom and it would just pour right out.
You need the leftist tears tumbler.
Get your own and then you won't need to worry about spreading germs because it'll just be your own tumbler.
Dailywire.com will be right back with a lot more.
It's not a hypothetical question about what the media will do to Trump if he just reopens suddenly.
They did it to Jerry Falwell over the weekend and it was fake news.
So Jerry Falwell decides that, you know, the original federal guidelines, 15 days to slow the spread, that's fine.
We're going to do that, but we're not going to have 15 months to slow the spread.
Okay, we got to reopen at some point and he decided to reopen Liberty University.
You know.
Mainstream media, they don't like this.
They don't like when you stop listening to them and when you leave your apartment and when you don't just blindly follow whatever they say, even if it's based on the faulty Imperial College study.
New York Times.
Liberty University brings back its students and coronavirus, too.
Oh, gosh.
There must be...
Coronavirus must be sweeping the university.
Must be hundreds of students with it, right?
Yeah.
The piece goes on.
The decision by the school's president, Jerry Falwell Jr., to partly reopen his evangelical university enraged residents of Lynchburg, Virginia.
Residents of Lynchburg, Virginia here being a stand-in for New York Times editorial board members.
But then, here's the key line, they say.
Then students started getting sick.
So the rumor, started by the mainstream media, is that you had 12 students immediately getting coronavirus at Liberty University.
That's pretty bad, right?
Pretty bad, except it's not true.
Jerry Falwell immediately came out and refuted this.
He said, we don't have a dozen students with coronavirus running around our campus.
We had four students who decided to isolate because they came from hot spots.
Maybe they started to sniffle or something like that, but haven't tested positive for it.
We had one student who doesn't even live on campus.
And is at home.
And so it's not even like our decision would affect him, who seems to have coronavirus.
We had some people who knew a guy who knew a guy who was infected.
They're self-quarantining out of an abundance of caution.
But the story that the New York Times is running, that now coronavirus is running rampant through Liberty University, just not true.
It doesn't matter.
If you ask people, hey, what happened when Liberty University reopened?
You know the story?
they're going to say, oh, all the kids got coronavirus.
That's why we can't reopen anything.
That's why we've got to stay in our apartments forever.
It isn't true.
At least there's no evidence that it's true yet.
I guess it could ultimately turn out to be true.
I mean, we know how viruses spread.
We know that a lot of us are going to get this virus at some point, but it doesn't seem to be true now.
I mean, even the idea of flattening the curve, right?
Flattening the curve doesn't reduce the number of people who are infected.
It just spreads out the number of people who will be infected by this.
The idea being that if the curve gets too high, then you're going to overwhelm the hospital systems, and that's going to result in more people dying because, you know, let's say someone gets into a car accident, that all the hospital beds are going to be taken up with coronavirus patients, so they're not going to be treated.
There's going to be all this fallout too.
But that's how the media narrative has shifted.
It went from 2.2 million people are going to die to some hospitals are going to be overrun.
Doesn't matter.
It's the same narrative.
And they're trying to tell you.
Every time we test, they say we need more tests, but then the moment you get more tests, then obviously you get more diagnoses.
And when you get more diagnoses, they say we're losing the battle against coronavirus.
So many little COVID-22s here that are tripping up.
Conservatives who are trying to do a good job and fight this virus.
That's what Trump is up against.
He knows that those are going to be the headlines, which is why he's trying to zigzag his strategy a little bit here, all the while showing you the work, all the while showing you the impossible situation that he has been put in.
And guess what?
Most people approve of what he's doing.
We showed you a poll last week.
Gallup polling showed most people approve.
Other polls have shown it.
Now we have one from the Washington Post and ABC News.
Two outlets that don't particularly care for Donald Trump.
This new poll from them asks the question, do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?
So this is overall approval rating.
48% of respondents said they approve.
46% said they disapprove.
So he's still under 50 here, but more approve than disapprove.
34% approve strongly, 15% approve somewhat.
35% disapprove strongly.
11% disapprove.
Somewhat 6% have no opinion.
By the way, who are those people?
Who has no opinion about Donald Trump?
You've got to be locked in a bunker away somewhere if you don't.
Then the poll gets to, do you approve or disapprove of the way Trump is handling the coronavirus outbreak?
51% of respondents approve.
45% do not approve.
So now he's totally above water.
Here he's even above the 50% mark.
Most people Even people who don't like the job he's doing as president like the job he's doing on coronavirus.
And in that environment...
Even Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, the guy who, if he can make it, I guess is going to run against Donald Trump in November.
Even he is giving President Trump some credit on the coronavirus when Chuck Todd, left-wing hack, asks Biden if Trump has blood on his hands for his handling of coronavirus.
Biden...
Much wiser, looking at those poll numbers, says, whoa, Chuck, what are you talking about?
Calm down there.
You know, your campaign put out in a critique of President Trump and says if he doesn't do these things, you know, he could cost lives.
Do you think there's already, do you think there is blood on the president's hands, considering the slow response?
Or is that too harsh of a criticism?
I think that's a little too harsh.
I think what's happening is the failure to, as I watched a prelim to your show, where someone used the phrase that the president just thinks out loud.
He should stop thinking out loud and start thinking deeply.
He should start listening to the scientists before he speaks.
He should listen to the health experts.
Okay, first of all, President Trump clearly is listening to the health experts.
He's holding daily press conferences with two of the most prominent public health experts in the entire country, and he's letting them speak, and he's regularly deferring to them.
Not on every question, but on a great many questions.
That's why Fauci and Birx are now international celebrities.
Second...
Joe Biden criticizing anybody for speaking before he thinks is the most pot, kettily sort of situation I've heard of in weeks, all right?
Probably not what Joe should be doing.
So why is Joe giving Trump credit here?
He's giving Trump credit because Joe Biden was dead wrong on coronavirus.
And to use Chuck Todd's question, if Joe Biden had been permitted to follow the policy that he wanted to follow, he would have blood on his hands.
Because when Donald Trump issued the travel ban from China, way, way back at the end of January, right, probably the single most important thing he could have done to stop the spread.
Just look at Italy if you want to see another example.
Joe Biden criticized him for it, said he wouldn't have done it, called him xenophobic.
So Biden knows he's in a bad spot here.
He knows Trump is popular on Wu flu, despite being backed into this catch-22.
So Joe is going to play this fairly neutral.
You know, Trump has managed to stay popular during the coronavirus, not through any reasonable way.
There is no reasonable way, right?
There is no way to kind of Pick just one strategy and go for it, and that's how you would stay popular.
That has been closed off to him.
So he's managed to stay popular pretty much through sheer force of will.
He's managed to stay popular through daily press briefings.
By the way, the daily press briefings coincide with when that approval rating started to go up again.
And it's blunted the best attack that Democrats have on him.
We've got to get to why the World Health Organization is a totally corrupt institution that does not deserve our defense.
First, let's try to get to a couple questions from listeners I see are popping up from SW. After all the positive news for Andy Cuomo, older brother to Fredo, governor of New York, any thoughts on him being Biden's vice president?
Or could Andy even hop into the race this late?
I don't think he'll be Biden's vice president.
I think Biden needs a woman, ideally a black woman, because he knows that the Democrats are obsessed with racial and sexual identity politics, and Joe Biden is an old white guy.
So even though Andy Cuomo might have a lot of energy, he'd probably be a pretty strong candidate, I don't think he would be the VP. Also, Joe Biden doesn't need to win New York.
He'll win New York.
He doesn't need any help doing that, rather.
Now, could Andy Cuomo get into the race this late?
Look, Joe Biden...
Is in bad shape.
Okay, he doesn't look good.
He's forgetting his name.
He's forgetting his boss's name.
He doesn't seem to have any energy.
We're in the midst of a global pandemic that targets people who are exactly in Joe Biden's demographic.
There's a world in which he just doesn't have the stamina to actually be the nominee.
And in that case, you'd get into a pretty crazy convention.
Maybe they go with Bernie.
Maybe the Wicked Witch of the West swoops in there and takes the nomination at the last minute.
Or maybe a young up-and-coming, he's not that young, but he is a more energetic, more youthful candidate like Andy Cuomo, who obviously has designs on the presidency.
Maybe he swoops in at the last minute.
I think there's a better shot that he could pop in and try to make a play for the big job than that he would be the VP. Another question from AC. Michael, fellow Sicilian here, how do you feel about what's happening to your ancestors?
You're talking about my friends back across in the old country.
Well, it's kind of interesting, because generally in Italy, the southern part of Italy is considered the poor part, the less prestigious part, the less posh part.
And the north, specifically Milan, fashion capital of Italy, and industrial capital of Italy, that's considered the nicer area.
And yet, what's being hit most...
Milan, Lombardy, the north of Italy is being hit much harder on coronavirus than those backwards Sicilians where my ancestors come from are.
Shows you one of the weaknesses of globalization because it was Lombardy that decided to import a ton of very low-wage Chinese workers to man their factories.
And when they didn't cut all that off, you saw an influx of obviously this Chinese pandemic come in specifically there.
The other thing that it shows you is that America is a different country from Italy.
We've got a different population.
Dr.
Birx made this point yesterday.
Different population, different demographic.
Our population is not as old.
Our population...
Especially among the old people, do not smoke as much.
I mean, Italians just smoke cigarettes all the time, so respiratory diseases really affect them.
It shows you the differences in countries, not just from the globalization standpoint and how we got the disease, but how people are treating it as well.
Speaking of globalization, the WHO. World Health Organization is a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
Take a look at how this WHO hack refuses to answer a question about Taiwan, which is independent from China, but not totally independent from China, and China wants to completely take it over.
He's asked a question about Taiwan.
He pretends not even to hear it.
The WHO considered Taiwan's membership.
Hello?
I couldn't hear your question.
Okay, let me repeat the question.
Let's move to another one then.
Hold on.
You didn't hear that?
And he says this.
This is so spooky.
It shows you that these weirdo bureaucrat mouthpieces for communist dictators...
They're so cold-blooded, man.
Like ice running through their veins.
Just completely straight face.
Not answering that, not answering that, not answering that.
Sorry, I didn't hear your question.
Okay, I'll repeat it.
No, that's okay.
Let's move on.
Well, how do you know you want to move on to the next question if you didn't hear the first question?
Now, this journalist, to her credit, persists.
I'm actually curious on talking about Taiwan as well, on Taiwan's case.
What?
We decided to give Dr.
Alward another call to follow up.
And I just want to see if you can comment a bit on how Taiwan has done so far in terms of containing the virus.
Well, we've already talked about China and, you know, when you look across all the different areas of China, they've actually all done quite a good job.
So with that, I'd like to thank you very much for inviting us to participate and good luck as you go forward with the battle in Hong Kong.
Yes, thank you.
Man, that is so spooky, isn't it?
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Yes, we've talked about China, which owns Taiwan.
Taiwan is just part of China, our pay masters.
Hi, no, what are you talking about?
I'm not a marionette for the communist government.
What are you, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, goodbye.
Goodbye.
Talk to you later.
Really spooky stuff.
How and why did this happen?
Why is the WHO, the World Health Organization, a mouthpiece for communist China?
So it looks like China knew about this virus now as early as mid-October.
Initially we thought it was January, then December, then November.
Now it looks like mid-October.
China covered it up.
It punished whistleblowers.
It silenced journalists who reported on it.
WHO consistently praised the CCP, the Communist Party of China, for its transparency, quote, and leadership.
Saying its actions were making us safer.
WHO experts didn't even go to China until February 10th.
China knew about this since mid-October.
WHO did not want any part of it.
The most aggressive campaign the WHO has waged during this whole epidemic is to stop people from calling this the Chinese coronavirus.
And you think, wait, why is the WHO telling me what language to use?
They actually had this campaign, don't call it the Chinese coronavirus, don't call it the Wuhan virus, parroting the Chinese communist line.
So who is the who?
The WHO. Why is the WHO so bad?
WHO is a division of the United Nations, which there tells you enough about them, you know, already tampers our expectations.
Why is it so bad?
The Federalists had a good piece on this.
So bad because the head of it is a prop for Chinese communists.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Former job was in the Marxist government of the Ethiopian people's revolutionary democratic front.
As the Washington Post reported, China worked, quote, tirelessly behind the scenes to install this guy as the head of the WHO. China has been working for years behind the scenes to take over international institutions to try to ease their normalization.
They're a Chinese dictatorship, a communist dictatorship, but they're trying to enter the world as this kind of international, wonderful, democratic, Country.
China already runs four of the UN's specialized agencies.
No other country controls more than one.
Clear takeaway here, okay?
We give the WHO half billion dollars a year.
We are by far the biggest contributor to the WHO. And yet the WHO is a mouthpiece for China.
We need to defund WHO. Until its China Patsy leader is ousted.
We should cut off their money.
I know there's this idea that Trump is going to cut money from the WHO, the World Health Organization.
That's going to compromise public health.
It won't.
They're useless.
They do nothing.
They're worse than useless.
They help communist thugs cover up the worst pandemic we've seen in our lifetimes.
Get rid of them.
Get rid of the money.
Oust the leader.
It's done.
Enough of them.
In the meantime, we need to remain very skeptical of anything they say.
Before we go, I've got to get to Bill de Blasio.
Bill de But he didn't just say he would shut them down for a week or so.
He threatened to shut them down permanently.
He has been instructed that if they see worship services going on, they will go to the officials of that congregation.
They'll inform them they need to stop the services and disperse.
If that does not happen, they will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.
Closing it permanently?
De Blasio is unabashedly anti-religious.
Most evidence seems to suggest he's an atheist.
He sort of pushed back on the atheist thing, but he says he doesn't have a religion, he doesn't have a church, he doesn't like it.
He's a commie, so generally they're not particularly traditionally religious people.
That's a bridge too far to shut down the churches permanently.
If de Blasio permanently forced churches to close...
The most measured and reasonable response would be to riot.
Now I say would be to riot because Christians, as a rule, don't riot.
Jews don't either.
It's so interesting that in his line here about shutting down these religious services, he only targets two religions.
He says, if you go to your synagogue, if you go to your church...
What's missing here?
Notice any religious service that he left out?
Hmm.
Notice a particular religion of peace that he refused to name here, that he refused to threaten.
He's only threatening the Jews and the Christians.
He's not threatening other religious groups.
The reason, I suspect, is that he's not afraid of any reprisals from Christians or Jews.
He thinks they're just going to take it.
I don't know.
He clearly has some particular antipathy toward Christians and Jews that he doesn't have toward, say, Muslims or Hindus or other groups as well.
That is a step too far.
This country, if it is founded on any one thing in particular, it is on the ability to practice your religion.
It's what the pilgrims came over on the Mayflower for.
We have no established church at the federal level.
All sorts of different religions have thrived in America.
We're much more religious than the rest of the Western world.
Religion really matters.
It is completely gratuitous and unnecessary to threaten to permanently shut down religious institutions.
If the government were to do that, the government would be illegitimate.
Very extreme position they're trying to put everybody in now.
Very tough for those of us on the receiving end of it to react.
You've got to be careful not to allow yourself to be backed, as they want us to be, into an impossible situation.
There are ways to get out of this, but you've got to be very careful, because at this point, we're not just talking about a public health pandemic.
We're talking about a highly politicized agenda that is being pushed to advance political goals.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
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Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.
