Now that the United States has flattened the curve, President Trump is flattening the narrative at a White House briefing that not only brutalized the press but also prepared the way for a reopening. We will examine the grand strategy behind owning the libs. Then, a new study out of Israel suggests the global economic shutdown was completely pointless, Bernie Sanders endorses Joe Biden, and Joe’s lead in the polls evaporates.
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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Now that the United States has flattened the curve, President Trump is flattening the narrative at a White House briefing that not only brutalized the press, but also prepared the way for a reopening of our country.
We will examine the grand strategy behind owning the libs.
Then, a new study out of Israel suggests the global economic shutdown was completely pointless.
Bernie Sanders endorses Joe Biden, and Joe's lead in the polls evaporates.
All that and more.
i'm michael knows and this is the michael all show we've been talking about flattening the curve That's what we all have to do.
Flatten that curve, spread out the number of infections.
That's the goal of the last three, four weeks.
That's done.
We've done that.
We did a good job.
Mission accomplished.
Now, a much more pressing matter is flattening the narrative that the media have been building the whole time.
And President Trump is doing a great job at that.
One thing I want to point out about yesterday's White House press conference, which President Trump has been doing every single day, they've almost all been extraordinarily entertaining, just really excellent TV. But one thing I want to point out about yesterday's, which was the most entertaining of all of them, is that the entertainment value was not just there to make us laugh.
I think that President Trump structured this press conference to achieve a grand strategy for his re-election campaign in 2020.
And it also happened to be absolutely freaking hilarious.
So President Trump gives the usual introduction.
Then he answers some questions.
Rather, before he gets to the questions, he tees up a video.
He's got the media all in the room.
He says, you know, I want to tee up this little video just to give you an overview of the past few weeks.
And he tees up the video.
The video is of the media getting the coronavirus totally wrong.
In February, Nancy Pelosi said we should come to Chinatown.
This is late February.
Come to Chinatown.
We think it's very safe.
Come here.
Let's all have the big parade.
Chinatown parade.
Probably referring to San Francisco.
And that's it.
But I took this action early.
And...
So the story in the New York Times was a total fake.
It's a fake newspaper and they write fake stories.
And someday, hopefully in five years when I'm not here, those papers are all going out of business because nobody's going to want to read them.
But now they like them because they write about me.
Now with that, I have a couple of interesting, we have a few clips that we're just going to put up.
We could turn the lights a little bit lower.
I think you'll find them interesting.
Okay, that's setting the stage, right?
He's saying, I think you're going to like this, you're going to enjoy it.
So you already know, given the way he's introducing this video, that this is going to be pretty savage, right?
He's making fun of Nancy Pelosi for telling people in the early days of the pandemic to come to Chinatown.
He's going straight after the New York Times.
Trump has changed his tone day by day in the press briefing.
Some days, very staid, very presidential, very bipartisan, saying nice things about Democrats, saying nice things even about the media.
That wasn't yesterday.
Yesterday was a major tonal shift.
He comes out, he goes, the New York Times is a fake piece of trash newspaper.
Nancy Pelosi's completely wrong.
She's a joke.
She imperiled lives.
And hey, check out my video.
So he tees it up.
Here's the video itself.
People should be more concerned right now with the flu in this country.
A lot of people are concerned about the coronavirus because they're hearing a lot of news about it right now.
But the reality is comparing it to the flu, for example, it's not even close to being at that stage.
It goes on and on on the media, but I think you get the gist.
Look at how he's flipping this, because what the media are accusing Trump of doing is not taking the coronavirus seriously.
Of comparing it to the flu, for instance, which, by the way, might be a fair comparison.
We'll get to that a little bit later in the show.
But regardless of whether or not it is a fair comparison, that's not what Trump cares about here.
What Trump cares about here is showing that the media were very recently doing the exact same thing that they are accusing him of doing.
This is what he manages to do all the time.
He did this all throughout 2016.
It's not even that he would defend himself against the attacks from his opponents in the Republican primary or in the media.
He didn't have to do that.
All he would have to do is show that his opponents and his critics are no better than he is.
So you remember this very clearly with Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush accuses Donald Trump of being immature in 2016, of being childish, of not being composed, of not being an adult.
And then...
Donald Trump on the debate stage gets – he triggers Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush starts getting all angry and he gets really fired up.
And he goes, how was that, Donald?
Was that high energy enough?
And Donald goes, yeah, that was high energy.
And he puts his hand out for a low five.
And then Jeb, like the kid on the playground who finally got the attention of the bully and, you know, the bully didn't give him a – Swirly.
Jeb got so excited that he kind of jumps up a little bit and smacks Trump's hand, totally destroys Jeb Bush's argument that Jeb is the mature person.
Jeb is going to behave like the adult in the room because he was behaving in just as giddy and childish a way as Donald Trump.
That's what he's doing here to the media.
He's done this again and again.
I mean, do you remember when Hillary Clinton was saying that if you contest the results of the 2016 election, you're a threat to democracy?
Yeah.
What does Trump get her to do?
Contest the results of the 2016 election.
So that's what's happening here.
The press are just watching themselves.
He says look at this video and it's just a mirror basically up in the front of the room to show the press who they are.
Then the video moves on to its second stage which is no longer going after the press with their own words.
It's showing how Trump took the virus seriously.
Well, we've asked them to accelerate whatever they're doing in terms of a vaccine.
We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.
To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency.
So, you see here what Trump is doing.
He's saying, you're accusing me of not taking it seriously.
Look at all the clips of me taking it seriously.
Now, to be fair, were there also clips of President Trump saying that the media were being alarmist early on?
Yes.
Again, that doesn't matter.
The media has this very narrow narrative that they have been constructing, which totally ignores their own behavior, their own hypocrisy.
So President Trump is constructing a parallel narrative.
So he hits the media, he then hits how great a job he's doing, and then he goes on to the governors praising Trump.
And the brilliance of this three-part video strategy is not even in the video.
We've all seen these clips before.
It's that he knew exactly how it would trigger the media, and it turned out he was right.
We'll get to that in a second.
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All right.
He tees it up, shows the media their own words.
Then he shows the media his own words.
And the third part...
The piece de resistance is he shows the media the Democratic governors who are praising him.
So the New York Times can't say anything nice about him.
CNN can't say anything nice about him.
The supposedly objective journalists.
But Trump's own political adversaries are going to be more fair to him than the allegedly objective press.
Here's the third part.
His team is on it.
They've been responsive late at night, early in the morning.
And they've thus far been doing everything that they can do.
And I want to say thank you.
And I want to say that I appreciate it.
He returns calls.
He reaches out.
He's been proactive.
We got that mercy ship down here in Los Angeles.
That was directly because he sent it down here.
Okay, this, I think, is unprecedented in the history of press briefings.
First of all, the fact that President Trump holds his own press briefings every single day is also unprecedented.
I mean, the guy is obviously playing to his strengths because he's so good on camera.
He's so good at communicating.
But to be this brazen, to be this bold, is...
There's obviously something going on underneath this strategy.
It's not merely a troll.
And we'll get to what that is in a second.
But President Trump gives you this ice cream sundae, right?
This three-part ice cream sundae.
Just in case that wasn't going to send the media into a tizzy, he gives them a little cherry on top of the sundae.
And that little cherry on top is that he quotes one of their own reporters, not just any reporter, perhaps one of the most partisan reporters, Maggie Haberman.
Hillary Clinton said that Maggie Haberman's her favorite reporter because she would always cover Hillary in a positive light.
Trump adds this little bit of Maggie Haberman Having to admit that Trump is doing a good job.
So now you've got an actual member of the press, a far left one, contradicting the press coverage that we've been seeing for the past two weeks on President Trump.
And that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
As there were more cases, and it was clear that it was spreading out of China where it originated.
The president took this move that he was widely criticized for by Democrats and even some Republicans at the time, which was he halted a number of flights from China into the U.S. The idea was to halt the spread of the disease, keep transmissions to a minimum.
He was accused of xenophobia.
He was accused of making a racist move.
At the end of the day, it was probably effective.
It was probably effective.
Maggie Haberman at the New York Times.
They could not believe it.
It was so brazen.
It was so brutal.
They tried their best to flip it on him, but they were so defeated.
They were so taken, taken aback by this that they couldn't do it.
The best move to try to flip this on Trump came from John Carl over at ABC, who Trump has been humiliating in these press conferences.
And John Carl took, took the one angle he could see, could see, which is he said that it looked like a campaign ad and he wanted to find out who made the ad because maybe Trump was using white house resources inappropriately for campaign activities because that was a campaign ad that he just forced all of the mainstream media to play for him for free on their which is he said that it looked like a campaign ad And Trump, like he was waiting for it.
He He was waiting for that little toss-up, knocks it out of the park, and he says, wait a second.
You think that me, playing your own ridiculous words, is a campaign ad?
What does that say about you?
I've never seen a video like that played in this room.
It looks a bit like a campaign ad.
Who produced that video for you?
That was done by a group in the office, and it was done just by...
We just put some clips together.
I could give you...
I'll bet you I have over a hundred more clips, even better than them.
They were just pieced together over the last two hours.
That was just, oh, we have far better than that.
That's nothing compared to some of them.
This was produced here in the White House?
Yeah, this was done by Dan and a group of people, and they just put it together in a period of probably less than two hours.
Why do you feel you need to do that?
Because we're getting fake news, and I like to have it corrected.
How did John Carl not notice the flaw in his own question?
He goes, why did you feel the need to do that?
To do what, John?
What did he do?
He just played your own words back to you.
Why did you feel the need to show our reporting?
As if he is now admitting their reporting is so bad, so unfair, so humiliating for them.
That merely playing it back on a television is an attack on the media.
Quoting the media is now an attack on the media.
And I agree, it is, because the media have humiliated themselves.
And that was the trap that Trump set, and it totally worked.
It wasn't just him.
It wasn't just him.
The former New York Times editor, Howell Raines, fell for exactly the same thing.
Here's Howell Raines talking on MSNBC about it.
I think this is one of the most astonishing acts of disinformation we've seen from the White House since the Vietnam era and the 5 o'clock follies of Lyndon Johnson's administration.
The news today, and this is one of those days as a journalist when you have to put on your analytical hat, And hack your way through what's really happening.
What really happened today is that some smart, serious governors, Governor Newsom on the West Coast, Governor Cuomo and Governor O'Mara on the East Coast, took action to prevent the president from making a thunderous blunder that would further endanger the health of the American people.
This was dangerous disinformation.
What happened today, what matters is not what we saw at the press briefing.
It's not our own words.
It's this other stuff that happened about the governors.
So if the Trump press briefing was dangerous disinformation, and if the centerpiece of the Trump press briefing was just playing the reporter's own words back to them, It would seem to follow that the mainstream media reporting is dangerous disinformation.
He falls into it too.
Not just him.
Okay, the question is, who melted down here?
The narrative right now that the media are trying to spin is that Trump had a meltdown.
And seriously, this was trending on Twitter.
They say, Trump had a meltdown.
You just saw it.
Does he look like he had a meltdown?
No.
He just played a video of these people speaking.
And then the press had a meltdown because the left is always projecting.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Who really melted down?
That's the question.
Now, the media are reporting this as a Trump meltdown.
Here's Jim Acosta, Jim Acosta-ing all over this story.
I have to tell you, that is the biggest meltdown I have ever seen from a president of the United States in my career.
I don't think a reasonable person could watch what we just saw over the last hour and conclude that the president is in control.
He sounds like he is out of control.
He sounds like he's totally out of control because he played our own words back to us.
You saw how Trump reacted.
Compare that to John Carl, who looked like he was going to cry.
He looked so crestfallen.
And upset.
And Jim Acosta obviously seems pretty upset on that clip.
Trump didn't just shred the reporters with their own words.
He pointedly, when they were trying, they just kept trying to attack him from different angles.
He just doesn't care anymore, okay?
There's no more veneer.
There's no more pretend that he's going to play nicely with them.
He's not doing it.
Here is Trump ripping apart a CBS reporter.
All I'm saying is this.
How do you close down the greatest economy in the history of the world when on January 17th you have no cases and no death?
When on January 21st you have one case and no death.
One case.
Think of that.
Now, we're supposed to close down the country, but here's what happened.
When on January 31st, I instituted the ban, Joe Biden went crazy.
He said, you don't need the ban.
He didn't go crazy.
He didn't even know what the hell the ban was.
So he didn't go crazy.
But he did say, he did call me xenophobic.
Wait a minute.
He called me xenophobic.
He called me racist.
Because he has since apologized and he said, I did the right thing.
So when you say, why didn't you this...
Every Democrat thought I made a mistake when I did it.
I saved tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives by a million.
The argument is that you bought yourself some time and you didn't use it to prepare hospitals.
You didn't use it to ramp up testing.
Right now, nearly 20 million people are unemployed.
It's so disgraceful the way you say that.
So disgraceful.
Absolutely.
Who could disagree with that?
The media, it was just an all-out brawl, okay?
The media were getting their hits in.
Trump was getting his hits in.
CNN ran four crazy chyrons in five minutes.
One said angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session.
Next one, Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes.
Next one, Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history and coronavirus response.
Next one, Trump melts down an angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings.
What's this all about?
What's this about?
This is not just about Trump trying to move on from the coronavirus news cycle.
It's not just him signaling that he wants to move on.
This is how Trump moves on from the coronavirus news cycle.
We got reports yesterday that Trump, he wants to try to start reopening by May 1st, which he should.
He should frankly do it sooner if he can.
He's not going to win if he keeps defending himself.
He's done an excellent job on the coronavirus response.
The media are dishonest hacks and they're going to attack him for, as we just saw, opposite reasons.
Because he didn't do enough or because he did too much.
They're going to go after him either way.
It's going to be unfair.
That's not a battle he can win.
So he's got to move on now.
And the way that he's going to move on is not by asking nicely to move on.
The way he's going to move on is by playing what is essentially a campaign ad during the White House briefing, even though the campaign ad is just the mainstream media's own words.
He's going to force their hand.
That's what he did yesterday, and he's forcing them to get back to 2020 coverage.
And you know what?
Credit where credit's due.
You don't need to just take my word for it here.
The jackals over at Media Matters finally caught on to how much this foolish press is helping President Trump.
So my friend over there, Jason Campbell, who is, you know, Media Matters is this left-wing operative group.
But unlike other left-wing operative groups, instead of trying to get politicians fired, they try to get media...
People fired.
And there's no version of this on the right.
It's only on the left because they hate that conservatives can communicate.
They can't refute the arguments that we're making, so they just try to silence us.
And so anyway, the one guy who's assigned to me and some of the other Daily Wire people, Jason Campbell, who I actually sort of get a kick out of, he recognized the strategy here, right?
So he tweets out, Not that networks should ever have been broadcasting these Trump rallies clothed as press briefings, but if they're now going to run campaign ads for free on their airtime, they clearly have learned nothing from 2016.
That's true, right?
Trump is always using the media to get free publicity.
I think he got something like $2 billion worth of free press in 2016.
Campbell sent out another tweet.
He was responding to someone who said, they can keep putting all the sassy chyrons on screen they want.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is when the networks stop airing the briefing and start covering it.
And Campbell responded to that over at Media Matters.
And he said, this is just dawning on the networks now.
They had to air a campaign ad for free to realize these are propaganda sessions.
So...
I give Campbell and Media Matters credit for recognizing how Trump is manipulating the press's own hackery to work against them.
There is a little irony here, though, because Media Matters watches my show every single day and then takes out some of the best clips from my show and posts them themselves with little snarky comments.
And they think that the little snarky comments are going to matter more than the exposure that Media Matters is giving to my show and the other shows here at The Daily Wire.
But that they are doing exactly what they're criticizing the media of doing for Trump.
So anyway, I just want to thank Media Matters for doing that.
You're astute in your observation.
You're definitely helping us to spread our show.
So thank you very much and keep up the good work.
It was not just Trump.
Who was owning the press yesterday and having a good time doing it.
Okay, everyone was getting in on this.
It's not just a single zinger, right?
This was clearly a well-thought-out strategy.
This is what you're going to see moving into the future.
Even Dr.
Fauci got in on the fun.
Dr.
Fauci is a pretty buttoned-up guy, but even he went after the press because the press had been trying to sow division and get Dr.
Fauci fired and get Trump pitted against Fauci.
So Fauci was asked...
Basically, please, Dr.
Fauci, please disagree with President Trump.
And Trump wouldn't, or Fauci rather, wouldn't do it.
He ended up backing the president.
We had been talking before any meetings that we had about the pros and the cons, the effectiveness or not of strong mitigations.
So discussions were going on mostly among the medical people about what that would mean.
The first and only time that Dr.
Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president.
To actually have a, quote, shutdown in the sense of not really shutdown, but to really have strong mitigation.
We discussed it.
Obviously, there would be concern by some that, in fact, that might have some negative consequences.
Nonetheless, the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.
The next second time that I went with Dr.
Birx into the president and said, 15 days are not enough.
We need to go 30 days.
Obviously, there were people who had a problem with that because of the potential secondary effects.
Nonetheless, at that time, the president went with the health recommendations and we extended it another 30 days.
So Fauci is saying Trump did what we asked him to do.
Trump listened to the advice of the medical professionals.
I got no problem with Trump.
Stop trying to sow discord.
The press wouldn't leave it at that, though.
The press actually asked Dr.
Fauci if he was being honest or if Trump had just bullied him into backing him.
They asked him, Dr.
Fauci, are you voluntarily saying all of these things?
And the disgust With which Dr.
Fauci regards the media became so clear.
Because what an offensive question.
Say, yeah, but are you telling the truth?
Yeah, but are you lying?
Yeah, but are you being bullied?
Yeah, but are you weak?
He looks at them and he goes, excuse me.
Everything I do, I do voluntarily.
Are you doing this voluntarily?
No, I'm doing good.
Everything I do is voluntarily.
Please, don't even imply that.
Please, don't even imply that.
What an offensive way.
By the way, if the press are trying to ingratiate themselves to Dr.
Fauci and turn Fauci against Trump, not doing a good job of it.
This was one of the most glorious press conferences in American history.
However, it was not without its flaws.
There was one bit in here that Trump got an aspect of our governmental system factually incorrect.
He seemed in the clip to misunderstand federalism, and he said it's not up to the states on whether or not they want to reopen.
Actually, the president has total control.
Just to clarify your understanding of your authority vis-à-vis governors.
Just to be very specific.
For instance, if a governor issued a state home...
When you say my authority, the president's authority...
Not mine, because it's not me.
This is...
When somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total.
And that's the way it's got to be.
Your authority is total.
It's total.
And the governors know that.
The governors know that.
No, you have a couple of bans of...
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
You have a couple...
Could you rescind that order?
You have a couple of bans of Democrat governors, but they will agree to it.
They will agree to it.
But the authority of the President of the United States having to do with the subject we're talking about is total.
Now, that last bit is important.
He's not saying the president has total power like he's a dictator.
He's saying that on this subject, the president has total power, which is also not true, by the way.
The states do have considerable authority on how to reopen.
Federal government has a little bit of authority there, too.
But sure, okay, President Trump is misrepresenting federalism here.
Everybody, everybody and their mother pounced on Trump for this.
You know, you heard the same chorus that you always hear from the squishy Republican crowd.
They said, what would you have said if Barack Obama had said this?
Let's be fair here, because Donald Trump said this, and you're going to mostly give him a pass.
You'll maybe say he was wrong, but then not harp on it too much.
But if Obama had said this, you would have harped on it a lot.
They think this is some sort of profound question, this profound insight that we treat radical leftists differently than we treat conservatives.
They think this exposes some kind of hypocrisy.
It's actually quite simple.
We would have reacted differently to Barack Obama because Barack Obama was Barack Obama and Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
Why do we think that ideology doesn't matter here, okay?
If we've got a president who's done a very good job, who's got a good track record, who we can rely on at least to a considerable degree to advance conservative priorities and steward the government in a good way, What maniac would not give him a little bit more grace than the guy who's a radical leftist,
who has an apparent antipathy for the country, who says he wants to fundamentally transform the country, who lies through his teeth when it comes to matters of public policy, like if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, who regards half of his countrymen as bitter clingers, who he holds in contempt.
Yeah, of course we're going to treat Trump a little bit better than that.
That's perfectly natural and it's perfectly reasonable to do that.
So did Trump get the point on federalism a little bit off?
Yeah, sure he did.
Is it going to spoil my day?
No.
I'm glad that he knows now that, you know, the states have a little bit more authority, but okay, whatever, move on.
Other than that, it was an excellent press conference and it achieved the goal of moving past federalism.
And there are a lot of reasons, I think, that we should probably move past coronavirus in the near future.
One of those is given by a legendary conservative figure, Bill Bennett.
Bill Bennett was the Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan.
He's been a long time on the conservative scene.
Bill Bennett is now bringing back this argument that perhaps the coronavirus is not like Ebola so much as it's like We're good to go.
Now, what's funny about this is this is the argument that the press was making in the early days of the pandemic, that now they're criticizing Trump for making in the early days of the pandemic, that now President Trump is not making but increasingly looks plausible.
How do we make sense of all of that?
We'll get to Bill Bennett.
We'll get to a new study out of Israel, which is backing up what Bill Bennett is saying, at least about reopening the economy.
Then we'll get to the big endorsement, Bernie Sanders caves, like he always does, because Bernie is a loser.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to Biden's evaporated lead, but first, oh, do I have a deal for you?
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So Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan's education secretary, legendary conservative figure.
He's going back to the initial comparison for this coronavirus, which was to the seasonal flu.
Obviously that comparison would not have made a lot of sense if we were talking about 2 million Americans dead, or 4 million, or 6 million Americans dead, or however many they said it was going to be.
Wouldn't have made sense if we were talking about 250,000 Americans dead.
But the current models are now projecting about 60,000.
And so that is within the range of the seasonal flu.
Here's Bill Bennett.
What are we missing about this virus?
We see the numbers, 22,000 dead, how many cases?
But you took a step back, and what did you find?
Yeah, let's take a step back.
The estimates now from the University of Washington, which is the model everybody's been going on, even though it's been wrong most of the time by a lot, overstating it, is now they say 60,000 people will die.
61,000 is what we lost to the flu in 2017 and 2018.
The flu.
Now, we all regret the loss of 61,000 people, if that's what it turns out to be.
I'm going to tell you, I think it's going to be less.
And salute all those who are working on the front lines on this.
The hospital workers, the nurses, the doctors, etc.
And the generosity of the American people.
But if you look at those numbers and see the comparable, we're going to have fewer fatalities from this than from the flu.
For this, we scared the hell out of the American people.
We lost 17 million jobs.
We put a major dent in the economy.
We closed down the schools.
You heard Dr.
Oz say we probably didn't have to do that.
Shut down the churches and so on.
You know, this was not and is not a pandemic, but we do have panic and pandemonium as a result of the hype of this.
And it's really unfortunate.
Look at the facts.
I love that Bill Bennett has the courage to say this because increasingly this comparison looks tenable.
Now, is this the flu?
No, it's different.
It's more contagious.
It's new, right?
We don't know about this.
It just came out of China.
It was covered up by the Chinese government, so it became more virulent and was able to spread more without us taking precautions.
So, sure, it's a little bit different, but if you look at the current projected deaths, it's very similar.
But you're not allowed to make that comparison anymore because the left is using the tactic that it always uses when it can't win the argument, is it just browbeats you.
It emotionally manipulates you into not making the obvious argument.
So it goes a little bit something like this.
You say, huh, 60,000 deaths.
Well, that's kind of like the flu.
I guess the coronavirus is a little bit similar to the flu, and yet we reacted to it so much differently.
And then the left will do this.
They'll say, are you comparing this to the flu?
Are you seriously, do you have the gall, the temerity, the stupidity to compare this to the flu?
And by the time they're done intimidating you, You think, oh gosh, maybe I shouldn't have done that.
Am I wrong?
Yeah, no, no, I'm not doing that.
But wait a second.
Yeah, why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I? Because the comparison wouldn't make sense if your alarmist numbers turned out to be correct.
But they didn't turn out to be correct.
Actually, the numbers that we suspected were true the whole time from the very beginning that you screamed and yelled at us for, those numbers are turning out to be correct.
So yes, I am making that comparison, thank you very much.
And it would appear that that comparison, while imperfect, because all comparisons are imperfect, that comparison seems to carry a lot of weight.
Now, there's one argument that the left puts forward to shut this down.
They say...
You can't compare it to the flu because the only reason the numbers are so low, the current projected death numbers, Is because we shut down the global economy.
So it's crazy.
If we'd listened to you, we would have gotten 2 million people dead.
But because we listened to me, now the numbers are going down.
And ironically, you think this vindicates your stupid idea.
But really, it vindicates us, the alarmists, who shut down, without precedent, the global economy over a virus that we knew very little about.
That argument does not hold up.
It doesn't hold up for a couple reasons.
One, because...
At least in the recent models, which were projecting 100,000, 200,000 deaths, at least in those recent models, they were already factoring in social distancing.
They were already factoring in shutting down the economy.
They were factoring on all the things that we were doing, and they're still wrong.
But even beyond that, there is evidence coming out more day by day, That the lockdown didn't do anything.
Most recently we're seeing this from Israel.
Not just Israel the country, Israel the person.
The Israeli professor and public intellectual Isaac Ben-Israel has just looked at some studies on this.
He has concluded that in countries where they took closure steps, shutdown steps, like Italy, and in countries that have not taken closure steps, like Taiwan or Singapore...
The trend of the disease is almost exactly the same.
What he found is there is an increase, in some cases a significant increase in the number of cases, until the fourth to sixth week.
And then immediately after that, there is moderation for a couple weeks or a few weeks until the eighth week.
And then it declines and disappears.
What's different about what this Israeli intellectual, Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, is looking at and the models that we based our policy on is that Isaac Ben-Israel is looking at the real hard data, not just the prediction models.
And the real hard data are showing that perhaps the lockdowns didn't achieve very much at all.
He says...
This is happening both in countries that have closed down, like us, and in those that have not closed down until today, like Sweden.
Every country, no matter its response, the decline and rise occur according to the same timeline.
It's clear to us how the epidemic is starting and what is causing the increase.
What is causing the moderation is unclear.
Which means there is a world, and I'm not saying this is certainly the case, but there is evidence that we shut down this global economy.
We threw 16 million Americans out of work for three weeks.
Just in three weeks.
Not for three weeks.
They're going to be out of work a lot longer than that.
And when we get the unemployment numbers this Thursday, there are going to be a lot more people unemployed.
A lot of lives ruined.
A lot of people going back to drug addiction.
A lot of people who will commit suicide because that always happens in economic downturns.
There'll be a lot of negative consequences from this, possibly for nothing, based on no evidence.
The mainstream media and the leftist politicians who did this are going to have a lot to answer for.
And I think President Trump is recognizing this now.
And I think that's why he is signaling that we've got to move on past this.
We've got to get out and get the economy going as fast as possible.
Because, by the way, we're running out of time.
Every day this drags on, it's going to be that much harder to restart the economy.
And that could cost Trump the election in November.
And maybe the media and the left had that in their mind the whole damn time.
Speaking of the election in November, we now have a presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden.
And Bernie Sanders, loser as he ever was, is admitting defeat, and for all his purported radicalism, is endorsing the establishment nominee, Joe Biden.
Today I am asking all Americans, I'm asking every Democrat, I'm asking every Independent, I'm asking a lot of Republicans, To come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse.
Hold on.
What was that sound that just came out of Joe?
Did you hear that?
And I'm asking them to support your candidacy.
What was that sound?
Was that supposed to express surprise?
What is he surprised about?
Surely he's not surprised that Bernie is endorsing his campaign.
That's the whole reason they were on that live stream.
That's what they've been negotiating for weeks.
That couldn't have been the surprise.
Maybe for Joe Biden, the surprise was that he's running for president at all.
It's got to be an unpleasant surprise.
Oh, I got to do that still?
Oh no, that's terrible.
I just want to sit and watch my stories on the television.
Bernie then finishes his endorsement.
To make certain...
That we defeat somebody who I believe, and I'm speaking just for myself now, is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.
Okay.
You get it.
You get it.
Bernie is going to endorse him.
We knew this was going to happen.
Bernie always rolls over.
Bernie doesn't want to be a leader.
Bernie doesn't want to be the nominee.
Bernie doesn't want to be a frontrunner.
Bernie doesn't want to be the president.
That would require doing something, and Bernie has never...
Bernie has never led Anything in particular other than a protest movement.
That's why when he was a young man, he was always part of these fringe political parties.
He didn't seem to have much interest in really winning.
He just wanted to be a gadfly, and then he's been a gadfly his whole career, and now he's endorsing Joe Biden.
The only reason I mention this is because of one particular irony, which is that Bernie Sanders has endorsed Joe Biden for president before Barack Obama has.
Bernie Sanders, the radical socialist who ran against Joe Biden, Has endorsed him before Joe Biden's old boss, who he served under faithfully as vice president for two terms, Barack Obama.
Obama just, I don't know, he just might not believe in Joe.
Who would?
That Bernie endorsement might not mean very much because Bernie's own spokesman will not endorse Joe Biden.
The idea is that if Bernie endorses Biden, then all the Bernie bros are going to come over and the party's going to unify and that'll be all well and good.
Maybe not.
Because if Bernie can't get his own spokesman to come over, how's he going to get all those other crazy Bernie bros?
His spokesman, Breonna Joy Gray, says, With the utmost respect for Bernie Sanders, who's an incredible human being and genuine inspiration, I don't endorse Joe Biden.
I supported Bernie Sanders because he backed ideas like Medicare for All, canceling all student debt, and a wealth tax.
Biden supports none of those.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Pretty sad.
Ouch.
Bernie Sanders likely already has regrets, okay?
Because I think probably Bernie doesn't want to endorse him, but he doesn't want to be blamed for losing.
And what does he really care?
He's just going to go back to the Senate.
You could see in the endorsement video, Joe Biden starts running off on tangents that don't make any sense.
And you can look, if you look deeply in Bernie's eyes, you see, oh gosh, what have I done?
At one point in this endorsement, Joe Biden says it's so imperative that he wins because he needs to create a path to citizenship for citizens.
We're going to finally achieve comprehensive immigration reform as well, Put millions of citizens on a pathway to citizenship, including so many who are on the front lines right now.
You can see Bernie Sanders just, yeah, yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you.
Oh, what did he say?
Oh, well, we're in it now.
Okay.
And he plasters a smile on his face.
Very sad situation for the Democratic Party because they don't think that Joe is going to win and the polls are showing that too.
So right now there's a Fox News poll out of registered voters showed that Joe Biden's lead over Trump is gone.
Joe Biden.
Just a week ago, had an almost 10 point lead over President Trump nationally.
Now that's gone.
Okay, now they are tied.
They both have 42% support and another 16% say they would vote for a third party candidate or are undecided.
What changed in that time?
Trump has shown leadership.
On the coronavirus, it didn't have the effect that Democrats were hoping, right?
What Democrats were hoping was that the coronavirus would destroy the economy, throw people out of work.
I mean, Bill Maher talked about this openly.
He said, we need a recession because a recession will kick Trump out of office and it'd be better for millions of people to lose their jobs than for Trump to get reelected.
So Democrats were openly campaigning for this, right?
The media were openly campaigning for this.
They finally got it, but it didn't have the effect that they wanted because President Trump took control of the narrative.
If he had just stayed in the Oval Office, closed off from everybody, and the media were running rampant, then it might have had that effect.
But he's not.
Trump is holding his own press conferences.
Now, he's not just holding the press conferences answering questions about coronavirus.
He's dictating the news of the day every single day.
He's showing leadership.
I think the leadership thing helped on those polls.
He also is showing that he's ready to turn this around.
Okay?
And a down economy...
Four or five months before the election is not a huge deal if he can get that economy going again in time for November.
And I think that's what he's signaling.
I think Joe Biden knows that.
I think nobody wants Joe Biden to lead in a crisis.
And they're seeing that moment slip from Joe, just like so many things are slipping from Joe these days.
That is one way to pummel the narrative.
Now, what...
We all have to make sure happens is now that we're pummeling that mainstream media, that leftist narrative, now that it's into oblivion, we've got to move forward.
That's what President Trump's got to see.
He's making some signals that he's going to do that, but a lot is going to matter in the next two weeks.
We'll see if they can turn it around.
We don't have any more time today, but we will get back into it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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