All Episodes
Previous Next
April 28, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
41:07
When In Doubt, Blame China

The Republican Party rolls out a strategy to blame the coronavirus pandemic on China and "Democratic traitors." Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the cravenness of it all, and the danger of rising fascism and the prospect of widespread, manufactured paranoia and racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute.
One minute.
And is there a way we can do something like that?
By injection inside or almost a cleaning.
It's a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party's brightest minds to go back to China to compete for our jobs, to take our business, and ultimately to steal our property and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people.
You know, if Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America.
They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am your co-host, Jared Yates-Axton.
I'm here with my favorite co-host, Nick Halsman.
We are knee-deep still in the coronavirus pandemic, and we have a lot to talk about today.
But first things first, The GOP is apparently deciding to blame China for all of its failures in the coronavirus pandemic.
There's a memo circulating and Nick, tell the good people about this strategy that is taking shape.
Delightfully Republican is such a great oxymoron.
or shall we say delightfully Republican than to attempt to find something to make worse than the present administration Republican that they are all supporting. - Delightfully Republican is such a great oxymoron.
I love that a lot. - I mean, it's reassuring in a way They haven't changed their tactics, but they're always trying to figure out who they can shove underneath the people who they want to really deserve blame, right?
And so, okay, obviously Trump has done a pretty bad job by all accounts in dealing with this, but if they can somehow say, well, no, China is really the one doing the bad job here, then it can kind of serve as a distraction at the very least at the surface for what's really going on and what they need to get people to stop thinking about.
Yeah, so there is this 57-page memo floating around GOP circles right now.
And for anyone who's not familiar with how this stuff works, the Republican Party, starting back in the late 1970s, early 1980s, basically handed over their political positions over to a bunch of think tanks.
And basically there's like this shadow world of think tanks, conservative.
There's also Democratic ones too, don't get me wrong.
But the Republican Party relies on them heavily.
And so basically they are scripted.
This is one of the reasons why the Republican Party is quote unquote disciplined, right?
And we're all very familiar with that.
The Republican Party is very good at staying on message together with the occasional difference of like a Roy Moore out there or something, right?
And so they get these memos.
And right now this 57-page memo, and I've had a chance to take a look at it, and it is, let me see, a professional piece of jargon.
It is disgusting, is what it is.
And basically what it says is that every Republican running for office in November should, number one, blame China for the coronavirus pandemic, right?
Not just the fact that China was the initial place where it started, but to say that they were somehow or another, you know, they didn't handle it right or they didn't tell the world about it.
There's also a lot of wink-wink, nudge-nudge about, you know, conspiracy theories and where this thing came from.
Tom Cotton, who we'll talk about in a second, is involved in all this.
And number two, I thought was a really interesting thing that they have done.
is that they said under no circumstance whatsoever should you defend Donald Trump's record on the coronavirus pandemic and that you should just pivot away from that and talk about the Chinese and talk about Democratic Party members who are quote-unquote in bed with China.
It is a really disgusting thing that they're pushing around here.
Well, is it encouraging to you, Jared, that the polling indicates that any amount of defense of Trump and his actions so far doesn't do well?
You know, we talk all the time, you and I and all these other people who analyze this stuff, and the one thing that we always talk about is like, Donald Trump's hardcore base is ungettable, right?
There's like a 20% number of Americans who just Aren't going to abandon him and aren't going to, you know, listen to criticism of him.
But here the Republicans have seemingly admitted that this is something that they cannot win.
This is something that there's no way whatsoever for them to actually spin.
So that gives me hope.
Does that make you feel better about the situation at least a little bit?
I mean, I guess so.
I mean, we can see through it, but I think you're low on that percentage.
I think it's higher than 20%.
Oh man, maybe I was trying to sleep at night.
I don't know, Nick.
You know, I mean, the fact that people called in to various government agencies to find out if it was okay to inject disinfectant.
Now, here's a question I have for you, because I'm starting to think that maybe those are false flags.
Maybe it's like Democrats calling in, like, you know, fake dumb to make it seem like that was happening.
Who knows at this point?
I wish that was true, but journalists have found that there was a giant uptick in Trump supporters ingesting bleach and having to actually, like, seek medical help.
Which, you know, we can laugh about it all we want.
There's been a bunch of memes around it, but there's Absolutely nothing funny about the fact that this country's public education and critical thinking have been so much under attack by corporations and the wealthy and the Republican Party for so long that we've gotten to the point where people think that they should be ingesting bleach.
I think that's a big, giant problem, and that's part of the strategy that's been there.
I mean, that's what we've been seeing this whole time is this really strategic, bad-faith effort to manipulate people, and that's where we are now.
Well, I kind of feel like I feel a lot better about all this if I could just sort of take Trump, everything he says, as sarcastic because that seems where he wants to go with all these things anyway.
So let's just take everything he says from now on as sarcasm and then we can, maybe that'll be better, it'll be easier to deal with.
Donald Trump's had a rough few days, you know.
No, we haven't talked about it.
No, it's been, um, it's been bad.
Like, not just from the standpoint of like, oh, this is an ineffective leader.
I mean, that ship sailed a long time ago.
Um, you know, it has been so erratic lately and so, um, Insane.
There's really no other way to put it.
It's been so insane lately, and you're starting to see these poll numbers that are starting to come out, and this is one of the reasons why that memo circulated when it did.
You're starting to see these poll numbers that show that, like, a vast majority of Americans do not trust him on the coronavirus, and they think he's doing more harm than he is doing good.
And all these swing state polls and presidential polls are coming out.
He is really doing poorly.
He's, right now, Ohio is a toss-up state, and if you would have told me that in 2016, I would have been shocked.
I mean, his numbers right now, and obviously we can't prognosticate because we all lived through 2016.
Yeah, but it has been a rough few days and it is obvious that the Republican Party, and by the way, one of my favorite things is when you start getting these articles, right?
And we talked about it a little bit during the primary season when I was out in Iowa.
When you start noticing these articles where, like, people on the campaign say, or people in the Republican Party say, There's all these articles right now of Republicans who aren't going on the record saying he's going to take the party and destroy it.
And it is obvious with this memo that just came out that the Republican Party understands that Donald Trump's handling of this entire thing has not just been disastrous, but it's been disastrous on a level that they're not even able to spin.
Well, here's the thing they really screwed up on, and I had said this months ago before even the impeachment process began, which was, the polling was going to show that there was no way for Trump to win.
And if they could wrap their heads around that, they would have voted to get him out and put Pence in, and Pence would have won the landslide.
I have a feeling, and that's the thing they didn't do, if you did polling between Pence and Biden, what do you think that would be?
If it didn't include Donald Trump, it would probably be head-to-head.
Easily.
Easily head-to-head, right?
All those never-Trumper Republicans would come right back into the tent and vote for him, and depending on where they live, it would be easily winnable for them.
Certainly much more easily winnable than where they are now.
And that's the question.
This whole thing, the timing got all screwed up when we were talking about impeachment.
Had they waited, think about that, had they just waited a little bit longer, although I get it because of the call, But imagine that if they had waited and they could use this as part of their impeachment trial.
Like, he doesn't survive that, does he?
No, he doesn't, but one of the things that, well, I mean, you know, as a Republican Senator, that's a different thing altogether.
One thing that we have to take into consideration here, and this is something I've been screaming from the rooftops, They don't win in reality.
The Republican Party has made a decision that they do not win in the reality that is objective reality, the reality that we all live in, where we trust what we see and hear and smell or whatever.
But what they're doing right now, and this memo is part of it, they're trying to shift us into an alternate reality where it doesn't matter what the federal government has done during the pandemic.
What they're basically trying to do is they're trying to beat the drum of war.
And this is what authoritarian countries do all the time.
They fail constantly because they're really bad at government.
And by the way, the Republican Party is terrible at government.
They, you know, the only reason that they're elected is because they happen to trumpet and parrot Fox News talking points better than anybody else, right?
It's a really effective way to get elected in this country, particularly where we are and public education has been destroyed.
But now, with this idea with China and the idea that Democrats have somehow or another betrayed the country, helping China, that's treason, first of all.
And second of all, that's saying, no, America, we are on the brink of war, right?
Now, whether or not they intend to go to war is a different thing altogether.
But that's a different reality, right?
That's not just pandemic plus also economic crisis.
That is like a generational war crisis.
And if we want to believe that China somehow or another attacked us, and by the way, the usage of the phrase invisible enemy, the Wuhan virus, all that stuff, that's not by accident.
And while we're on the subject, this is something I want to bring up.
I have noticed over the past few days, Those old Russian social media bots have just flicked on.
They're back in full force, but they're not pushing necessarily Donald Trump.
Which, by the way, is interesting because it's just like that memo, right?
What they're doing is they are pushing anti-Chinese propaganda, and every liberal commentator, like your favorite co-host Nick Hausman, Jared Yates Sexton, everything that I post, I just look up and it's just like, oh, you're in China's back pocket.
And I've been talking to a lot of other people out there who have these platforms and they are all being called pro-China propagandist.
They've clicked on and it is a completely orchestrated thing, which is not at all an accident.
It's not a coincidence.
But it's also interesting because if we are to believe that it's Russia-driven, right, which seems to be where it's coming from, I think that they have a relative simpatico with China, right?
Although their main objective, obviously, is to sow discord and create chaos and help Trump at the same time.
Well, I want to bring up one of your favorite guys, Mr. Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Yeah.
Which is with triangulation.
Right.
I mean, that's the idea is that there are superpowers in the world that play each other off of each other.
Now, I don't know that it's Russia.
It could very well be, I don't know, you know, far right groups, shadowy far right groups that have learned from Russia.
But I can tell you right now, it smells and looks like what happened in 2016 with the Russian bots, but it could be a completely different thing.
You're exactly right, because they have sort of come simpatico, but they also play each other, and they play US off of each other.
It's a weird little game they all play.
Right.
I mean, and CIA plays this game, too.
And speaking of Nixon, I was looking at it today only because, you know, there are notions of oversight, quote-unquote oversight, right?
We'll call it that.
Which is, I mean, for JFK, it was severe oversight.
But you could argue that there are times people could go rogue in terms of national security stuff, and things will all of a sudden leak.
And you want to go way off the rails for one second.
Bob Woodward got hired by the Washington Post having written a rag for like a year without any real credentials.
And you can see him in the movie like he wasn't a really good writer.
So you kind of wonder like – this is how crazy it gets, but like he had a lot of intelligence background in this service.
And then he's now at the Washington Post exposing the president.
It's like – I don't know.
It's interesting to me.
But nonetheless – OK.
Let's cut to the real facts.
No, I just want to pause for a second.
And this is one of those things.
As we're building our audience and people are listening to us, I like the idea that they get to know us.
And everyone needs to know that Nick is on a big Watergate counter-conspiracy kick right now.
And that just made my day.
I have to tell you, I'm looking for joy where I can find it, and you really picking up on this Woodward counter Watergate thing.
One of these days, we've already discussed that when we're done with this podcast, you're going to introduce me into this really bizarre batshit world, and I'm excited for it, but what you're talking about is this environment where you can't trust anything, right?
And we talk about that on this show.
One of the things that Watergate taught Bad actors.
And this goes back to Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and this is where we give you a little bit of historical context.
What they discovered, even in the face of the most damning political scandals in American history, was that they scored points when they lied and they called in the legitimacy of their critics.
Right?
And when they did that was when they succeeded and that's where things like Bannon's flood the zone with shit and all that comes from and things we've talked about on here with like Russian propagandists and technologists.
What we're watching now is a situation where you and I and every listener who's listening to us right now and every American knows that this thing was screwed up.
On a massive level, and that we've had too many people die.
The federal response has been criminal.
We're now getting ready to open back up in a lot of places where they don't need to open back up.
It's malfeasant greed.
And the only way that they can win, the only way that the Republican, and by the way, in a sane world, after this pandemic, the way it's been handled, the Republican Party would go out of existence.
Right?
There would be something else that would take their place, which is what needs to happen.
But the only way they can do it is by shifting reality and getting rid of our idea of objective reality and shared reality.
And that's what's happening right now with this China thing.
Right.
And they have been successful, let's make no mistake.
There's enough evidence out there on social media and posts by like everyday normal people claiming the hoax-like nature of this thing, right?
where it's not as lethal as the flu, it's not as contagious.
Like all those things have creeped in a little bit, and I get it, over enough time, and we're now starting to see, I wouldn't even say the flattening of the curve, because it kind of fits and starts.
But after enough time, people forget.
The American people in this country just sort of have really bad memories, and four or five weeks into this, they kind of forget, oh, there's all these people dying, and no one has died next to me in the last five days, so therefore we should be able to go out and earn a living.
And I get it.
But again, the only reason why they're feeling that kind of pressure is because of all the intense debt they probably mounted, the poor earnings they make anyway, and they can't afford to go that long without it.
And it's the government didn't properly address this, which is my biggest issue with all the money that they're spending and wasting right now on all the different programs they're trying to get money to.
They're not doing it properly.
That's what they're betting on.
I mean, they are betting on, and listen, we've said it before on here, one of the main problems with America is that we have a really bad memory and a really bad understanding of how things have happened and how we've gotten to places that we are and how we're moving forward.
They are betting that, A, they can reopen America, and even if a bunch of people die, that we're just gonna not pay attention.
And that's a possibility.
I know that's terrible and it sounds awful, but it's completely true.
The second thing they're betting on is that by November, we will have forgotten what this hell was like.
Right.
And or that we will have forgotten what they've said, because what you just said was interesting.
The idea that it's, you know, it's it's just like the flu and it's not that dangerous.
Well, how do you take those two thoughts?
It's not that dangerous.
It's just like the flu, but it is a terrible bioweapon released from China to decimate the world.
How do you do those two things, right?
Like, when you take those two things, they don't work together, but that's what this cult-like mentality does.
You're able to, like, take 2 plus 2 to equal 5.
And the way that you do that is you start... I mean, we gotta talk about Tom Cotton, by the way.
Okay, did you see Tom Cotton on Fox News this weekend?
Okay, so Tom Cotton this weekend, who I was thinking back to our, we had Ross Barkin on here as I think our first guest on the podcast.
And he was talking about the possibility of the Republican Party embracing fascism and totality and sliding into it.
And he was talking about future Republican leaders and it was either Mike Pence or Tom Cotton.
Let me check my notes.
And I thought about that all weekend after Tom Cotton went on Fox News and said that we should not allow Chinese students to study technology at America's universities.
And that they should be relegated, this is fun, to studying Shakespeare, who by the way, last I checked, let me check my notes, British, British.
He was pretty good, though.
Yeah, but he was white, so it's almost like that's the same thing as American to the Republican Party.
And second of all, the Federalist Papers, which by the way, this is going to turn some people off.
I don't care.
Whatever.
I'm shooting my shot.
Federalist Papers is propagandistic rags, but that's neither here nor there.
So anyway, he says that they should be relegated to doing that, which basically says that we should discriminate on a wide-scale, systematic approach All Chinese people.
And Fox News claps at him like a trained seal.
Right, right.
I mean, I guess because what he's afraid of or what he's trying to identify is the Chinese bad actors who will steal our IP and they'll hack into our systems and they'll whatever, I guess, spread viruses.
We shouldn't teach them how to do these things.
What do you call that, Nick, when you Judge an entire group of people as if they are all the same.
Yeah, that's racism.
Oh, that's racism!
That's right!
And what happens when a political party in a time of crisis in a country engages in racist scapegoating?
What happens to the group that they're scapegoating?
Um, I think they're called hate crimes.
Oh, there's a bunch of hate crimes and murders and they get discriminated against.
Has that happened in America?
I'm not good on history.
A little.
It's happened a little, that's right.
Every time there's one of these things.
And that's what we're looking at.
And I know that sounds terrible, but that's their political strategy, Nick.
Like, that's what they're betting November on.
Right.
Although, again, are they inciting hate crime?
Or are they simply just trying to distract and elevate Trump above, you know, one notch?
That's all they're trying to do, right?
To get one notch above somebody else so that Trump is not the worst.
And that's the likely Republican notion.
That's it.
And here's the thing.
Let's go in our time machine and say, okay, this idea worked, right?
So we get to November of 2020, if we have an election, and Donald Trump is re-elected because of this strategy.
What's life look like for an Asian person in America at that point?
It's gonna be bleak and I can't speak for them because I don't, I'm not, I don't know, right?
I don't know what it's like to be Asian, but I can only imagine even the slightest subtle things are gonna make life, you know, unbearable.
Hate crimes went up in this country when he started saying Wuhan virus and Chinese virus.
So if this strategy works, November 2020 looks bad.
And I can tell you from experience reading about authoritarianism, That when authoritarian regimes consolidate power effectively by scapegoating conspiracies and vulnerable populations, it's not like it stops with that one vulnerable population.
What people do to fight off the conspiracy and the enemy is that they give away individual liberties, or they're given more liberties over other people who have theirs taken away, and you end up in a really bad situation.
Now, again, this isn't A podcast that was created to go after the Republican Party, it just so happens that we're here to say what's wrong, right?
We're here to say, here's the problem.
Think about a party that would do that.
Think about a party that, like, they get this paper and they're like, yeah, sounds good, I'm gonna do that.
They get on Fox News and they say, you shouldn't be allowed to do this, you should have to be Americanized by the law, right?
Like, think about a party, that's a party that deserves not to exist anymore.
That is a terminally ill party that needs to go away.
Oh, how about the fact that, you know, if you're older, then, you know, you died to save your kids, you know, by going to work.
You know, that kind of stuff, too.
It's so clear.
That's why, again, it's almost refreshing because they don't have to, like, even talk around it anymore.
They can finally just be out in the open with how little they actually care about the constituents.
But for some reason, the way they speak these terms, it makes that whatever percentage, 30, 32% of the people think that they care about them more.
Or certainly the white ones.
And that's, I guess, the genius in this is that it's just enough or they're going to win another election, maybe.
Well, I want to... I think you're exactly right, because there's something... Refreshing is not the word, but it is nice to know that all of these, like, decades spent watching this party operate, that's like, yeah, we had your number.
We know who you are.
We know what you are and what you think.
But I will say, to get in the head of the people who respond to that, because you're right, There is a voter out there, and I know them very, very well.
I mean, I wrote a book about this, The Man They Wanted Me To Be.
There's a group of people out there who are like, yeah, tell me that you're okay with me dying.
I'm fine with me dying.
Like, there's people in my family that, like, when you talk to them, and they're like, when I die, just throw me in a ditch.
Throw some dirt on me or whatever.
But the point is that they have been They have been taught to pretend like they don't care about death and like they're stronger than fear and all this stuff.
Meanwhile, they're insecure and terrified, right?
But that's what has happened here.
There is a death wish in this party that is being served by them.
I mean, what was it that Lieutenant Governor of Texas, which by the way, for those who haven't seen, their plan is to reopen literally everything, but keep it at 25% volume, which means that every business will lose money, but it's all to get people off unemployment.
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas said something along the lines of, there are fates worse than death.
And he was talking about money.
He was talking about economic problems.
There are fates worse than death.
It's all made up.
When I hear about economic problems, right?
And then you see how much money, how the trillions they can suddenly, out of thin air, just materialize.
Just make it rain, Nick!
Just throw them at Roost Chris!
And they're just, you know, they're just knocking the bills out of their hands.
That's what makes me so frustrated.
I mean, even the market, we talked about that before, doesn't have any connection to what the reality is.
And again, am I like hoping that it goes down further because that's the one thing that's going to sink Trump?
Like, no, but it would be nice if something would be clear to make him, you know, lose the election.
Have you ever taken a cruise?
Never and never will.
Okay, okay, we're agreed on that.
Okay, me either.
It just seems like a good way to get stuck out in the middle of the ocean with bad things happening.
Okay, for anybody who doesn't know this, right, when Trump and all these Republicans, like when a cruise line is like, oh, we're in trouble, Trump and Republicans are like, yes, we will help you.
We will not even hesitate to help you.
For people who don't know this, American cruise lines are not American cruise lines.
They have other flags that they fly so they don't have to pay taxes.
But meanwhile, Donald Trump and Republicans will not hesitate to throw billions of dollars at these people and never ever see it returned or whatever or any interest in America.
But meanwhile, the rest of us is just like, eat shit and die.
I mean, that's really what it is.
And again, it's like you were saying, it's so good to see it in the stark terms that we have always known was there, right?
There's not even the, like, pretending to care.
Like, we know what it is.
Well, Trump was busy tweeting today and he's talking about how the delay in these checks out to people, the $1,200 meager, we even have a good term for that, the meager assistance program.
Um, you know, it was delayed because the Democrats wanted to do it through the states.
And it's like, no, it was delayed because you wanted to put your fucking name on the damn check.
And by the way, when I finally saw the check, and like, I was assuming it was his signature was gonna be on there.
But it turns out, no, they put it in the memo line, and it's kind of small, and I just, I don't even think people are really even gonna notice it necessarily.
Certainly not the ones who get direct deposit, the 30 million or whatever who get direct deposit anyway.
So, this is where we're at, where he's now, you know, again, most people, understand that and realize that he's not telling the truth and he's, you know, but again, there's that group.
This kind of reminds me really quickly of, there's an article maybe by Malcolm Gladwell.
Can we talk about, is he persona non grata?
Well, you know, he's got moments.
Okay.
But go ahead.
I think it was him who did an article about how certain cultures would produce just horrible airline pilots because the culture was built in that you can't challenge the senior officer, right?
So the senior officer is flying poorly and the guy knows they're going to crash and he can't tell him.
Meanwhile, Americans have this, you know, ingenuity and they have no problem speaking to authority and speaking up when they know something is not right.
Somehow, that point I just made connects to this.
Can you help me?
Something about, like, maybe people who are Trump supporters refuse to be wrong, perhaps.
They'll just continue to double down the whole time.
And then they'll also try and get in your face and tell you that you're not right about it, too, because it has to make them feel better.
Am I?
Please.
No, no, I have no idea.
I'm laughing because this is the most Malcolm Gladwell type thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
It's like if I was playing Malcolm Gladwell Mad Libs, This would be like the top.
Put it on the fridge.
That's amazing.
Someone out there is nodding their head right now.
Well, I think there's something going on there with this.
So, I don't know if you saw this.
This was like one of those weird things that you see on Twitter.
And you're just like, I need to put my phone down for the night.
You know what I mean?
You're just like, no, I'm good.
I'm good on that.
You know?
And occasionally there's nice stuff on there.
And then other times you're just like, no, I need to take a walk.
And it was one of those where it was...
Gorka.
Seb Gorka, who I believe blocked me on Twitter.
I don't like to collect blocks.
It makes me feel bad as an only child, but there's something about Seb Gorka blocking me that made me very happy.
And Seb Gorka was doing a show.
I guess it's a show.
We should invite him on.
We should have Seb Gorka on the Mercury Podcast.
Let's get Roger Stone on here too.
Well, he's got other things to do, like go to prison.
And so, Zeb Gawker was like, Liberals hate Donald Trump because he is the most masculine man they've ever seen.
And there's this bizarre phenomenon that I didn't realize until I was covering the Trump campaign.
It happened in 2016 at the Republican convention where I saw all of the alt-right posses.
You know what I mean?
Like I was at the convention in Cleveland and like I would look over and I'd be like, oh it's Mike Cernovich.
Oh what's up it's Roos V or whatever the hell that guy's name is.
And they're like these really sad men.
They're, like, really pathetically insecure.
And meanwhile, behind them, like ducklings, are, like, more sad men.
Do you know what I mean?
And it's like that old Looney Tunes cartoon with, like, the big bulldog with the little dog.
It's like, what are we doing today?
What are we doing today?
And, like, it's just this bizarre, and Zab Gohonka was talking about alpha males, and, like, they all are looking for, like, alpha males, and it's just, like, the shittiest person they can find, they're like, I guess that's, like, the alpha male.
And that's how they look at Donald Trump.
They really do believe that he's, like, this, like, ripped, massive, masculine dude who, by the way, gets a tan every single day, and, like, does hours on his hair, and is, like, so petulantly insecure.
It's sad.
Oh, well then you look at the tweets and the way he reacts to stuff.
He was so upset.
Here's the tweet he did.
Oh, so sad.
They reported on him and what he does.
Here's what we know, and it's factual, because he tweets about watching Fox News and CNN and MSNBC.
He watches all these shows because he tweets about it almost in real time.
So we know he spends all this time in the morning.
He doesn't really get into the office until like noon, and then he leaves early.
But he was so triggered by these things that his last tweet that he had was about the New York Times article.
He's like, I'm reading, I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night and read and see that I'm angrily eating a hamburger and Diet Coke in my bedroom.
I just love the notion of angrily eating a hamburger.
I'm going to try that today.
I'm going to go to McDonald's today and eat one.
You know what?
Listen, I don't agree with Donald Trump very often.
I have angrily eaten a few hamburgers in my life.
Wow.
There's a primal thing to it, I'll be honest with you.
It's just attacking a hamburger.
I'm gonna film myself and post it on Twitter.
I hope it's not too messy, but I want to try it.
By the way, it does remind me of Matt Damon's such a spot on... I'd never seen an actor drink angrily before, but when he did Kavanaugh and he drinks from the water, and you know what I'm talking about?
And he's angry.
It was the single most comedic and amazing thing I'd seen ever to convey from an actor's standpoint.
Oh no, it's incredible.
And to think, you know, that's the other thing about Trump.
Like again, we had Dan Drasmer on a while back and it's like trying to look at this horror and find the comedy in it.
The idea that Donald Trump was undoubtedly just absolutely destroying some Burger King while tweeting, I don't do this, you know.
But you're right, he's such a sad human.
Like he's so, so pathetic.
And like he'll do these things, like you were saying, he read that article and he's like, I'm obviously the hardest working president of all time.
It's like, you're tweeting.
You're tweeting your mind out.
And by the way, I don't want to be the party pooper here, but we have to talk about this.
And we hadn't talked about this before, but he tweeted out a deep fake video of Joe Biden.
And for those who don't know, a deepfake video is artificial intelligence uses existing footage of people and creates these, like, really compelling fakes, right?
And by the way, this is the future.
If you want to talk about bots and you want to talk about misinformation.
Like, in one night, he talks about how he's really, really hardworking and he doesn't eat hamburgers and all this stuff.
And then he also tweets in the middle of that a deepfake video of his political rival.
It is so off the charts insane and dangerous that all of this stuff is being done that it's almost impossible to process.
Right.
But it's all like, oh, what?
It's fun.
It's funny.
I'm just, you know, having a fun time here in the White House being sarcastic about, you know, injecting light of some hole of yours to secure yourself.
I mean, I don't know if you saw, did you see that Cooper, the comedian, I forgot what her first name is, but she did a lip sync to that whole thing.
Did you see it?
No, I did not.
Oh, you have to go check it out.
It's hilarious.
But the point being that she mimes what, you know, as he's speaking about light inside the body.
It's appropriate.
Nonetheless, right, that's the other thing.
He so destroyed the office of the White House and of the presidency.
You know, what it's supposed to stand for and the decorum that you're supposed to have.
Now, we knew he would never have that anyway.
He was always going to be the lumbering guy with the gold toilet with no class and no sense of decorum.
Nick, he's grown into the presidency so many times.
What are you talking about?
I mean, he has delivered teleprompter speeches many times and grown into the presidency.
Of course, I did forget exactly the tone of the speech, but I remember he did finally one speech during the campaign in 2016 where he sounded the slightest bit presidential and I turned to my wife and I'm like, he's now going to win.
That's all they needed.
They needed literally like a five minute segment where he could read barely.
But what we didn't really explore, and again, it's easy to just shit on him and just say these things like he's an asshole, he's a terrible person, whatever.
But the greater thing that I think we're making the point of is that he literally is, he's mentally diminished.
Like there is something wrong that he cannot cope and cannot process properly.
And that's the biggest issue.
And so like right now, we're taping this on Monday, it's troubling 5 o'clock right now, which by the way is the witching hour.
It's like when Donald Trump is either going to go up in front of a podium or he's not.
And like say something that is literally going to kill people.
You know, like literally going to kill people.
And today, and for people who haven't been up on this, there's now talk that he's going to cancel his press briefings.
Which, by the way, isn't it weird that that was announced whenever that memo came out?
It's almost like those two things are intertwined.
But so Trump announces that he's not going to give a press briefing, two hours pass, and then he's like, I'm gonna give a press briefing.
And the reason, and this is the thing, and this is what chaps my ass, Nick, is that it is so obvious that this person is a broken person, you know?
And it's not...
It's not that somehow or another he thinks he's going to get up there and kill it, which he does, but it's that he craves attention like an addict.
And we know this.
We know that he's willing to put people's lives in danger simply because he craves that.
He craves that camera in front of him.
And if he's not in front of the camera, he's not living.
And that's why he tweets.
He does it because he wants the attention of it.
And he gets the head off of the retweets and the likes and changing the conversation.
You're exactly right.
He is a diminished, broken man.
And the fact that we have to deal with this is just the most horrific absurdity imaginable.
Well, the scene that's going on in the morning in the White House is they inject him with a Thorazine and they get him to say, OK, we're not going to do a press briefing today.
And then it wears off.
And then he's like, no, because, you know, he was the most reluctant of all time to say, OK, fine, we're not going to do it.
I see, like, some of the numbers are down, whatever.
But then, yeah, again, within a couple hours, he just can't help himself.
And I'm sure when he tweeted it out, he hadn't told anybody.
You know, he's like, it's on again.
We're just doing it.
And he does it all the time.
And we've seen that before.
Even that horrible announcement of shooting Iranian boats out of the sky was never conveyed to the military, thank God.
He just does it.
He just writes stuff.
And again, it's just more evidence that the Republicans really just screwed this whole thing up.
They would have had control of this election without any problems if Pence was in charge right now.
And then, because they didn't, and because they have backed this absolutely grotesque candidate every step of the way and worshipped him like the most sycophantic acolytes imaginable, now they are going to endanger the lives of Asian Americans and Democrats.
Because, you know, the moment you start talking about those conspiracies, Remind me, didn't a Trump supporter send a bunch of bombs to Democratic leaders because he thought that they were in a war against the country?
That's right, it happened, right?
Yes, absolutely.
But what about killing everybody from the coronavirus as well?
There's some studies out there.
That said that you know you could have you could I don't even give the numbers because who knows exactly but I will say that there's significant Significantly less numbers of death if we had suppressed this two weeks earlier And we got one the lockdown and it would have been you know a lot less again If it was only one week earlier instead of screwing around and not getting serious with what was happening
And we've already seen the statistics and the studies that show that people who watched Sean Hannity were more statistically to take risks with their lives.
This is a phenomenon and we can't dance around it.
This is a deadly phenomenon that we currently have.
Once we get out of this thing, if we get out, knock on wood, somehow or another, we're going to look back on this, or people are going to look back on this history.
They're going to see the Republican Party and the apparatus of Fox News and whatever in the hell you want to call all these people, and they're going to see it as madness.
It's going to be one of those studies of mass hysteria that we've seen.
It's like tulips in the past.
Tulip markets.
I hope so but I also could easily see like six months go by people like corona what what was that oh yeah like they might forget you know we'll get a vaccine by the way there's one being developed apparently in England I can't now remember where they was but like that that also makes me scared because it's so fast And if they rush this through and it could, you know, there might not be any efficacy, it might be, you know, who knows.
But that is a little bit almost, it's not even encouraging to me because it is so fast.
I guess there's some monkeys are working in monkeys right now, so like they can then move to human trials.
But nonetheless, once that happens and we can kind of like, quote unquote, what, conquer the enemy, I worry that like they're going to go back to business as usual.
I, you know, we're not gonna let people forget that's one of the reasons we're doing this thing and it's just a matter of keeping the eye on the ball.
We cannot allow this civilization to, you know, slide into this abyss.
And so we're gonna get off of here.
Nick is gonna tell me about his Counter Watergate reading.
I cannot!
Wait, I'm very very excited to hear this thing.
Maybe sometime in the future we can get into this once we work out the kinks of it.
I'm so excited!
Again, we are so pumped to have you here.
The audience is growing and we are loving it.
We're loving the support and the sharing and the liking and the subscribing.
You make this whole thing worth it and I know that right now is a really really hard time so we just want to thank you and really appreciate you putting our trust in us.
As always, I'm your co-host J. J. Sexton.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
Nick Haussmann is at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
Please like, subscribe, share, all that good stuff.
And most importantly, stay safe.
▲
Export Selection