He’s back, and nothing has changed.
The President had a particularly disastrous weekend. After his nearly universally derided medical advice on Thursday, he took no questions on Friday and cancelled the briefings for the rest of the weekend. Instead, his Twitter account exploded with lies, vitriol and bombast.
The highlight was when he insisted that journalists return their “Noble” (sic) prizes for their work as all they were spewing were lies, fake news, and that they were our enemies. Beyond misspelling Nobel, repeatedly, the President was sadly ignorant of the fact that there is no Nobel Prize for journalists. They are awarded the Pulitzer for excellence and these professionals are present in multiples at these briefings. If this is a battle of wits, he is unarmed. His stupidity confirmed, he had other ground to cover.
A lot, it seems. He tweeted over 35 times each day. He assured us all that he had been working from dawn until the wee hours of the night (between tweets?) and hadn’t left the White House in months. The truth is he left the White House every time the Democrats had a primary vote, organizing a rally in the state hosting the election the night before it took place. Every time. Big rallies when all of these people should have been advised to protect themselves in their homes by the very man that brought them out into a very high risk environment. Many other sorties occurred to the CDC in Atlanta, to Mar A Lago and others.
Clearly Trump, essentially finally quarantined in the White House, had an opportunity to discover some new nutjob voices, because he also tweeted that Fox News was dead to him. He wanted all his followers to turn their back on them, that they were not reliably “pro” him and perhaps a better source of dependable journalism was OAN, or One America News. It is a tiny network that launched out of San Diego in 2013 as an alternative to the liberal Fox News, and has been the same kind of cheerleader for Trump that Trump has been for us. Entirely unprincipled and disconnected to facts. They recently did a special report that indicated the coronavirus was developed in a lab in North Carolina as a bio-weapon. They have been elevated by Trump to the point of being invited to the daily briefings. They have obliged by sending Chanel Rion, a tiny brunette Barbie doll that can be depended on to provide a softball respite during his briefings. She is a homeschooled graduate of Harvard Extension School, where this intrepid reporter also attended. It’s important to note that the Extension School has no matriculation requirements. It is available to the general public willing to pay the fees. Her, or my, attendance there is not to be confused with being accepted to Harvard undergrad. It’s a community service offered to the masses. She sells her degree as an Ivy League credential. It is not. More on her later.
Another target for Orange Julius (Caesar, that is) was the current U.S. mortality reportage, accusing the press of inflating the numbers to attack him. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only numbers available are being provided by the Fed, and it is those numbers that have been reported. The President landed on this because a NewsMax pundit, John Cardillo, suggested this as a journalistic conspiracy to smear POTUS.
Mortality rate is a difficult number to determine accurately, because it is completely dependent on the amount of testing being done to determine the percentage of the population that is or have been positive for Covid-19. The fact is that an increase in the amount of testing which is nearly uniformly encouraged and so reported would have the result of lowering the mortality rate, since as more cases are discovered they are still being compared to a determined number of fatalities. Ironically, the one thing that has a legitimate opportunity to make the President’s case for the competence of his response is what he has fought the governors tooth and nail over, and that’s what the press reported.
The meltdown that began on Thursday was confirmed on Twitter. Stupid is as stupid does. He wanted nothing to do with testing, the one thing that would help his competency quotient.
But now he was back at the podium, and the one thing on everyone’s mind when it began was would there be questions. First there was a parade of retailers that were making a killing on Covid by helping to provide some of the critical needs for testing. Trump held them up as evidence that retail would come roaring back shortly after “reopening” the country, without explaining how movie theaters, restaurants and bustling shops would protect their employees or their clients, and how people that have little expendable income would find the consumer confidence to come visit in the first place. Over 25 million people are unemployed, and some of their jobs no longer exist due to the reduced worker requirements of the businesses or the disappearance of those businesses altogether.
The rest of the prepared remarks were the usual celebration of Dear Leader and the response team who were cloyingly deferential, led by the VP.
The President has repeatedly said that he sees his role in this pandemic as being a cheerleader for the public. As such he has become the object of deserved ridicule. Remember that game in high school? Your team was down by 39 points with a minute to go, and the kids were on the sidelines doing kicks and cartwheels? That’s Trump. His insistence that the economy will be back bigger and better than ever is a lie. No credible economist would support that theory or risk their reputations by pretending to.
But after the love train of business executives, there were indeed questions.
Shockingly, there was only one question about the dubious advice that the President suggested on Thursday. He was asked if he felt responsible for the hundreds of calls received by multiple states inquiring if the people should be swigging Clorox. Of course he didn’t. He didn’t even believe it, and he immediately moved on and the press left it there. In their defense, this, too, was a truncated Q&A, so maybe they got cut off before they were able to circle back to it, but it was stunning nonetheless.
Enter Chanel! If she is in the room, the President will assuredly call on her, and on some days multiple times. Today she had a laser focused question as she always does. In the past she has asked, for example, if since we call it Chinese food was it racist to call this the China Virus? (Spoiler alert!)
It wasn’t.
Today she wondered if, since LG Michael Flynn has been nearly exonnerated (her characterization) would the President consider bringing him back into the administration? This led to the usual declarations by Trump of Flynn’s innocence, the criminal treatment he had received, how everything ever said negatively about him was fake news, and so on. He never answered the question. Most importantly, he never said no.
Chanel would have no follow up. She had never cared about the answer anyway. She got to be on TV.