How fucking weird and disconcerting and downright disturbing was the interview President Donald Trump did with ABC anchor David Muir? The fact that they were propped awkwardly on tall chairs over 10 feet from each other on the factory floor of the Honeywell plant that makes masks for COVID-19 protection (and which Trump had toured without wearing a mask) was the least weird part of the whole thing.
I mean, of course, the entire thing was filled to the brim with lies and then more lies were thrown in until it was overflowing with lies and then a dam of lies broke which flooded the entire valley with lies and, since the valley was filled with Trump voters, they were happy to drown in his lies.
Like here's what Trump said when he was asked if the pandemic in the U.S. was an intelligence failure. After blathering on for a bit about how awesome his useless limits on travel from China were, he explained, "They said I called it a hoax. No, I called the Democrats a hoax because of what they were saying because when I did the ban they're out there saying -- they call me a racist because I did the ban." That's a fucking lie. On February 28, Trump called Democrats' criticism of his failure to do anything about the pandemic a "their new hoax." And after he said that, he bragged about there only being 15 cases in the U.S. Then, at a press conference the next day, Trump said he meant that it was about Democrats who "try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them." So Trump just changes the story to fit the situation.
And, of course, there was the blithering, willful, arrogant ignorance of history. For instance, here's a couple of sentences from midway through that were part of a rambling non-answer regarding the possibility of a second wave of coronavirus in the fall: "Frankly, I've read about and heard about, in 1917, the Great Flu. They call that the Flu, right? The Spanish flu, and it might have killed 100 million people. Probably stopped the First World War ‘cause all the soldiers were getting sick." Ok, you ready? The Spanish flu started in the U.S. in 1918; it was called "the Great Flu Pandemic;" it killed at most 50 million people around the world; and it didn't stop World War I - in fact, the war helped spread the disease among the soldiers who then brought it home.
And, of course, he brought up how he won in 2016 because time essentially stopped then for him: "I have a media that's extremely hostile. And they have been from before I got elected, you know that, that's why it was called a miracle because I had a hostile media." Muir had asked him if it was difficult to be optimistic and hopeful during a pandemic. What he got was an incoherent shit stew of ventilators, Democrats suck, and the media is mean.
But the strange and disturbing shit was laced throughout. Asked about reopening businesses and society too early, causing more deaths, Trump essentially said, "Fuck it. Let's roll those dice and see which motherfuckers are gonna die. Russian money won't launder itself." More precisely, he was asked, "Do you believe that's the reality we're facing that -- that lives will be lost to reopen the country?" and he responded, "It's possible there will be some because you won't be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is." Then, later, he acknowledged, "There'll be more death." And he wanted us to know that people die in other ways: "You know, people are dying the other way too. When you look at what's happened with drugs. It goes up, when you look at suicides, I mean take a look at what's going on." And fewer people are dying in auto accidents and from other activities we used to do. So that doesn't make any goddamn sense.
However, for the pinnacle of batshit, the acme of assholishness, you gotta go to when Muir tried to get Trump to offer compassion to the families of people who died. "What do you want to say to those families tonight?" he asked.
And Trump really responded, "I want to say: 'I love you.'" That's some creepy fuckery right there. He reiterated, "We love you," and then, no shit, added, "And we want them -- you can never really come close to replacing, when you've lost some -- no matter how well we do next year, I think our economy is going to be raging. It's going to be so good. No matter how well, those people can never ever replace somebody they love. But we're going to have something that they're going to be very proud of."
Do you get what he's saying? "You lost your dad to this disease I did pretty much jackshit to try to slow down, but, hey, aren't you proud of how the economy is just raging along?" Do you get how devoid of humanity that is? How fucking sociopathic? It's like a thief saying, "I stole all your shit and fucked up your life and sense of safety in the world, but, man, you got a cool new TV out of the deal. So we're good, right?"
Trump is frantically trying to talk himself out of any blame for this goddamned disaster. Muir asked him good questions but bumblefucked the follows ups (Jesus, stop letting him get away with shitting on Obama about coronavirus tests that didn't exist). The whole thing just feels like we're on an increasingly short road to national damnation, a sense that if Trump's going down, he's gonna take the rest of us with him.
