I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or peek between my fingers. Perhaps you’d like to watch Trump’s sitdown with Chris Wallace, and see how you react.
I just…I can’t even…With all due respect to the mentally challenged, it was like visiting an institution to check on a patient. And discovering that the gentleman in question was doing poorly.
How many more months, at minimum, do we have to house him? Don’t remind me. Let’s just cull the Fox News interview for its 10 most indelible moments:
Tossed word salad. Wallace brought up “the surge of the coronavirus,” and said: “You still talk about it as, quote, ‘burning embers.’…This isn’t ‘burning embers,’ sir.”
Trump: “No, no. I don’t say – I say flames, we’ll put out the flames. And we’ll put out in some cases burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames.”
School daze. Trump recently claimed that American kids are taught in school to hate our country, so Wallace asked Trump for some specific examples: “Where do you see that?”
But alas, the dog ate Trump’s homework: “I just look at – I look at school. I watch, I read, look at stuff.”
Trump tried another tack: “Now they want to change ‘1492, Columbus discovered America.’ Now they want to make it the 1619 Project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I don’t even know – ”
Wallace: “It’s slavery.”
140,000 dead people is great. Trump boasted about the pandemic: “We have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world!”
Which prompted Wallace to point out: “That’s not true, sir.”
Which prompted Trump to grab a fake mortality chart from his hovering press secretary, and declare, “I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate in the world…I heard we had the best mortality rate.” He brandished the chart and burbled: “Number one low mortality fatality rates.”
Which prompted Wallace to tell his viewers, “We went with numbers from Johns Hopkins University, which charted the mortality rate for 20 countries hit by the virus. The U.S. ranked seventh…worse than Brazil and Russia. The White House went with (a) chart which shows Italy and Spain doing worse, but countries like Brazil and South Korea doing better. Other countries doing better, like Russia, aren’t included in the White House chart.”
Willful amnesia. Trump dissed the scientists: “Everybody thought this summer (that Covid) would go away…They used to say the heat – the heat was good for it and it really knocked it out, remember? And then it might come back in the fall. So they got that one wrong. They got a lot wrong. They got a lot wrong.”
Actually, scientists warned as early as April that “summer may not save us and that repeated periods of social distancing may be needed to keep serious cases from overwhelming the hospital system.” And a National Academy of Sciences panel said the same thing. But Trump knew better, of course, because he has the best brain; back in April, he was the one who repeatedly said that “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
(He also said yesterday that he still opposes a national mask-wearing mandate because “I want people to have a certain freedom.” But this morning, on Fox News, his own Surgeon General contradicted him: “I’m pleading with your viewers, I’m begging you. Please understand that we are not trying to take away your freedoms when we say wear a face covering.”)
He has the best word. While defending – yet again – the Confederate names that adorn military bases, Trump said: “We won two world wars, two world wars, beautiful world wars” because we trained our troops at bases with Confederate names. When Wallace pointed out that even today’s military leaders want to dump those names, he replied: “I don’t care what the military says.”
But hang on…”Beautiful world wars?” That’s a function of his narrow vocabulary. He has talked about building a “beautiful” border wall with a “beautiful” door in it. He has extolled “beautiful clean coal.” (Coal isn’t clean.) When he tried to squeeze the Ukraine president for fake dirt on Joe Biden, he did so in a “beautiful phone call.” He once said that he and the Chinese president ate “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake.” From cake to casualties, it’s all beautiful.
Mark your calendar! Wallace brought up Obamacare: “Since the pandemic hit, millions of people have lost their jobs and thereby lost their health insurance…Why does it make sense to overturn Obamacare, which — which people now are — are relying on?”
“Because it’s no good.” But fear not, Trump says he has a plan to replace it.
Wallace, stating the obvious: “But you’ve been in office three and a half years, you don’t have a plan.”
Trump: “Well, we haven’t had – excuse me, we’re signing a health care plan within two weeks. A full and complete health care plan.”
Good to know. Trump, who for three and a half years has failed to come up with a replacement plan, and the Republicans, who for 10 years have failed to come up with a replacement plan, will magically do so by August 2. And they’ll be “signing” it, too! I bet that’s news to the Democratic House, which apparently still needs to educate Trump about the legislative process.
Lying about Joe. Trump said: “Biden wants to defund the police.”
To which Wallace correctly said, “Sir, he does not.”
To which Trump said, “Look, he signed a charter with Bernie Sanders.”
To which Wallace correctly said, “It says nothing about defunding the police.”
To which Trump lied, “Oh really? It says abolish, it says defund…He says defund the police, they talk about abolishing the police.”
To which Wallace again correctly said: “The White House has never sent us evidence that the Bernie-Biden platform calls for defunding, or abolishing police. Because there is none.”
Acing the test. According to the latest Fox News poll, more Americans think that Biden’s mental cognition is better than Trump’s. As Wallace told Trump, “Whose mind is sounder? Biden beats you on that.”
Trump: “Well, I’ll tell you what, let’s take a test. Joe and I will take a test. Let him take the same test that I took.”
Wallace: “Incidentally, I took the test too, when I heard that you passed it. It’s not that hard…”
Wallace shows it to the viewer. There’s a picture of an elephant. Wallace says, “It’s an elephant.”
Trump: “No, no, you see, that’s all misrepresentation…I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t. They get very hard, the last five questions.”
Wallace: “Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven.”
Trump: “And let me tell you – “
Wallace: “Ninety-three.”
(By the way, one of the “very hard” questions, near the end of the test, was: “What year are we in?”)
Setting the bar low for Joe. Trump, who can’t put two sentences together, said: “Biden can’t put two sentences together. They wheel him out…Joe doesn’t know he’s alive, OK? He doesn’t know he’s alive…He’s mentally shot…Let Biden sit through an interview like this. He’ll be underground crying for mommy. He’ll say mommy, mommy, please take me home.”
Seriously, how stupid is Trump? He sets Biden’s bar so low that Joe will vault it merely by comporting himself as a living, breathing adult.
Poor poor pitiful me. Wallace asked, “How will you regard your years as president?”
Trump: “I think I was very unfairly treated.”
Wallace: “But what about the good parts, sir?”
Trump: “Here’s the bottom line. I’ve been very unfairly treated. And I don’t say that as paranoid.”
Tell that to the shrinks.
Joe Biden’s ad-makers don’t need to lift a finger. They should just parse this interview and run clips from now to November.