S*** the President Says – 4/13/2020

Ladies and gentlemen, behold, some s*** the president said during the previous week:

“They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.”

4/10/2020 at the White House.

I’m pretty sure antibiotics work to fight bacterial infections, not viruses. Coronavirus, as you may have deduced from its name, is a virus. It’s hard to believe someone who’s been delivering daily coronavirus briefings for weeks wouldn’t know that much.

“I’m not a doctor, but I’m a person with common sense and we’ve had some very good results over the course – including a woman who just reported it two days ago.”

4/8/2020 at the White House.

Here’s the president again hyping hydroxychloroquine – just one of the many drugs currently undergoing clinical trials for use in treating COVID-19. So what if he doesn’t know the difference between a virus and bacteria – he’s got common sense!

“People go to a hospital and they catch – they go for a heart operation – that’s no problem but they end up dying from – problems. You know the problems I’m talking about. There’s a whole genius to it.”

4/10/2020 at the White House.

People dying of problems. Genius.

The Wall Street Journal article in question specifically called out our president for focusing too much on the spectacle of the briefings at the expense of actual information that might keep us safe. Donald Trump then took to Twitter to prove the point. Pure poetry.

It’s just so strange. If the president showed up to those briefings like Gallagher with a giant mallet and just told jokes and smashed watermelons the whole time, that would also get terrific ratings. Sometimes, though, the people need to know actual information to prevent us from being killed and all the circus stuff – however entertaining – distracts from that.

“I have great authority if I want to use it. I have absolute authority to [reopen the economy].”

4/10/2020 at the White House.

Just once, I’d like to see the roughly half of my Facebook friends whom constantly live in terror of the likes of Kathy Dahlkemper executing some kind of dictatorial plot against freedom of movement in Erie County show just an ounce of concern when our president claims “absolute authority” over anything. Here, the president claims he can order businesses to open in states against the wishes of their governors. He cannot.

“The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number. Hard to believe that if you had 60,000 – you can never be happy. But that is a lot fewer than we were originally told and thinking.”

4/10/2020 at the White House.

“Originally,” President Trump says, he expected more than 100,000 people to die. Look, this isn’t true and it isn’t complicated. It was February 28 when we only had 15 positive cases that he said, “[T]he 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” So no, he didn’t expect this from the beginning. Not was this inevitable. South Korea and the United States had their first positive cases on the same day and now, South Korea has lost 217 people due to COVID-19; we have lost over 20,000.

“You shouldn’t be asking that kind of a question. Jim, honestly. I really don’t believe – you got bad advice. You shouldn’t be asking that kind of a question. You should say, ‘You know what? It’s been really incredible what’s been happening.’”

4/10/2020 at the White House.

The question from CNN’s human piñata, Jim Acosta, was how the poor roll-out of coronavirus testing in the United States could have been prevented. As far as the president is concerned, though, questions should be more along the lines of, “On a scale of ‘the 1985 Chicago Bears defense’ to ‘Jesus Christ himself,’ how would you rate the awesomeness of your coronavirus preparedness?”

It now appears the bulk of U.S. coronavirus cases, at least those in the epicenter of New York, didn’t even come from China but rather Europe. Like the high school back-bencher who talks for years about that one time he made a shot, President Trump is still hyping his decision to close travel from China. It may have been the right call, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough.

“They called him Chopper. His name was chopper. He was a great helicopter pilot. It’s a tremendous skill. I know a lot about helicopters.”

4/6/2020 at the White House.

I saw this quote and honestly have no idea as to the context. I just find it very unlikely that he knows anything helicopters, and even less likely that helicopters had anything to do with that day’s coronavirus news.

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That’s our report for this week. Be sure to check out the links for more info on any particular topic and, as always, thanks for reading.