S*** the President Says – 4/20/2020

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

“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.”

4/13/2020 at the White House.

Claiming total authority is so ridiculous, so outlandish, it reminds me of that one guy everyone knows who swears he has a smoking hot girlfriend no one’s ever met. “Uh, she’s from another school. You wouldn’t know her.” Donald Trump doesn’t have this authority. That girl doesn’t exist.

Mutiny on the Bounty is a film about a ship captain whose depraved selfishness results in his being set adrift in the Pacific Ocean by the crew of his own ship. Why Donald Trump would compare himself to this captain is anyone’s guess.

“I will be speaking to all 50 governors very shortly. And I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening, very powerful reopening plan of their state in a time and a manner which is appropriate.”

4/14/2020 at the White House.

I am authorizing all the super models to see other people.

First, he had “total authority.” Second, he ceded whatever authority he thought he had to the governors to do whatever they wanted. By midweek, however, there was another about-face: encouraging mass protests at the Minnesota governor’s mansion in the hopes of scrapping the social distancing guidelines still promoted by his own federal government’s CDC. This is what flailing looks like.

The all-caps flailing would not end with one tweet about Minnesota. One minute after the first, our president added a second to the list of states he wouldn’t mind open themselves up to a second wave of coronavirus deaths: Michigan. So far we have two tweets encouraging civil unrest in Democratic-leaning swing states with Democratic governors.

In case the first tweets didn’t encourage enough chaos, this ones throws a little “They’re coming for your guns” into the cocktail. Virginia just happens to be a third Democratic-leaning swing state with a Democratic governor. There would be no tweet about Ohio, which is similarly competitive and which has seen its governor implement similar measures to those of MN, MI, and VA. Ohio’s governor happens to be a Republican.

“I wish I could tell you what other countries, even powerful countries, say to me, the leaders. They say it quietly and off the record, but they have great respect for what we do.”

4/17/2020 at the White House.

If you saw my girlfriend, you wouldn’t believe how hot she is, but you can’t. She’s busy.

“This is Maggie Haberman. You know she won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Russia but she was wrong on Russia. So was everyone else. They should all give back their Pulitzer Prizes. In fact, it turns out that the crime was committed by the other side! The crime was not committed by this side; it was committed by the other side, a bunch of bad people…They got caught.”

4/18/2020 at the White House.

“They should all give back their Pulitzer Prizes” is one of the Donald Trumpest things ever uttered. No, everyone wasn’t wrong about everything, and no crimes have even been alleged against “the other side.” This whole rant was triggered by a new Haberman story describing how Trump’s new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, cries frequently at work.

“And because we exposed her as being a bad reporter, what happened is she came out and said, ‘Mark Meadows was crying.’ And they made it sound – I said, ‘Mark’ and it’s ok if he did. I wouldn’t – I mean, look – but I think he was crying probably, uh, really for the wrong reason they had it down.”

4/18/2020 at the White House.

Here in this one quote, our president seems to claim both that (1) Maggie Haberman totally made up a story about Mark Meadows crying because she’s a “bad reporter” who’d been exposed, and (2) Meadows did actually cry but for a different reason. These can’t both be true.

“We’ve gotten judges because we go through the process. I guess we’re up to 448 federal judges.”

4/15/2020 at the White House.

Nope. There have been 193 federal judges confirmed since Trump’s inauguration. How do you get 448 from 193? No one knows.

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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.