MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid made the daily decision to conduct her deranged show without facts, insisting on Thursday night that President Trump has purposefully chosen to do nothing on the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that Kodak’s new pharmaceutical division will be tasked with finding the (and presumably only) vaccine, and that Trump was suspended by Twitter.
After expressing annoyance with Trump’s “God” remarks about Biden while ignoring Biden’s racist claim about the African-American community, Reid claimed that Trump has “literally [been] refusing to use the power that he holds to fight the biggest threat facing Americans today, the coronavirus pandemic, that has now taken the lives of more than 160,000 Americans.”
Reid continued to unspool lies, despite the facts showing that Trump hasn’t been sitting around for six months drinking Diet Cokes (see here, here, and here as but a small sampling):
In fact, rather than marshalling a national response to this health and economic catastrophe, Donald Trump was running around Ohio today, turning what was supposed to be an official presidential visit into a series of faux campaign rallies...Trump is spending every day pretending that everything is totally fine and that he doesn’t need to do anything except tweet and give interviews and complain.
Bringing her panel of former Obama officials Richard Besser and Ben Rhodes, Reid again lied in bemoaning to Rhodes that Trump “doesn’t think he has any power to do anything other than invade cities because of Black Lives Matter.”
The Iranian-loving Rhodes concurred and asserted without evidence that Obama’s leadership on Ebola and H1N1 were proof that the coronavirus could have been a blip on the radar (click “expand”):
Well, you’re exactly right, Joy. From the very beginning of the crisis, he’s kind of talked about it like something that was just happening that he had no agency over, something that would disappear in the spring, something that would be gone by Easter instead of marshalling the kind of national and global response that could create a difference and if you look at President Obama, that’s two things, it’s one, modeling certain behavior, so in H1N1 epidemic, President Obama made a point, modeling certain behaviors, publicly getting a photograph getting a flu shot. In Ebola, very clear in communicating to people how do you contact this disease, what do you need to avoid, frankly trying to reduce a stigma of people who’ve had it by hugging a nurse who would recover from Ebola in the Oval Office. That type of modeling good behavior would have led Donald Trump to be encouraging people to wear masks, encouraging people to socially distance, encouraging people to take the steps that could have bent the curve on this virus early in the spring when it mattered the most.
And, secondly, marshalling that international response and national response instead of just saying it’s up to the governors, saying having a patchwork of 50 different regulations for how we deal with this in a federal union is not the way we go about this and having clear, national guidelines for how states and cities should be dealing with this and then, similarly, working around the world to make sure companies were cooperating and getting necessary supplies and doing the necessary contact tracing so we understood this disease better. Instead, he literally withdrew the United States from the rest of the world from the World Health Organization and what we’ve seen is every other single major country in the world has handled this much better than us. It’s because we have nobody at the center of our response modeling that behavior and marshalling a national and global response.
For the record, the U.S. didn’t leave the WHO until July 7 and Trump has cooperated with other countries (such as on sending ventilators), but those are stubborn facts the former novelist wouldn’t accept.
Reid pivoted to Besser with a chart showing the death totals with the U.S. and other major countries except China, but didn’t adjust for each country’s respective population. In turn, it was made so she could argue Trump’s “so helpless and so alone when, normally, you would think of the United States sort of marshalling the world, let’s make a vaccine and being a part of that and being completely separated from it.”
Ah, yes, Joy. The U.S. has been bumbling around for months and done nothing on the vaccine front.
Besser didn’t push, making it seem as though the virus no one knew of at the start of 2020 could have easily been controlled, but Trump failed in doing that.
He also joined Reid in wearing a tin-foil hat, purposefully casting doubt on the vaccine on account of Trump being President and somehow meddling in its production. But on the issue of Kodak, that was where Besser corrected her (click “expand”):
BESSER: You know, any vaccine that is rushed through without the proper safety testing and effectiveness testing, no one is going to want to get that vaccine and no one in public health would recommend people get that vaccine and that really takes time. The other thing is that there’s been this movie conception of a vaccine put out there where, you know, in the last 20 minutes a vaccine is developed, everyone gets a vaccine and we go back to our regular lives. Most vaccines provide, at best, partial protection and the ability to ramp up production and vaccinate massive numbers of people, billions of people will take time as well, so what I worry about big time is when politicians are saying the vaccine is coming and that gives people an excuse not to do the things right now that will save lives.
REID: Dr. Besser, are you not excited about the idea of a vaccine coming out of the Kodak company? Apparently the Kodak company is getting out of photographs business and becoming a drug company. Is that — does that seem normal to you that that is something that’s happening?
BESSER: One thing I am excited about is the amount of money that’s going in to develop a vaccine, but I think we still have to keep in mind that there’s no certainty that even with all these companies working to develop vaccines that there will be one. There are many diseases, think about HIV, dengue fever, where, for decades, there’s been work on vaccines and we don’t have one. I’m optimistic that there will be one but who knows and who knows when that will be and the other piece of this is, as we think about vaccines and we think about vaccine distribution, we have to keep in mind what communities, what parts of our population are getting hit the hardest, how do we ensure people have confidence, that black and brown communities are part of this. You know, if — if the death rate for black Americans, Latino Americans is four to five times that for white Americans, we have to make sure that we’re addressing the needs there and making sure that every community has what it needs to be safe.
Before shifting to Lebanon and making it all about Trump, Reid claimed that Trump’s been “rebuked by Twitter and Facebook and pulled off of Twitter and told to shut down, and he can’t tweet — or put a, you know, post on Facebook because he’s lying and saying children are completely immune.”
Wrong again, Joy. Despite initial media reports on Wednesday claiming it was Trump himself, it was actually the Trump campaign account @TeamTrump.
Rhodes didn’t push back and continued his gross, partisan mumblings, trashing Trump 2016 supporters as responsible for the severity of the pandemic, insisting Trump hasn’t utilized anyone with scientific backgrounds in the government’s non-existent response, and was the reason behind the economic downturn.
Huh-uh.
Reid’s latest lies and assistance from her panelists were brought to you by Amazon, Chevrolet, and Liberty Mutual. Follow the links to the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from August 6, click “expand.”
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
August 6, 2020
7:02 p.m. EasternJOY REID: But perhaps the wildest thing about Trump’s attack on all powerful Joe the Destroyer, is that Biden is just a civilian at the moment. He literally holds no governmental power. He’s an ex-vice president while Donald Trump is the current president of the United States. He is the one who has power, but he’s not using it. He’s literally refusing to use the power that he holds to fight the biggest threat facing Americans today, the coronavirus pandemic, that has now taken the lives of more than 160,000 Americans. In fact, rather than marshalling a national response to this health and economic catastrophe, Donald Trump was running around Ohio today, turning what was supposed to be an official presidential visit into a series of faux campaign rallies. Despite the fact that Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, who was supposed to greet him on the tarmac there in Cleveland himself tested positive for the virus today ahead of Trump’s arrival. Trump is spending every day pretending that everything is totally fine and that he doesn’t need to do anything except tweet and give interviews and complain. And if that’s not enough shear madness, today, Trump said that despite it all, he wouldn’t change a thing.
GERALDO RIVERA: Don’t you wish you had done some things differently?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think, first of all, the governors run their states. You understand that. [SCREEN WIPE] Nobody has done a better job. We’ve done a great job and we haven’t been rewarded with —
RIVERA: So you don’t admit any missteps? You don’t think that maybe if you were a little more enthusiastic about it earlier?
TRUMP: — no I guess you could say people call things wrong, but that’s understandable. Nobody —
REID: Joining me now Dr. Richard Besser, former Acting CDC Director, and Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Adviser in the Obama administration and, Ben, you know, I try to picture President Obama, you know, the Ebola crisis happens. He says, you know, Ebola, what can you do, right? Or — or any of the crises that he faced during his administration and saying I think we’re doing all fine and I can’t do anything about it. What do you make of the fact that it does appear that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, doesn’t think he has any power to do anything other than invade cities because of Black Lives Matter?
BEN RHODES: Well, you’re exactly right, Joy. From the very beginning of the crisis, he’s kind of talked about it like something that was just happening that he had no agency over, something that would disappear in the spring, something that would be gone by Easter instead of marshalling the kind of national and global response that could create a difference and if you look at President Obama, that’s two things, it’s one, modeling certain behavior, so in H1N1 epidemic, President Obama made a point, modeling certain behaviors, publicly getting a photograph getting a flu shot. In Ebola, very clear in communicating to people how do you contact this disease, what do you need to avoid, frankly trying to reduce a stigma of people who’ve had it by hugging a nurse who would recover from Ebola in the Oval Office. That type of modeling good behavior would have led Donald Trump to be encouraging people to wear masks, encouraging people to socially distance, encouraging people to take the steps that could have bent the curve on this virus early in the spring when it mattered the most and, secondly, marshalling that international response and national response instead of just saying it’s up to the governors, saying having a patchwork of 50 different regulations for how we deal with this in a federal union is not the way we go about this and having clear, national guidelines for how states and cities should be dealing with this and then, similarly, working around the world to make sure companies were cooperating and getting necessary supplies and doing the necessary contact tracing so we understood this disease better. Instead, he literally withdrew the United States from the rest of the world from the World Health Organization and what we’ve seen is every other single major country in the world has handled this much better than us. It’s because we have nobody at the center of our response modeling that behavior and marshalling a national and global response.
REID: You know, and that is the thing that I think for a lot of Americans is really confounding and new and, Dr. Besser, I’ll bring you in on this as well. Here are the deaths in the United States compared to the next highest countries, right? So we’re coupled in. You have Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., India, Italy, France, Spain, Peru, Iran, and Russia and a look at our — we’re the blue line at the top, for those of you have on T.V., you have to squint to see. We’re the blue line way up there — I — it’s hard for a lot of Americans to understand how our President could seems so helpless and so alone when, normally, you would think of the United States sort of marshalling the world, let’s make a vaccine and being a part of that and being completely separated from it, but then you have Donald Trump saying this today. Here is him predicting — so he has no power to stop that, but here he is saying there’s going to be a vaccine by Election Day.
RIVERA: So what’s the earliest we could see that, a vaccine?
TRUMP: Ah, sooner than the end of the year, could be much sooner. At least something would be fantastic.
RIVERA: Sooner than November 3rd?
TRUMP: Oh, I think in some cases, yes, it’s possible before, but right around that time.
REID: Dr. Besser, it’s clear he has no idea when there would be a vaccine. He has clearly no agency at all over a vaccine being created, but the fact that he’s saying that to his supporters, because the people he’s talking to are his people, is — is — does that worry you that he’s now overpromising on a vaccine?
DR. RICHARD BESSER: I mean, there are a couple of things that really worry me. If — if we want to have the same type of curve in the United States that we’re seeing across Europe, across so many different countries where they have been able to control this and really drive the numbers down to something that’s manageable and economies have been able to reopen, it’s not going to be a vaccine that gets there. It’s going to be these simple measures that countries have taken that aren’t easy to do, but wearing masks and social distancing and making sure that everyone has what they need to be able to protect themselves and their families, these are the things that what we need to do and if people think that a vaccine is going to ride in and all of a sudden this is going to go away, they’re sorely mistaken for a number of reasons. You know, any vaccine that is rushed through without the proper safety testing and effectiveness testing, no one is going to want to get that vaccine and no one in public health would recommend people get that vaccine and that really takes time. The other thing is that there’s been this movie conception of a vaccine put out there where, you know, in the last 20 minutes a vaccine is developed, everyone gets a vaccine and we go back to our regular lives. Most vaccines provide, at best, partial protection and the ability to ramp up production and vaccinate massive numbers of people, billions of people will take time as well, so what I worry about big time is when politicians are saying the vaccine is coming and that gives people an excuse not to do the things right now that will save lives.
REID: Dr. Besser, are you not excited about the idea of a vaccine coming out of the Kodak company? Apparently the Kodak company is getting out of photographs business and becoming a drug company. Is that — does that seem normal to you that that is something that’s happening?
BESSER: One thing I am excited about is the amount of money that’s going in to develop a vaccine, but I think we still have to keep in mind that there’s no certainty that even with all these companies working to develop vaccines that there will be one. There are many diseases, think about HIV, dengue fever, where, for decades, there’s been work on vaccines and we don’t have one. I’m optimistic that there will be one but who knows and who knows when that will be and the other piece of this is, as we think about vaccines and we think about vaccine distribution, we have to keep in mind what communities, what parts of our population are getting hit the hardest, how do we ensure people have confidence, that black and brown communities are part of this. You know, if — if the death rate for black Americans, Latino Americans is four to five times that for white Americans, we have to make sure that we’re addressing the needs there and making sure that every community has what it needs to be safe.
REID: Yeah. Ben, you know, I want to read you a little bit of this New York Times article, whose depressing title is “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus.” It’s a David Leonhardt piece that was published today. And it says: “When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead to far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations like Bahrain and Oman.” And, meanwhile, our President is getting rebuked by Twitter and Facebook and pulled off of Twitter and told to shut down, and he can’t tweet — or put a, you know, post on Facebook because he’s lying and saying children are completely immune. He actually got rebuked by even Facebook, which has been pretty lax with him up to now. I don’t know what we do about that. I mean, we don’t have a place in the world other than as a source of pity.
RHODES: Yeah, Joy, I think, you know, when I started at the White House and when I began working at the White House, you walk into the West Wing and the first thing that you’re struck by is how small it is, just a few desks with people working there and you realize government is a human endeavor and the human beings that you put in these positions matter a lot. South Korea had an outbreak of this disease bigger than we did before we did and they’re right next to China. They’ve had a few hundred people die from it because they did the right things. You’ll recall in March, Italy, Spain, had curves very much like us that out of control. They got it under control. This country elected someone president who habitually lies, who’s not interested in government, who’s disparaged expertise and calls civil service the deep state, who cannot look beyond the 24-hour media cycle, not even that, the 24-second Twitter cycle that he lives in. He can’t do these things. This was evident to us when he was elected. It was evident to us for the first three years of his presidency and what happened is, inevitably, he was not going to be equipped to deal with a crisis. He did not hire the people who were equipped to deal with the crisis. He did not listen to the experts, like Dr. Fauci, who was still in the government, who could have helped in deal with the crisis and the hard truth for Americans is, this did not need to happen. We did not need to be sitting here with 160,000 people dead and an economy utterly devastated.
REID: Yeah.
RHODES: We are where we are because of the people who are running our government. That’s what we need to decide in November.
