Even for the execrable Nicolle Wallace — Trump-hater extraordinaire and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer — this was truly grotesque. Sure, tens of thousands of Americans have died, and the economy is in shambles. But hey, there's a "silver lining" to all the death and misery: Trump's alleged "lies" and sins" are hurting him politically.
As Wallace put it Thursday afternoon on her MSNBC show Deadline: White House, "the things that we’ve been talking about for three years may be finally catching up with him." Translation: time and again, we've tried and failed to destroy Trump. But the virus is our silver bullet, even though tens of thousands of Americans have died!
Here was her gleeful but repugnant utterance:
[T]here is something both tragic, and pathetic, and ironic about the fact that it took a, you know, color-blind, gender-blind, state-line-blind virus to sort of have all of the President’s sins from his first three years catch up with him. You can’t stand there and lie. You can’t contradict your scientists because they’re the ones that stand at 66 and 68 percent public trust, not you. He’s down at 38 percent. Pence is lower than him. I mean, he needs those people whether he likes what they say or not and I wonder what you think about whether or not there’s some silver lining there, that some of the things that --- that we’ve been talking about for three years may be finally catching up with him?
Note that Wallace posed the question to Ron Klain, the leftist political hack who loves to boast about the great job he ostensibly did as Obama's "Ebola czar"—as if what he dealt with in the 2014 outbreak of the far-less contagious (though more deadly) virus is anywhere close to what's going on now.
He's also a Biden adviser who presumably would be in line to lead a hypothetical Biden administration response to the virus. So it's in his best interest to trash anything and everything uttered by those currently in the federal government.
But even Klain had the sense not to pick up on Wallace's despicable "silver lining" line. Instead, he fired off his own set of platitudes about the laudable nature of the previous regime in contrast to the current one.
Here's the transcript (click "expand" to read more).
MSNBC's Deadline White House
04/23/20
4:11 p.m. EasternNICOLLE WALLACE: Ron Klain, there is something both tragic, and pathetic, and ironic about the fact that it took a, you know, color-blind, gender-blind, state-line-blind virus to sort of have all of the President’s sins from his first three years catch up with him. You can’t stand there and lie. You can’t contradict your scientists because they’re the ones that stand at 66 and 68 percent public trust, not you. He’s down at 38 percent. Pence is lower than him. I mean, he needs those people whether he likes what they say or not and I wonder what you think about whether or not there’s some silver lining there, that some of the things that --- that we’ve been talking about for three years may be finally catching up with him?
RON KLAIN: Well, you know, Nicolle, I think the reality is that a leader in this situation has to tell the American people the truth. You know, when we were managing the Ebola response, President Obama was always clear with the public that we had seen cases of Ebola in the United States. We were going to see more cases in the United States. That was unpleasant news. He shared it with people honestly and told them honestly what we were doing to keep them safe. When President Trump stands up yesterday and says there will not be a second wave, he's denying the inevitable. If you look at the history of epidemics, there's always a second and third wave. This idea that it's a smooth curve up and smooth curve down is wrong. It's not going to look like that. The path down is slower than the path up and there's always a recurrence of the disease and so when the disease comes back this fall, will President Trump try to tell us again no one saw it coming? Who could have possibly foreseen that? That argument, which is a false argument now, is going to look like a ridiculous argument in the fall when he stood in the briefing room and tried to spar with his own health officials about the scientific inevitability that this virus will be back.
