In the eyes of MSNBC, the coronavirus has never been about finding a cure, or reducing the number of cases and deaths—it has always been about attacking President Trump. On Last Word Monday night, host and Democratic Party mouthpiece Lawrence O’Donnell pushed the preposterous narrative that the President only cares about fighting the coronavirus in states with voters that support his reelection.
The far-left TV personality claimed that Trump’s visit to a factory that has been working on a coronavirus vaccine only occurred because of personal political reasons:
The Trump campaign made a desperate campaign trip to North Carolina today where polls showed Joe Biden seven points ahead of Donald Trump in a state that Donald Trump won by four points in 2016. Taxpayers paid for the Trump campaign event as they have been lately because the White House disguised this one as a presidential trip to a factory with a government contract to work on developing a coronavirus vaccine.
O’Donnell has such an intense hatred for Trump that even when the President makes remarks that are meant to unite the American people, the MSNBC bomb-thrower looks at it as solely political. The President of the United States should be going to factories that are developing the desperately-needed vaccine, since that is what any president would do.
In order to push the narrative that Trump’s coronavirus response has been politically motivated, O’Donnell brought on former Obama advisor Dr. Zeke Emanuel to concur with him:
This is— look, the President is obsessed by one and only one thing it appears, and that's re-election. And if the coronavirus threatens re-election, that's all that counts. And we can see it now that he's got only one strategy left, which is we're going to get a vaccine before election day. I predicted this two month ago in an op-ed in the New York Times that the October surprise will be an approval of a vaccine.
The goal has always been to get the coronavirus vaccine available to the public as soon as possible, but according to the leftist media, if it comes out earlier than expected it will only be to help Trump’s reelection.
This should be an issue that Americans are united on, but MSNBC wants the public to be divided, in an effort to elect Biden this November. Anything positive that the Trump administration does leading up to the election will not be portrayed as a way to save American lives. Americans should all be rooting for a safe and effective vaccine to be available as soon as possible, whether it’s in October or January.
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Read the full transcript below:
MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
07/27/2020
10:22:40 PMLAWRENCE O’DONNELL: The Trump campaign made a desperate campaign trip to North Carolina today where polls showed Joe Biden seven points ahead of Donald Trump in a state that Donald Trump won by four points in 2016. Taxpayers paid for the Trump campaign event as they have been lately because the White House disguised this one as a presidential trip to a factory with a government contract to work on developing a coronavirus vaccine. Here was Donald Trump's campaign message for North Carolina today.
(clip of President Trump)
PRESIDENT TRUMP: America will develop a vaccine very soon, and we will defeat the virus. We will have it delivered in record time as our visit here demonstrates. And I want to thank all of the people and representatives from the great state of North Carolina. This is a great place. It is a phenomenal place.
(cuts back to O’Donnell)
O’DONNELL: In other words, good luck, North Carolina. Hope you can hang on until we discover a vaccine. And that is Donald Trump's message to the country where as of tonight the United States has 4,303,046 confirmed cases of coronavirus that have been reported. And as of tonight the United States has suffered 148,213 deaths from coronavirus.
The Washington Post is reporting that Donald Trump didn't care about those numbers at all, not the infections, not the deaths, none of it until people in the White House started talking to him about his voters. The Washington Post reports, “In the past couple of weeks, they began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes of coronavirus cases among our people in Republican states. A senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest, including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin the official said. This new approach seemed to resonate as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.”
Joining our discussion now is Dr. Zeke Emanuel, he is a former Obama White House Health Policy Advisor, an MSNBC Senior Medical Contributor. He is also the author of the new book "Which Country Has the World's Best Health Care?". Dr. Zeke Emanuel is here, Zeke the situation -- what is the situation with baseball tell us tonight? Here you have the very, very, very protected people in a bubble of sorts, full access to testing. You have got 14 infections, 12 players, two staff and who knows how many we will have tomorrow.
DR. ZEKE EMANUEL (MSNBC SENIOR MEDICAL CONTRIBUTER): Yeah. Well, I think, Lawrence, you said two very important things. First, a bubble of sorts. A bubble is either a bubble or it's not a bubble if people can go in and out. You don't know who they're meeting with, and that's the problem. I have been advising a number of different companies, especially in the entertainment business where my brother works. And one of the things we say is that on the set, on the field, where all the precautions have been taken, that's your safest spot. And then you are going to go out. You go to a restaurant or you go to a bar or someone you know has gone to a restaurant or bar, that's where you can contract coronavirus, and that's the problem. And the second point is, you know, they have all the testing you want, but testing doesn't prevent transmission. It only tells you that you have been infected. You have got to do other things to prevent transmission, and that's what you have to worry about.
O’DONNELL: I don't know why I have been wasting my time asking your brother when show business is going to reopen when I could just have gone straight to the source. Zeke, what about what we just heard from The Washington Post in that horrific reporting from inside the Trump White House? You worked inside the White House. Can you imagine being in the Obama White House and in order to get the President's attention to ebola or to something else, some other possible epidemic, you would have to say to him, your voters, your voters in your states might be killed?
EMANUEL: Not true for President Obama, I could tell you that. For President Obama, you wanted to get his attention, you wrote out a memo. You put it in the briefing book. He read the briefing book and took it in, and you got back the memo and notes on the side with his reflections and comments and directions as to which way to go. This is— look, the President is obsessed by one and only one thing it appears, and that's re-election. And if the coronavirus threatens re-election, that's all that counts. And we can see it now that he's got only one strategy left, which is we're going to get a vaccine before election day.
I predicted this two month ago in an op-ed in the New York Times that the October surprise will be an approval of a vaccine. But, Lawrence, we should remember, having a vaccine and the average American like you and I getting a shot, those are two different things. Manufacturing, putting it in viles, shipping it out, making sure that there are needles and syringes to give you a shot and that there are people who know how to give you a shot and that it can all be traced. That's very big hurdles and there is no telling that this administration actually is prepared to address all of those hurdles before we can actually get shots. So just approving a vaccine doesn't actually get Americans out of this coronavirus pandemic.
O’DONNELL: Zeke, we're seeing big increases now in a state like California where the California government has tried to do everything right and Governor Gavin Newsom did an early shutdown, tried to do everything right. We're also seeing it in states they did not try, they never pretended to try to do everything right. What does that tell us about these different governing approaches?
EMANUEL: Well, you know, tried to do everything right and then eased up and probably eased up too fast before we had the testing in place, the contact tracing and the ability to actually address any little outbreaks. I think that is a serious problem, and we haven’t gotten people accustomed to the things they need to do. We know from Europe, and from places like Italy that had a big explosion that actually if we do have self-discipline, if we do have perseverance, in eight weeks you can bring this down to a very, very minimal level and open up in the proper way, do things outside. Don't have crowds. Don't do internal restaurants and bars. You can see Italy has less than one case in 8,000, and the United States has one case per thousand people, and that's a huge difference.
