On Sunday night’s CNN Newsroom, host Ana Cabrera combined with senior political analyst and Atlantic senior editor Ron Brownstein and Vanderbilt infectious disease professor William Schaffner to melt down over President Trump and Vice President Pence holding rallies over the weekend despite several of Pence’s staff testing positive for COVID. Cabrera freaked out over Trump “giving fist bumps” and Brownstein claimed that Trump and Pence “prioritize re-opening the economy in every possible way over public health.”
Cabrera began by flipping out over Pence’s event and asking Brownstein why “the White House hasn't pulled Pence off the trail?”
Brownstein replied by nastily attacking Trump and Pence for wanting to re-open the economy “no matter how many people die”:
The loudest message they are sending to the public is through the way they are conducting these rallies and conducting themselves and that message is that they prioritize re-opening the economy really from the beginning. They prioritize re-opening the economy in every possible way over public health. And that no matter how many people get sick, no matter how many people die, no matter how long they're in office, they are not going to take this more seriously than they have so far.
Trump and Pence are so awful for opposing authoritarian lockdowns that have caused 13 million people to lose their jobs and 97,966 business to permanently close? How heartless of them for wanting to help people make money and prevent Americans from having their dreams crushed!
Additionally, due to the side health affects of the lockdowns, maybe it is Brownstein that doesn’t care about “how many people die.” The lockdowns have caused 75,000 extra deaths of despair in the U.S. due to their mental affects, 1.2 million extra child deaths worldwide due to the decreased lack of child health services, and possibly even more preventable cancer deaths than COVID deaths due to people not being able to receive the cancer treatment they need.
Cabrera then gleefully reported that Scott Gottlieb and Anthony Fauci have endorsed a national mask mandate and asked Schaffner “if is it time for a mask mandate?”
In his response, Schaffner did not explicitly endorse the policy but did state that even after a vaccine is available to the public, that mask wearing “should be the new normal for all of us.”
Brownstein then continued his attacks on Trump by claiming that Trump made wearing masks “another one of the culture wars”:
Yeah, look, he’s made mask wearing -- the President's made mask-wearing into, like, another one of the culture wars, you know, and I've said many times in this presidency when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. No matter -- whenever he is presented with a challenge, his instinct is to kind of fall back on cultural and -- and racial division, and in this case I think what -- what they did was they essentially made mask wearing an attempt by elites, medical, you know, medical experts are really elites who want to run your life and tell you how to live your life. And this has had enormous consequence, I think, not only in the behavior of his supporters but also the pressure that the President placed on Republican governors. I mean, you can't overstate the -- the impact of the decisions in Florida, in Georgia, in Texas, and Arizona, to avoid closing, to re-open early, to override multiple mask ordinances. And I think all of that was heavily influenced by the fear of getting on the wrong side of the President as he tried to make this kind of a culture division.
Cabrera then showed the media’s continued love for nitpicking on what Trump does at his rallies and even freaked out over him “giving fist bumps”:
I want to go back to that video that we showed earlier with John Harwood in Maine where the President today was at this apple orchard and was meeting very close to supporters, voters who wanted him to sign hats, and wanted to get, you know, a little bit of -- of time with the President and you can see he's not wearing a mask. Many of the people in the crowd aren't wearing masks. It doesn't appear that they're six feet apart. There's no social distancing.
(....)
He's giving fist bumps and I'm just looking at the people next to the President, his Secret Service team that's part of this event with him and they're also having to stand so close to many people without masks and we know that there's an asymptomatic transmission, pre-symptomatic transmission is a big thing, too.
Brownstein couldn’t help himself but to spout more vile about Trump in response to Cabrera’s meltdown:
I think it is been an enormous political miscalculation as well as a public health catastrophe from the beginning. I mean, the President's choice right from the outset was to project normalcy at all costs, whatever the impact for public health, whatever was actually going on in the real world and try to tell the American people that, you know, what they were seeing in their daily lives was not really happening.
With the election less than two weeks away, CNN will continue to amp up the Democratic propaganda.
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Read the full October 25th transcript here:
CNN Newsroom
10/25/20
7:07:59 p.m. EasternANA CABRERA: I want to bring in CNN senior political analyst and senior editor of The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein. Also with us is Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Schaffner also spent time at the CDC as an epidemic intelligence service officer. So great to have both of you here with us. Ron, let me start you and just the politics. Why do you think the White House hasn't pulled Pence off the trail?
RON BROWNSTEIN (CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST, SENIOR EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC): Look, the medium is the message here. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter what Vice President or the President say from this stage. The loudest message they are sending to the public is through the way they are conducting these rallies and conducting themselves and that message is that they prioritize re-opening the economy really from the beginning. They prioritize re-opening the economy in every possible way over public health. And that no matter how many people get sick, no matter how many people die, no matter how long they're in office, they are not going to take this more seriously than they have so far. And that in many ways, Ana, is his closing message to the country. I mean he is, as often is the case, speaking to a minority, roughly the 35 percent of the country that says open up at all costs, that are ideologically opposed to masks. But for the 60 percent of the country that said from the beginning that they disapprove of the way he's handled this, he's basically telling them don't expect anything different.
CABRERA: The former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal saying it's time to consider a temporary mask mandate. Dr. Fauci on Friday said he thinks a mask mandate might be good. Dr. Schaffner, what do you think, is it time for a mask mandate?
DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER (INFECTIOUS DISEASE PROFESSOR AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER): Well, we certainly all, Ana, we certainly all ought to be wearing masks, every time we walk out of our front door and any contact we have with other people. You know, wearing a mask is an inconvenience. We don't like the way it looks and it's kind of dorky and it is yes, it is a little bit more difficult to breathe but it's life-saving. It will make all of us together work to reduce the transmission of this virus and so it's something we all ought to be doing. Whether we do it on a voluntary basis or an obligatory basis, we really need to do that in order to keep this outbreak under some sort of control. You know, if you wait for treatments, that means people are already in the hospital. A vaccine, yes, we want that, but it's not going to be sufficient. If you wear a vaccine -- if -- if you get the vaccine, you'll still have to be wearing the mask. That's a message that hasn't really gotten out there to everyone because we don't think these vaccines are going to be 100 percent effective so wearing the mask, that should be the new normal for all of us.
CABRERA: I hope everybody is listening out there because what we are being told by the modelers at the -- the University of Washington is that right now, they believe only 49 percent of Americans are wearing a mask in public settings. At these political events, Ron, oftentimes we have the President or Vice President on stage surrounded by people who are wearing masks behind them, yet everyone else in the actual crowd, they're packed together, many people aren't wearing masks. Why the political theater?
BROWNSTEIN: Yeah, look, he’s made mask wearing -- the President's made mask-wearing into, like, another one of the culture wars, you know, and I've said many times in this presidency when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. No matter -- whenever he is presented with a challenge, his instinct is to kind of fall back on cultural and -- and racial division, and in this case I think what -- what they did was they essentially made mask wearing an attempt by elites, medical, you know, medical experts are really elites who want to run your life and tell you how to live your life. And this has had enormous consequence, I think, not only in the behavior of his supporters but also the pressure that the President placed on Republican governors. I mean, you can't overstate the -- the impact of the decisions in Florida, in Georgia, in Texas, and Arizona, to avoid closing, to re-open early, to override multiple mask ordinances. And I think all of that was heavily influenced by the fear of getting on the wrong side of the President as he tried to make this kind of a culture division. But again, he's talking to, what, 25 percent of the country that's ideologically opposed to masks. That is his strategy, deepen his base rather than broaden but he's really looking at the small side of the field on this.
CABRERA: I want to go back to that video that we showed earlier with John Harwood in Maine where the President today was at this apple orchard and was meeting very close to supporters, voters who wanted him to sign hats, and wanted to get, you know, a little bit of -- of time with the President and you can see he's not wearing a mask. Many of the people in the crowd aren't wearing masks. It doesn't appear that they're six feet apart. There's no social distancing. Dr. Schaffner, what's your reaction when you see this video?
SCHAFFNER: Well, it clearly saddens me, of course, because that's exactly the environment -- although it's on the outside, nonetheless, it's the environment in which this COVID virus likes to spread. It likes people close together, being excited, breathing heavily, and that actually provides the opportunity for the virus to spread. These are all potentially accelerator events. You spread it among the people there, they take it home, give it to their family members and neighbors and that keeps the whole epidemic revved up. That's actually the opposite of what we can do. One can go to these rallies and be happy but still wear the mask and be socially distant. Yes, we can engage in society. We can open up again. We must open up again. But we need to do it carefully, rather than carelessly.
CABRERA: He's giving fist bumps and I'm just looking at the people next to the President, his Secret Service team that's part of this event with him and they're also having to stand so close to many people without masks and we know that there's an asymptomatic transmission, pre-symptomatic transmission is a big thing, too. Ron, do you think the handling of these White House outbreaks and just the way the President or the Vice President have been conducting themselves at these rallies, really downplaying the coronavirus, in some cases making fun of the concern over COVID-19, will it change any votes?
BROWNSTEIN: Well, look, I -- I -- I think it -- I think it is been an enormous political miscalculation as well as a public health catastrophe from the beginning. I mean, the President's choice right from the outset was to project normalcy at all costs, whatever the impact for public health, whatever was actually going on in the real world and try to tell the American people that, you know, what they were seeing in their daily lives was not really happening. And he's left himself in a position where from the beginning 60 percent of the country has said they do not think he took it seriously enough, they do not think he's listening to the scientists, and -- and they do not believe that he is, you know, that he is providing truthful information about it. So, as is often the case as I said, he -- his strategy is to play to that minority that views all of this as something between a hoax and an ideological inconvenience. But I do think that going out and -- and behaving in this way overshadows anything else he could possibly say. His closing message to the country is that no matter how bad this gets, don't expect anything different from me. And that is, I think, a tough way to end the campaign when we're looking at a record caseload.
