Bob Woodward releases a bombshell tape of President Trump talking about downplaying COVID. Democrats ignore their own records to leap on Trump's failures. And politics continue to dominate facts when it comes to CoVid. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, and it's a good time to diversify your portfolio into precious metals. If you haven't reached out to Birch Gold, diversify part of your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA, or just purchase a little bit of. I trust Birch Gold. They're the people you should trust! As well, text BONUS to 474747 to get a FREE information kit on protecting your savings with gold. I've got Gold! I trust BCR! You're not going to get better information about gold than this, and you don't want to miss it! Get a free information kit from Birch Gold on how to protect your savings by investing in gold today! It's not a bad time to be alive! This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN! Stop putting your online data at risk and get protected at ExpressVPN. Get protected at expressvpn.ee/ProtectYourData at Parcast Connect with Ben Shapiro on social media and get access to all of the latest breaking news and breaking news coming from the world's leading financial and investing sites! Tweet me and let him know what you thought of the breaking news breaking out of this episode of The Ben Shapiro's new show! . Tweet Ben on if you have any breaking news you want him to help spread it around the word? or send him your thoughts on the world! or share it to Ben on it on his socials! and he'll get a shoutout on the next episode of his podcast! on the airwaves! Ben will get it on the rest of the world listening to Ben Shapiro s newest podcast on his podcast, right there on The Daily Mail? or Insta: Timestamps: , right here on Instapaper or Instapay , or on his insta or his feed & on Instacode: or any other place he listens to the latest in the world on the ground? . . Thanks for listening to the podcast? & more! - Timestare: - - Ben's Tweets: ) - Insta?
00:00:35.000I mean, what we are watching right now is a lot of new data being priced into the system, but times of great volatility, times of Not knowing what to expect.
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00:01:45.000Who in the hell thought it was a good idea for Trump to talk to Bob Woodward?
00:01:49.000Who in the hell thought that it was a good idea for Trump to ever talk to members of the press?
00:01:52.000See, Trump has this very bizarre relationship with the press where he really hates them because they mistreat him and because they lie about him, but also he loves them.
00:01:59.000I mean, really loves them and wants to talk to them all the time.
00:02:03.000And so this means that the White House press office is basically Woody in Toy Story 4 trying to prevent Forky from throwing himself in the trash.
00:02:10.000That is every day for the White House press office, because they're out there just trying to message, just trying to get on message about Joe Biden and riots in Kenosha and unrest and the economy teetering.
00:02:23.000And there's Trump out there just doing his thing, trying to throw himself in the trash.
00:02:28.000And just jumping into the trash like Forky from Toy Story 4.
00:02:30.000And if you're the White House press office, the comms office, you have to be incredibly frustrated at this point, especially because we are now two months out from an election, and you've got Donald Trump, as it turns out, doing 18 hours, 18 hours of on-the-record interviews with Bob Woodward.
00:02:44.000Now, I sort of understand the logic, I guess.
00:02:48.000In that, Bob Woodward is a pseudo-journalist.
00:02:51.000When I say pseudo-journalist, I mean that the last several books he's written have come under serious question for decontextualizing comments and then recontextualizing them improperly.
00:03:17.000And this is something Bob Woodward is famous for.
00:03:19.000So that means that if you want to stop him from doing that, you give him first-hand sourcing.
00:03:22.000Well, there's only one problem with that, which is that it doesn't dissuade him from violating things like on-the-record or off-the-record or on-background versus on-the-record.
00:03:30.000He'll just do whatever he wants to do.
00:03:32.000And letting the fox into the hen house is a really bad idea, particularly with President Trump, who is fond of overstating things and fond of saying silly things.
00:03:40.000He is a real estate magnate with a gift for puffery.
00:03:43.000In the real estate business, you're constantly puffing up the real estate.
00:03:45.000Isn't this the most beautiful island kitchen?
00:04:19.000Is it spectacular or unbelievable or garbage?
00:04:23.000There is no in-between for President Trump.
00:04:25.000When you combine those two personality flaws, one, he's never done anything wrong, with two, his penchant for puffery, you end up with some very unfortunate quotes about COVID.
00:04:33.000And that is what happened here with regard to Bob Woodward's book.
00:04:37.000So there are two allegations that put together make for some toxic politics for Trump.
00:04:42.000Allegation number one is one that Woodward puts in the book.
00:04:45.000Apparently, he spoke with Trump on February 7th.
00:04:48.000His new book is titled Rage, of course.
00:04:50.000Apparently, Trump said to Woodward about COVID, quote, This is deadly stuff.
00:04:55.000In a series of interviews with Woodward, said CNN, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known.
00:05:02.000Pretty amazing, Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus is maybe five times more deadly than the flu.
00:05:08.000Apparently, he also suggested that the virus was airborne at the time.
00:05:13.000Now, here is the thing about all the stuff that Trump was saying on February 7th.
00:05:18.000If Trump had come out publicly and said that the virus was airborne on February 7th, everybody rightly would have said that this was not actually supremely telling.
00:05:29.000Because Donald Trump has said a lot of things about COVID, many of which are inaccurate.
00:05:33.000Okay, it turns out that the WHO did not declare that the virus was airborne until July.
00:05:37.000So if Trump had come out in February, like the beginning of February, and he said, okay, we need to shut down all of American society, the virus is airborne.
00:05:43.000How many people do you think would have gone along with that?
00:05:45.000The answer, pretty obviously, is zero, since about one week prior, the Democratic Party had opposed Trump even shutting down some travel from China.
00:05:53.000When you hear Democrats proclaim they would have done something very, very differently in February, the answer is no, you wouldn't have.
00:05:57.000Nancy Pelosi was out in Chinatown encouraging people to come on down February 24th.
00:06:01.000So we'll get to the Democratic response to all this in just one second.
00:06:04.000OK, so he is on tape with Woodward on February 7th, where he said that the virus is dangerous and that it is airborne and that it could kill a lot of people.
00:06:15.000Now, again, How much of that is Trump conveying what he actually knew and how much of that is Trump misconveying what he had heard?
00:06:23.000We've seen enough of his press conferences to know that he was constantly giving either best case or worst case scenario and nothing in between.
00:06:28.000There was never any moderate rhetoric coming from Trump about the virus.
00:06:33.000But he did on February 7th apparently say that it was airborne and Woodward says this was a damning missed opportunity for Trump to reset the leadership clock after he was told this was a once in a lifetime health emergency.
00:06:44.000During a pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox News February 2nd, Trump said we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.
00:06:49.000And two days later during the State of the Union, Trump made only a passing reference to the virus.
00:06:52.000He promised, quote, my administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.
00:06:58.000Okay, and then there is another tape that emerged a little bit later on.
00:07:04.000And in this later tape, Trump was asked by Woodward what changed between, you know, February and March where he really started to ramp up the rhetoric.
00:07:10.000Now, the normal answer here is the information changed.
00:07:17.000We had zero identified deaths from COVID in the United States in February at that point.
00:07:21.000It's only later we realized that we may have had some deaths from COVID that we hadn't properly identified.
00:07:25.000But there were double-digit cases in the United States as of February.
00:07:29.000There were very low double-digit deaths as of early March.
00:07:31.000All Trump had to say here is, we got new information, and therefore I changed my feelings about the virus.
00:07:38.000But again, go back to those two personality flaws.
00:07:40.000Trump has never been wrong, according to Trump.
00:07:42.000And two, everything is either the worst or the best.
00:07:44.000Well, that means that what you're about to hear him say fits well within his personality foibles.
00:07:48.000One, he has never been wrong at any point in time.
00:07:50.000He is omniscient and therefore knew from the very beginning how deadly this virus was, which leads him to have to now explain, OK, if you knew it was that deadly, then why exactly didn't you talk about it?
00:07:58.000Which leads him to say, well, the reason I didn't talk about it is because I didn't want to panic everybody, which is a pretty weak excuse.
00:08:03.000I mean, honestly, if you knew that things were super duper bad back in February, you should have said so, because Americans ought to be trusted with information.
00:08:10.000I don't care if you're a Democrat president or Republican president.
00:08:13.000If you know really bad information that affects Americans, you have a responsibility to pass that along to Americans.
00:08:18.000It is not your job to tell us whether or not to panic.
00:08:21.000It is your job to tell us exactly what we are needing to know so we can make our own risk assessments.
00:08:27.000That's why if you look at the actual charts on human movements in the United States, you'll see that people started to shut down their own travel plans before all of the government lockdowns took place.
00:08:36.000Okay, so anyway, those two personality foibles combined to give you this tape, which will be used by Democrats in every attack ad from now until the election.
00:08:45.000Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob.
00:08:47.000Just today and yesterday some startling facts came out.
00:08:56.000So give me a moment of talking to somebody, going through this with Fauci or somebody who kind of It caused a pivot in your mind because it's clear just from what's on the public record that you went through a pivot on this to, oh my God, the gravity is almost inexplicable and unexplainable.
00:09:25.000Well, I think, Bob, really, to be honest with you, I wanted to Uh, I wanted to always play it down.
00:09:43.000They'll ignore the last part where he justifies it by saying that he didn't want to create a panic.
00:09:46.000By the way, that sort of rationale has been used also by Dr. Anthony Fauci when he said that people shouldn't mask because he didn't want to create a run on the masks.
00:09:53.000That logic was also used by Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, as we will see.
00:09:57.000Suffice it to say that the combo of those two factors, one, Trump saying to Woodward in early February that he had talked to Xi Jinping, and quote, it goes through the air.
00:10:11.000It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.
00:10:14.000Right, that combined with the March 19th statement that he had purposely downplayed the virus is going to lead the Democrats to say Trump knew and he didn't do anything about it and he was lying to us about this whole thing the entire time and now he's admitted that he was downplaying the virus.
00:10:27.000Okay, so I think a couple things can be true.
00:10:29.000One, if Trump had come out in early February and said this thing is airborne, there was not the scientific proof to back that up.
00:10:33.000Again, the WHO only declared this thing airborne in July.
00:10:35.000Okay, so it would have been crazy for Trump to say that in early February and it is crazy, frankly, for him to say it to Bob Woodward.
00:10:41.000He shouldn't have made on the phone to Bob Woodward.
00:10:43.000My God, what do people even do at the White House?
00:10:46.000Seriously, just disconnect the damn phone.
00:10:48.000Just take the phone and smash it with a hammer and then bleach bit it like Hillary Clinton.
00:11:02.000And in fact, a human mistake, because you shouldn't be telling people to downplay particular threats when those threats actually threaten their lives, right?
00:11:15.000One, if it's a revelation, and the real revelation is not what he said on March 19th, right, that he wanted to downplay it to stop panic.
00:11:20.000He actually said that publicly like a week later in a press conference.
00:11:24.000If the actual revelation is the February 7th conversation that he knew early on that it was airborne, then the question becomes why Bob Woodward did not release the tapes or report it.
00:11:32.000This is a question being asked by left, right, and center.
00:11:35.000Why exactly, if Bob Woodward knew this thing was airborne early February, didn't he come out and say, the president knows it's airborne, he's lying to you?
00:11:41.000And the answer is because Bob Woodward didn't know whether to take any serious measure of what Trump was saying.
00:11:46.000Because again, Trump engages in puffery.
00:12:03.000The bottom line is nobody knew what was going on, including Trump at the time.
00:12:07.000In early February, Trump did not know what was going on.
00:12:09.000Again, he said that he got information from Xi Jinping, who's a very untrustworthy source.
00:12:12.000There was a lot of differential speculation by various members of the various political parties on exactly how serious COVID was going to be and how bad the outbreak was going to be.
00:12:20.000Dr. Fauci was playing it down as of February as well because he, again, did not know that this thing was going to be a massive outbreak because nobody knew that it was going to break across the United States exactly this way.
00:12:29.000When you hear Democrats say, Well, you know, we applied for additional funding.
00:12:32.000Now, you applied for, like, a tiny bit of additional funding.
00:12:35.000You applied for, like, a little bit of additional funding.
00:12:37.000Funding that was so insufficient that actually the Republicans came back in early March and upped the amount of funding that they appropriated for COVID-fighting above what Democrats requested in February.
00:12:48.000Okay, so those are the tapes that are breaking across the media, and the media are going nuts over them, of course, because this is finally the tape that brings down Trump.
00:12:55.000This is the tape that brings down Trump.
00:13:08.000And again, the phone call is coming from inside the house.
00:13:10.000If you're the White House comms office, you're just that babysitter from the horror movie who gets the call from the police that the call is coming from within the house.
00:13:18.000You're just down the office from Trump.
00:13:19.000You're like, where are these leaks coming from?
00:13:20.000Then you look down the office and there's Trump on the phone.
00:14:15.000You'll also see this in every attack ad from now until the election, as I say.
00:14:19.000But is there really any content to it?
00:14:21.000We're going to assess whether there is anything that really adds here.
00:14:24.000Whether this is in fact a bombshell or whether it's a restatement from Trump's own mouth of a case that actually he has already made fairly publicly.
00:14:33.000First, let us talk about your safety and security.
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00:14:47.000People stealing boxes from porches, and this happened to several of my friends.
00:14:51.000This is why you need Ring, because then you can turn that tape over to the police.
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00:15:04.000You can speak to them as though you are home.
00:15:45.000So right now, basically, I think we are now participating in a multiplayer game of gaslighting.
00:15:51.000Every single person who's involved in the story is gaslighting.
00:15:53.000Bob Woodward did not know early February the thing was airborne.
00:15:56.000He didn't believe Trump that this thing was that serious.
00:15:58.000Otherwise, he would have revealed the story, right?
00:16:00.000He has even said that he didn't come forward with the story at this point because he literally did not know that it was a big story at that point.
00:16:08.000So Woodward has answered these particular questions.
00:16:13.000And Woodward's answer, he said, he did not have any signed agreement or formal embargo arrangement with Trump or the White House to hold back their conversations.
00:16:19.000He said, I told him it was for the book, but as far as promising it not to publish in real time, I didn't do that.
00:16:24.000He said his aim was to provide a fuller context than could occur in a news story.
00:16:27.000I knew I could tell the second draft of history and I could tell it before the election.
00:16:32.000Also, he said that there were two problems with what he heard from Trump in February that kept him from putting it in the newspaper at the time.
00:16:37.000One, he didn't know what the source of Trump's information was.
00:16:39.000It wasn't until months later, in May, that Woodward learned it came from a high-level intelligence briefing in January that was also described in Wednesday's reporting about the book.
00:16:46.000Now, note, Democrats had the same high-level briefing in mid-February.
00:16:50.000So top Democrats knew everything Trump knew by mid-February.
00:16:53.000In February, what Trump told Woodward seemed hard to make sense of, the author said.
00:16:56.000Back then, there was no panic over the virus.
00:16:58.000Even toward the final days of that month, Fauci was publicly assuring Americans there was no need to change their daily habits.
00:17:04.000And, he says, the biggest problem is I didn't know if it was true.
00:17:09.000So Woodward is basically acknowledging that Trump didn't know what he was talking about because Trump very rarely knows what he is talking about when it comes to statements of fact.
00:17:16.000This is one of the reasons why his press conferences, as soon as he got off script, devolved into kind of utter chaos and a bizarre sort of weird Benny Hill routine.
00:17:28.000That's because, again, Trump is not the greatest conveyor or purveyor of fact.
00:17:34.000This has not stopped anybody from jumping to the conclusion they wish to jump to, which is that Trump knew full well how bad things were in early February, and then he lied about it.
00:17:44.000Let's go through, first of all, what Trump's comments look like, and then we'll parallel them with what exactly Andrew Cuomo's comments look like, because as you will see, They're kind of parallel.
00:17:54.000Everybody was kind of figuring this out at the same time.
00:17:56.000So the basic story here, which is that Trump knew in February, early February, everyone was going to die from the virus, and then he lied about it.
00:18:42.000To uphold his electoral possibilities?
00:18:45.000As soon as COVID hit, it was going to be obvious that Trump had misstated the case.
00:18:49.000And that was going to hurt him politically.
00:18:50.000So what would be the purpose of the lie?
00:18:51.000Again, I think we ought to distinguish between people saying dumb crap, which again is a hallmark of this administration, and lying outright that he is not, he was not lying about COVID.
00:19:01.000And by the way, you know who says he was not lying about COVID?
00:19:03.000I'm not the one saying he was not lying about COVID.
00:19:05.000Dr. Anthony Fauci says he was not lying about COVID.
00:19:08.000So here was Dr. Anthony Fauci last night saying there wasn't any discrepancy between what we told Trump and what he told the press.
00:19:16.000I may not be tuned in to the right thing that they're talking about, but I didn't really see any discrepancies between what he told us and what we told him and what he ultimately came out publicly and said.
00:19:27.000I didn't get any sense that he was distorting anything.
00:19:29.000I mean, in my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had.
00:19:58.000The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a, quote, shutdown in the sense of not really shutdown, but to really have strong mitigation.
00:20:28.000Okay, so Fauci himself has already kind of debunked Woodward's story, but let's go through the actual timeline here, because the case Democrats are making is that they would have handled it differently, and they handled it right, and it was all Trump botching it.
00:20:39.000So let's begin with Trump's comments, and we'll see how his comments evolved over time.
00:20:43.000And there's no question that he did in fact downplay the virus all the way until basically mid-March.
00:20:49.000Here was President Trump, January 22nd, saying that we have this under control.
00:21:09.000On February 7th, President Trump tweeted that the Chinese government had it under control.
00:21:14.000He tweeted, just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China.
00:21:18.000He is strong, sharp, powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on coronavirus.
00:21:21.000He feels they're doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days.
00:21:26.000Not only that, but he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm and the virus hopefully becomes weaker and then gone.
00:21:31.000Great discipline is taking place in China as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.
00:21:35.000We're working closely with China to help, right?
00:21:37.000This is the same day that Woodward said that Trump called him up and started talking about how the thing was airborne and how it was going to kill everybody and it was super dangerous.
00:21:43.000OK, those two, those two messages are not in conflict, by the way.
00:21:46.000Trump could have thought all that and also thought that the Chinese government was actually going to be successful in shutting it down.
00:22:10.000Then, February 26th, President Trump reiterated, he said, we're very ready for this and the risk is low.
00:22:16.000The number one priority from our standpoint is the health and safety of the American people.
00:22:21.000And that's the way I viewed it when I made that decision.
00:22:24.000Because of all we've done, the risk to the American people remains very low.
00:22:30.000But we're very, very ready for this, for anything, whether it's going to be a breakout of larger proportions or whether or not we're at that very low level.
00:22:42.000Okay, February 29th, President Trump said, please don't incite panic, right?
00:22:46.000So this is the first time you've heard this sort of language from Trump, where he says, listen, we're taking it seriously, but please don't incite panic, which exactly is what he said.
00:22:53.000I mean, like, again, he said what he said to Woodward out loud, like, prior to that.
00:22:56.000Here he was on February 29th saying it.
00:23:00.000I'd like to just ask and caution that the media, we would respectfully ask the media and politicians and everybody else involved not to do anything to incite panic because there's no reason to panic at all.
00:23:16.000This is something that is being handled professionally.
00:23:19.000March 9th, Trump tweeted out comparing it to the flu again.
00:23:23.000Right, so he tweeted out, last year, 37,000 Americans died from the common flu.
00:23:26.000It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year.
00:23:36.000And then finally, on March 30th, President Trump was asked again about this in an interview on Fox News, broadcast on Fox News, and he was asked about exactly why he had Sort of not spoken with tremendous seriousness about coronavirus early on.
00:23:50.000And he said, I didn't want anybody to panic.
00:23:51.000So basically all of the revelations in Woodward's book were out there in public view.
00:24:24.000And now I'm taking it seriously, right?
00:24:26.000Again, everything that he said to Woodward behind the scenes, he was also saying out loud in front of the scenes, because this is also typical Trump, right?
00:24:42.000The Democrats mirrored this exact pattern.
00:24:43.000For all the talk about they were on top of this, and Trump's response was criminal, and he was lying.
00:24:48.000The Democrats were doing the exact same thing.
00:24:50.000Again, this doesn't mean anybody handled it right.
00:24:52.000It just means everybody handled it wrong.
00:24:53.000We're going to get to this in one second.
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00:26:38.000Uh, this cannot be addressed by Republicans in particular and their candidate for president of the United States.
00:26:46.000The last time this happened, uh, during Nixon's, the end of Nixon's presidency, the Republican leadership, including Barry Goldwater, the 1964 nominee of his party for president, went to the White House and told Nixon he had to resign.
00:27:01.000And the facts here are even graver than in Watergate.
00:27:04.000OK, all Bernstein has done for his entire life is just say Watergate over and over because it's his big accomplishment.
00:27:09.000But at a certain point, the high school quarterback is going to have to get a new career.
00:27:13.000I mean, seriously, like you just said, it's worse than Watergate.
00:27:21.000And nobody knew how bad this was going to be.
00:27:23.000And again, I don't even understand the implication.
00:27:26.000The implication is supposedly that Trump lied about this, that he outright lied.
00:27:29.000The implication is that, again, not that he botched it, not that he made a mistake, not that he has a congenital habit of downplaying bad news and upplaying good news, which he does, but that he actively lied about COVID, that he knew it was going to kill tons of people, and then he lied to the American public so that, what, more people would die and the economy would get worse and he would lose all faith in the presidency?
00:27:47.000Like, it makes no sense at all to suggest, you know, first-degree lying here, purposeful lying.
00:27:51.000In any case, CNN went nuts on this as well.
00:27:54.000So CNN's Brianna Keillor cut off Kayleigh McEnany because Kayleigh McEnany suggested that in fact the president had not downplayed the virus, which of course is not true.
00:28:03.000The president has now admitted on tape to downplaying the virus.
00:28:06.000Here was Kayleigh McEnany and being cut off by CNN.
00:28:10.000We didn't want there to be a huge crash and panic.
00:28:13.000He expressed calmness from this podium, but he has always taken it seriously.
00:28:16.000And the response, an unprecedented response, really reflects that.
00:30:33.000Number two, if Trump had taken it more seriously, maybe people would have started sheltering in place a little bit earlier.
00:30:38.000But Democratic mayors and governors didn't tell anybody to shelter in place earlier either.
00:30:43.000And in fact, Democratic legislators who knew full well what was going on because they were getting the same intelligence briefings on this stuff that Trump was, they were spending most of February downplaying the thing as well.
00:30:51.000I mean, Dr. Fauci was downplaying it in the late February.
00:30:53.000Like, don't let people rewrite the history here, such that Trump was fully in the know about how bad this was going to be February 7th, as opposed to just engaging in puffery with Woodward, which is exactly what he was doing in early February.
00:31:07.000The Democrats have responded by basically suggesting that Trump is a criminal.
00:31:10.000Here is Joe Biden suggesting that Trump's response was criminal, even though, again, Joe Biden has yet to explain what he would have done differently.
00:31:50.000What exactly, if you were president, what would you have changed?
00:31:53.000But nobody will ever ask him that because he's a Democrat.
00:31:55.000So instead, it's gonna be, here's a revelation about Trump.
00:31:57.000What do you think about that revelation, Joe?
00:31:59.000Here was Joe Biden going off on Trump.
00:32:02.000It was all about making sure the stock market didn't come down, that his wealthy friends didn't lose any money, and that he could say that, in fact, anything that happened had nothing to do with him.
00:33:33.000On February 24th, she went down to Chinatown and she told everybody to join her down in Chinatown in San Francisco as the pandemic began.
00:33:40.000Here's Nancy Pelosi circa February 24th.
00:33:45.000Speaker Nancy Pelosi told me she came here to Chinatown to combat fear.
00:33:49.000That's what we're trying to do today is to say everything is fine here.
00:33:53.000She understands people are concerned about China.
00:33:55.000But that shouldn't be carried over to Chinatown in San Francisco.
00:34:00.000I hope that it's not that, but all I can say is I'm here.
00:34:05.000We feel safe and sound, so many of us coming here.
00:34:07.000Okay, so, again, the notion that Democrats were really on top of this or would have been on top of this if they had the information from it is just nonsense.
00:34:27.000We'll get to more of this in just one second, because we'll show you how America's best governor, Andrew Cuomo, we've been informed by those who know that he's an incredible governor, that Andrew Cuomo really captained on top of this thing.
00:35:20.000So when this pandemic began, I could see the possibility of a pandemic 15 in my future.
00:35:24.000And so I really ramped up my new muse.
00:35:27.000What it allowed me to do was take little steps every single day to Control exactly how I was eating, how I was exercising, tracking everything I was doing.
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00:35:50.000Based in psychology, Noom will teach you why you do the things you do and empower you with the tools you need to break bad habits and replace them with better ones.
00:35:57.000Noom teaches moderation, can be used in conjunction with many pre-existing popular diets.
00:36:01.000If you want to, it won't tell you what to do and what not to do.
00:36:03.000Instead, it teaches you to sort of retrain how you think about food.
00:36:07.000They have a great, accurate food database that lets you track meal habits, visualize portion sizes, see calorie density at a glance, so you can know exactly what you're putting into your body.
00:36:14.000You don't have to change all this in one day.
00:36:25.000We'll get to a reminder as to what the Democratic response was throughout the COVID pandemic, and then we'll get to the continued politicization of COVID, because it's insipid.
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00:37:50.000If Trump supposedly blew this, right, if Trump knew all the way back when, that in order for Democrats to claim that Trump did something super wrong here, he didn't just blow it, they have to claim two things.
00:37:59.000One, either that they knew and they would have handled it better, which they can't claim, or two, that Trump knew and he lied.
00:38:06.000Trump knew and he lied is what they're going for with this Woodward revelation, but again, the evidence ain't there.
00:38:10.000That Trump knew it was airborne, that Trump knew it was super dangerous.
00:38:13.000Just because he said to Woodward what he had heard from Xi Jinping February 7th, that's called Trump mouthing off.
00:38:37.000Yes, because Obama was a literal serious person.
00:38:39.000I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm not going to treat Donald Trump the same way that I treat Barack Obama because they don't think the same.
00:38:52.000I have very low expectations for Trump's rhetorical prowess when it comes to spitting out solid fact or how seriously he takes his own rhetoric.
00:39:00.000And I think that the record will back me on this.
00:39:03.000It doesn't mean that Trump is a bad president.
00:39:05.000It doesn't mean that Trump hasn't done a great many things that I like as President of the United States.
00:39:09.000It doesn't even mean that I don't plan on voting for him.
00:39:11.000It does mean that if you're asking me to take his comments with tremendous seriousness, I don't know what world you're living in.
00:39:42.000Like, I understand mustering outrage at somebody who actually has the capacity for intent, but how do you muster outrage at Donald Trump, who just says things, who suffers from tremendous, tremendously serious logorrhea?
00:39:55.000In any case, The other case the Democrats could make is that they would have treated this better or they didn't treat this better, and that's just a lie.
00:40:02.000So let's track the rhetoric of Andrew Cuomo, the greatest of all governors.
00:40:05.000We've already said that Nancy Pelosi is saying, well, we were taking it very seriously.
00:40:09.000Late February, Nancy, you were out in Chinatown.
00:40:12.000You've already heard Joe Biden saying that he was taking it super seriously early March.
00:40:15.000He was out doing rallies until the actual shutdowns.
00:41:20.000We think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York.
00:41:28.000So when you're saying what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don't even think it's going to be as bad as it was in other countries.
00:41:41.000This is all about mobilization of a public health system that is going to be primarily senior citizens.
00:41:49.000People who are debilitated and we're going to have a special effort for our nursing homes, etc.
00:41:56.000OK, then the next day he says, by the way, we can't contain the spread, but we shouldn't be too concerned about the fact that we can't contain the spread.
00:42:41.000Okay, so again, it took another week and a half for him to start taking it seriously, and it took him another three weeks to fully shut down the state of New York.
00:42:50.000So many things can be true simultaneously.
00:43:09.000And I did that at length because I think it is important for people to recognize how the media spin up what is a thing we already knew, namely Trump says stuff and that he was saying silly stuff about COVID and he should have taken this more seriously in February and March.
00:43:23.000Okay, how they spin that up into a new scandal just two months before the election at the behest, presumably, of the Biden campaign, and then allow Biden to get away with public statements like Trump did this in order to increase the stock market, which is just conspiratorial nonsense of the highest order.
00:43:37.000Now, this is also relevant because the politicization of COVID continues.
00:43:41.000We are continuing to watch the politicization of COVID.
00:43:45.000And some people are making this perfectly obvious.
00:43:48.000County health official who's been in charge of COVID policy.
00:43:51.000She was caught on a phone call explaining full out that the schools would not be open until after the election, which sounds just a little political, does it not?
00:44:00.000So we don't realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either Tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools, at least until after the election, after, you know, in early November.
00:44:16.000Like, when we just look at the timing of everything, it seems to us a more realistic approach to this would be to think that we're going to be where we are now until we are done with the election.
00:44:31.000Okay, so, I mean, this is very political.
00:44:33.000And the media coverage of COVID is very political.
00:44:35.000So, for example, there's a story from the Associated Press called, This is from the Associated Press.
00:44:48.000Now, you might gather from that headline that basically a bunch of teachers went back to school and kids infected them, and then they died.
00:45:18.000The cases didn't come from the kids, apparently.
00:45:25.000Another Mississippi teacher died on Sunday.
00:45:27.000History teacher Tom Slade recently posted on Facebook about his battle with pneumonia caused by the coronavirus.
00:45:33.000Slade was teaching in person when the academic year started, August 16th, but began quarantining after he had contact with someone who was positive at a church meeting.
00:46:23.000And meanwhile, speaking of biased media coverage in the extreme, the media are making hay out of the fact that the AstraZeneca trial has been put on hold.
00:46:29.000They are suggesting this is because of an unexplained side effect.
00:46:33.000What happened is that somebody who was in the control group, well, somebody who was taking the vaccine, not in the control group, somebody who was taking the vaccine in the vaccine group, came down with something.
00:46:42.000They don't know whether it was linked to the vaccine yet or not.
00:46:45.000But the scare tactic is, well, maybe they've identified a grave side effect that causes them to cancel the trial.
00:46:54.000Frances Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health.
00:46:56.000The announcement yesterday about the AstraZeneca vaccine is a concrete example of how even a single case of an unexpected illness is sufficient to require a clinical hold for the trial in multiple counties.
00:47:07.000But the media played this as though this was an unexplained side effect.
00:47:12.000In fact, AstraZeneca spokesman Brendan McEvoy said the event is being investigated by an independent committee.
00:47:17.000It is too early to conclude any specific diagnosis.
00:47:21.000So it is unclear whether this is even linked to the vaccine at this point, but the media ran with that anyway to suggest that the vaccines are not going to work.
00:47:29.000We have also seen We've also seen the media continue to trot out this ridiculous Sturgis study, suggesting that there were 267,000 COVID cases and $12.2 billion in public health costs attached to the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota.
00:47:46.000The Washington Post reported like a week ago that there were 260 confirmed cases connected to Sturgis.
00:47:52.000According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, many in the media and various health stages warned that the motorcycle rally represented a worst case scenario for a super spreading event. It would be surprising if the rally didn't lead to at least some new COVID cases. It's impossible to know how many because there's no data on how many attendees or their close contacts later tested positive.
00:48:08.000But don't worry, the modelers showed up. So what exactly did they do? Well, they analyzed the anonymous cell phone data of attendees, and then they compared case trends in counties with high, moderate and low numbers of attendees.
00:48:19.000They found that cases increased by 3.6 to 3.9 percent, 3.6 to 3.9, sorry, per 1,000 in South Dakota in the three weeks after the rally, translating to between 3,185 and 3,441 more cases statewide.
00:48:34.000To put this number in perspective, New York State has recorded as many cases in the last week, even with its stringent public health rules.
00:48:41.000South Dakota still has among the lowest per capita death rates in America.
00:48:45.000COVID patients currently occupy 3% of the state hospital beds and 6% of ICU beds.
00:48:50.000The study really jumps off the rails by linking all relative increase in virus cases in counties with attendees compared to those without rally participants.
00:48:59.000Many high inflow counties like Los Angeles, Maricopa, Clark, and El Paso had already been experiencing flare-ups.
00:49:04.000So basically, the modeler said, if LA experienced a flare-up after surges, then it was probably surges.
00:49:10.000LA's been experiencing a flare-up for weeks, for months at this point.
00:49:14.000These counties may have shared other characteristics like high population density, says the Wall Street Journal, that contributed to the increases.
00:49:19.000There could also be other endogenous variables.
00:49:21.000For example, counties with more people who attended the motorcycle rally may also have had populations less observant of social distancing.
00:49:42.000But this study was trotted out as the gold standard for showing that it was red states that were responsible for everything evil happening in the country right now.
00:50:15.000Instead, they said the activity is quote-unquote, not recommended.
00:50:19.000Door-to-door trick-or-treating is not recommended because it can be very difficult to maintain proper social distancing on porches and at front doors.
00:50:25.000Ensure that everyone answering or coming to the door is appropriately masked to prevent disease and because sharing food is risky.
00:50:30.000First of all, you're generally sharing packaged candy.
00:50:34.000We're not Halloween celebrators in the Shapiro family, but we do leave out a bucket of candy for the kids.
00:51:25.000Apparently, Fauci also suggested that Trump didn't really follow the data all that well, which, again, we kind of knew, considering that we already knew that he has, like, shrunk his intelligence briefings down to a single page.
00:51:38.000In any case, Fauci was asked about this on Fox News, and he said, I didn't say any of that.
00:51:43.000According to the Washington Post, Fauci at one point tells others that the president, quote, is on a separate channel and unfocused in meetings with, quote, rudderless leadership, according to Woodward.
00:51:54.000His, quote, his attention span is like a minus number, Fauci said, according to Woodward.
00:52:11.000OK, so there's Fauci debunking that claim.
00:52:13.000Then there's the claim that Jim Mattis called Trump dangerous and unfit, which, again, is not a great shot, considering that he quit over Syria policy and wrote a letter to that effect.
00:52:21.000And Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence, apparently at some point he said that Trump's gentle approach to Russia reflected something more sinister, perhaps that Moscow had something.
00:52:31.000OK, so that was speculation from Dan Coats.
00:52:33.000This is all gossipy behind closed doors kind of stuff.
00:52:36.000Apparently Trump repeatedly denigrated senior American military officials to his trade advisory so they care more about alliances than they do about trade deals.
00:52:44.000In a discussion with Woodward, Trump called the U.S.
00:52:46.000military suckers for paying extensive costs to protect South Korea.
00:52:50.000Woodward wrote he was stunned when the president said of South Korea, we're defending you.
00:54:16.000Now he has announced that as part of its ongoing investigation into the DHS and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the committee received a whistleblower reprisal complaint alleging serious wrongdoing by officials at the department and reprisal against former INA Acting Undersecretary Brian Murphy for making protected disclosures.
00:54:32.000After receiving the complaint, Schiff sent a letter requesting Murphy appear for a deposition.
00:54:37.000The whistleblower retaliation complaint filed by former acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis Brian Murphy outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically.
00:54:53.000This puts our nation and its security at grave risk.
00:54:56.000From senior officials suppressing intelligence reports on Russia's election interference, and making false statements to Congress about terrorism threats at our southern border, to modifying intelligence assessments to match the president's rhetoric on Antifa, and minimizing the threat posed by white supremacists, we've requested Murphy's testimony.
00:55:11.000So, in other words, this is just a guy who's a career staffer who disagrees with how the intelligence community was creating its assessments, and now is claiming that Trump intimidated them, presumably without any evidence of any of this.
00:55:23.000So good, we can have another full investigation of this.
00:55:25.000Maybe we can try to impeach again, because that worked out so well last time.
00:55:31.000Suffice to say, Democrats are drawing near the bottom of the well at this point.
00:55:37.000Does that mean that Trump is going to win?
00:55:39.000It doesn't mean that Trump is going to win.
00:55:40.000It doesn't mean that it won't be effective enough for Biden to carry himself over the finish line.
00:55:46.000It does mean that when you're going back to the well with Adam Schiff and looking for impeachable offenses, you're really, really digging near the bottom.
00:56:28.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:56:31.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:56:37.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.