 It's Wednesday, September the 23rd. It's 11 o'clock. It's time for Trump week. I'm Tim Apatow, your host. Thank you for joining us. You know, the title of the show is COVID, the low COVID death toll. Just take out the blue states. Donald Trump made a reference that things were looking really great for COVID and the death count as he had a graph, as he is at the podium, he had a graph about all the COVID deaths. We're now over 202,000 deaths, by the way. And he was looking at the graph and he basically said, you know, we're looking pretty good. We're looking really great. Just take out the blue state numbers. Once again, when a Donald Trump statements that you just, you look at the TV and you go, did I hear what I thought he just said? Just take out the blue states. Just take out 110 deaths and life looks great. In fact, Donald Trump recently gave himself an A plus, an A plus on how he's handled COVID. So let's look at that statement, but I'm gonna just go down memory lane because you gotta put things in context and you gotta look at his modus operandi. And that is to say the most horrific things at the most horrific times and think that he's so smart and witty and guess what? The 40% that follow him thinks so too. So here we go. Just down a cavalcade of hits, if you will. Remember the comment, very fine people on both sides was a reference to white supremacists and his support for white supremacists in Charlottesville. Remember when we were looking at 156,000 COVID deaths and his obtuse comment to, I think it was Jonathan Swan and Axios was, it is what it is. Let's then compare that to his audio recording with Bob Woodward and saying, I wanted to play it down. I still wanna play it down. I don't wanna cause a panic. Unbelievable. He knew early in January how deadly this disease was. He knew in January how easily it was transmittable through the air, not just droplets and what has he done since then? Well, in his mind, he has an A plus, but what has he done since then? And then when the question came about is, could we be so much better and have far fewer deaths? He was recorded to say nothing more could have been done. Yet at the same time, we have rally after rally after rally and people are packed in, in fact, 4,000 as of yesterday in Pennsylvania where no one is wearing a mask. So no, nothing more could have been done. The bottom line is for the 40% of his low followers, here's a quotation for you and I hope you think about it. And that is a quotation from Olivia Troy who was a senior task force member with, working with Mike Pence. And Donald Trump said to her, and she's not an anonymous source, by the way, she's a direct quote and she came out courageously to say this. He said to her, you know, maybe this COVID isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing. I don't have to shake hands with those despicable, or excuse me, with those disgusting people. 40%, think about those words and think about how he thinks about you and think about how you are being used every time you go to a rally, showing your bravery and showing your support for Donald Trump by not wearing a mask, think about how much he values you. With us today is Jay Fidel, Cynthia Leeson-Claire, Winston Welch and Stephanie Dalton. Welcome everybody. Hey, I've had too much coffee and I'm hot to trot. So hang on and let's go. Hey Jay, good morning. A question for you, was this Trumpian math I call it or Trumpian mathematics, where you conveniently cut out 110 desks that originate from the blue states and you forget them, you set them aside and you say, gee, what a good boy am I and what a great job I've done? A plus, it might be an oversensitive or other people being oversensitive by saying, that is such a wacky, despicable comment to make. Should make a difference as far as how people perceive it and how people vote. What do you think on that? Well, it's outrageous, 110,000 you mean, don't you? Yeah. It's outrageous, but that's the MO. He's gonna do outrageous things and shiny objects to distract us from what he's got going behind his back. And one of the most outrageous things he's done is he called it herd mentality, but he really meant herd immunity. Rachel Maddow did a really interesting analysis of that. And what she found was that if you needed to have 70% of the people catch coronavirus and the rate of deaths on an average around the country is 2.97, say 3%. What you wound up was with 6 million people dying. Now you could make more optimistic analyses, but that was where it starts. And the more optimistic analysis she made was, I think it was one and a half million people. Bottom line though is that that's a lot of people dying. I don't think he gives a rip about that. He's just trying to make outrageous statements. Furthermore, that if that ever happened, what about the healthcare system? There wouldn't be a healthcare system. It would be completely overwhelmed. And that means not only for coronavirus, but for everything, every ill that you could imagine, every normal cause of death you could find. Bottom line is a terrible idea. And I think he throws these things out like hydroxychloroquine and what, bleach, just to get a reaction. He's always got to entertain us. This is one big reality show, but bottom line is you have to see that as a distraction. You have to see that as his MO. Bottom line is he's doing other things. And I hope we have time to discuss the other things today, Tim. Yeah, we will. And I just want to make one quick observation. He said it now many times. He's comparing to his A plus rating to the fact that we're not now at 250,000 deaths or 2.5 million deaths, where he said certainly we could have gone to. So he's really gave himself a pat on the back and he expects his 40% followers to give him a pat on the back because he's below 250,000 deaths or millions of deaths. Have you noticed that in his rally speeches? Oh, incessantly, every rally speech, it's an attack on anyone who is opposed to him. And it's a pat on the back for how well he's doing. My favorite one is where not only did he not cause the 200,000 deaths, but in fact, he has saved two to 2.5 million people. We may not have noticed that, but he is actually the great savior. And I think the bottom line on that is that he divides us. There's part of the country, call it the base, who believes what he says every time. And there's the other part of the country that has no trust in him at all. And so what you have is just another division. He is trying as hard as he can and Putin is telling him how to do it to divide the country on every single issue. And what he says in general is a divisive point. And I think that's one of the reasons he throws these shiny objects and distraction points at us. Yeah, agreed. Thank you, Jay, for your comment. Stephanie, the death count in World War II for American soldiers was 192,000. We're now 202,000. We've exceeded World War II as far as the number of COVID deaths. Is it, again, I'll ask the question to you, am I being overly sensitive by thinking it's a disgrace to basically say how great your death toll number is by excluding those lives out of a blue state and worse yet to exclude the families that are suffering through the deaths of their loved ones and discounting them completely because they happen to be from democratic blue states. What am I missing here? Or am I missing anything? He's cruel, he's brutal, he's stupid, but he's cunning and a con man. And he's had all this enablement which now includes the U.S. Senate. And this is what, there are no explanations other than a power grab. He's managing to move in over everything and everybody's standing around enabling him to do that. So I think this has been adequately argued and presented in the Mary Trump book and in other writings and he is not sympathetic to anything just as Jay cited Rachel Maddow's numbers. He's going for herd immunity which will cost another up to two million or more people to die. That's the cost of herd immunity, that's okay with him. So what, where, compare? He's not thinking of any of that. This is a guy with low brain intelligence, rationale, judgment, higher level skill thing. He's on his Tyrannosaurus Rex approach which is to get him the biggest and the best he can. And so I don't question his motives or ask them. I know what they are. He's responding to everything inside him that tells him in his knee jerk way what to do. And why are we enabling him? I call out to the Senate. Why are they enabling him? And that- We'll get to that with a question later on with Jay and we'll go through that as in part why the Senate is mum and completely inept to stand up and speak out. So we'll talk about that in a bit too. All right, thank you very much Stephanie. Hey, Winston, question to you is if you're one of the family members in one of these blue states that's just been dismissed as not counting and the death of their loved ones not counting and Donald Trump passed himself on the back with an A plus on his performance with COVID what's that do for you? What's that do for your family members? What does that do pot potentially one month from now six months from now? You know, again, it's what will his followers believe and if you're already on that side of reality that says everything that this man says is a lie or are twisting of the truth or whatever, it doesn't matter. The reality here isn't mattering. It's just more outrage for folks on the left but we have to, you know, is it when we talk about what we're gonna talk about on the show trying to keep up with the daily issues much more than hourly issues would be a better account. Maybe we need to like that something going on but I'm concerned it's the totality of everything and COVID is distracting at this point it's everything else. If you took away COVID that is which we can't but that's part of it and that's just a part of it. But we've got other things that he said this week I just want to mention a couple of them. He says it's a beautiful site when police injured MSNBC journalists with a rubber bullet were counting on the federal court system to declare a winner on the election night before many ballots are tallyed. He's Ruth, you're probably gonna get to these Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dying wish was a democratic hoax. I mean, who says something like that? Anarchistic jurisdictions for New York, Seattle and Portland. Then CDC pulling their draft, draft coronavirus guidelines, reversing themselves again. The suggestion that he moved Christopher Ray, the FBI director over testimony that was not flattering to him. It's so much that we can't absorb it anymore. I mean, it's just it bounces off at some point. So when you ask what do people think when they say this it's just like throw it on the trash heap over there because I can't buy enough trash bags to throw this stuff all away. I don't know where to... I agree because in the last week I've been overwhelmed by atrocious statements from Donald Trump. And then of course you go down memory lane you start remembering all the hundreds of other ones that are not quite as bad, but rank way up there. So yeah, it's too much for the human psyche to deal with. And I think people just shut it out. They just say, you know what? I'm voting for who I'm gonna vote for and that's all I can do. Or maybe they don't even get to that point. They just say, I mean, they go with it Donald. It is what it is. But, you know, we have a happy note though. He says, if he loses, you'll never see me again. He said, so we have to keep that in mind. I did catch that comment. But I'm not gonna hold him to it because you know, if it came out of his mouth it's suspect. Sadly, sadly. Sadly. Okay. Hey, thanks Winston. Cynthia, I always love to hear your perspective when it comes to atrocious statements from Donald Trump. What's your read on this all, this latest A plus award for himself and cutting out the blue states as far as statistics and what a great job he's done. Well, he's the president of the whole United States not the red Republican states. And so he would do well to remember that. The Senate would do well to remind him of that. But, you know, they just want the power. That's all they care about. And the thing that worries me the most is not just him anymore. He has infiltrated all of our organizations to such a high level. And, you know, Jay, you were talking today about the Rachel Maddow show. And I love that she really digs down and finds important things. And one of the things she found the other day is a CDC report for the Tyson meat packing plant. The CDC had all these recommendations. Now, when the inspectors go in, when CDC says, okay, there's an infection, whether it be, you know, SARS or Ebola or anything, right? They send out their little investigators. Their investigators make a report. The report doesn't say if you feel like it, you can do it. The report says, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. Well, they found the original report that didn't have any of that verbiage of if you want or if it's possible or if convenient. Well, the report that they received at the Tyson plant had all of that discounting language in it, if possible. If able, all of these things, you know, so must put up plastic barriers between the workers when possible. Every single one of the dictates that the CDC had put out had this little caveat for that if possible. You know, Cynthia, I'm gonna throw out one of Donald Trump's famous statements because nothing more could have been done. And to tag onto what you've just said, because they've retracted, you know, definitive language from the CDC recommendations, nothing more could be done. Well, there was a report that the post office had ready to go, including their distribution memo about sending five NR95 masks to every household in the country to stop the spread of COVID-19. That was pulled, that was retracted. Donald Trump didn't do everything that could be possible. In fact, in some ways it looks like he's doing many things to counteract the spread of COVID-19. Okay, we're gonna change on to something else here. And that's about the replacement of the Supreme Court seat, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Jay, the bottom line is, do the Democrats look ineffectual and weak trying to stop what clearly is a reversal from 2016 about not letting Garland's nomination move forward? Yeah, here we are in a race, in a downhill race to get the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg's position. Your thoughts? Well, this surprised you that Lindsey Graham has changed his position from a couple of years ago where he said, quote me on this, you can hold this tape and use it against me. He said, in connection with Merrick Garland, we're gonna wait till the election to see who should appoint the next Supreme Court judge. And that was the Republican position back in 2016 and they frustrated Obama about that. Now the shoe was on the other foot and they're all switching. It's unbelievable, this just reminds me of the peace in the Bible. Is there one good man or woman in the city of Sodom? We have a couple of people, but that's not enough in the Senate who could stop this rush. But I think it's clear enough that McConnell has control and Trump has control and the Senate has all sold their souls. Yeah, I'll just briefly talk about the response though from the Democrats and it seems to me that the ending- Well, let me address that. You hear a lot of puffing and protests from the Democrats and they say they have a whole war chest of things they're gonna do to stop the rush to appoint someone else. And they don't really tell you what's in the war chest. And then you say, as long as the Senate votes that's pretty much it and that's what's gonna happen. I don't know if anything stands in the way. What might have stood in the way is the shutdown issue. For all the bluff and blunder, the Democrats went along and voted for continuing funding to avoid shutdown which was very noble of them. But that was to me a big lever that they had which they did not apply. So they can make bluff and blunder but I don't think there's anything in the toolkit. Well, the old toolkit used to include activating the constituents of each state and encouraging them to contact their senators in protest. Well, it seems to me the Democrats are spending more time on pointing out the hypocrisy of what was said in 2016 versus today versus the real impacts of having the Affordable Care Act thrown out or the real impacts of having Roe v. Wade reversed. You know, those issues that really affect the lives of Americans for years to come that doesn't seem to be being pressed that hard. It's more of the indignation that how dare they change their voice and their opinions from 2016. I think that's a weak argument. I think they need to just drop that. We all know that the Republicans lie shamelessly at this point and because they follow Donald Trump wholeheartedly. So stop trying to point out to the American public what shameless liars they are. Let's just go to the heart of the matter and that is, hey, you are going to lose your Affordable Care Act very soon. Hey, if you value the freedom of your body you are going to lose on Roe v. Wade very shortly. And I don't think that's being pressed. Well, yeah, you know, but let me respond to say that even if there were people in the streets over this and everybody wrote a letter which isn't going to happen I think the public has sort of lost confidence in that kind of mechanism. Hasn't worked very well over the Trump administration. You know, protests don't work very well and letters don't work very well and so forth. So at the end of the day, the question is how do you get another justice in there? Number one, Trump appoints one. Number two, McConnell has a floor vote immediately even without hearings and the deed is done. So don't make any bets against that because in the next few days that's exactly what we're going to have. That's my prediction. Okay, Jay. Thank you very much. And I think you're going to be correct on that. Stephanie, your thoughts about the rush to fill the vacancy seat before the election? Got to go on the offensive. What is the offensive? You're right, Tim. There not needs to be an offensive. First of all, Bill Maher says, don't use the post office and I think the country ought to respond to that. And the next thing might be let's not pay taxes. Just stop it. Do not pay taxes in the millions and millions and put it if we have to going forward. But so getting on the offensive means we have to put up with whatever they're going to do. I wish they would impeach Trump again. I wish Nancy Pelosi and Chuck would go ahead and do something. I don't care what it is. Just do it to shut down the process of approving this justice. But in lieu of that, then we've got to look to the election and our success and the Democratic nominees success. And then go ahead with bringing DC and Puerto Rico to be states and get four more senators and then add two more to or however many more anybody wants to add to the Supreme Court. And it was wise to telegraph that in advance and really give the Republicans something to bat down and use as argument against this whole process. I think it was a very poor strategy to predict the future of what the Democrats were going to do to retaliate. I thought it was very bad strategy and I think it made them look bad quite frankly. Oh, well, I agree, Tim. I think you're absolutely right. I certainly wouldn't have recommended that. I think that I'm glad to know about them but I could give up knowing about moving in that direction but I'd prefer they would shut up and get on the offensive, work hard to stop, stop, stop it. And then if we still have to swallow a 6-3 then we get and work on these other approaches to it. Now that of course depends on getting the Senate. So that's another thing and that Lindsey Graham is like bouncing around a little bit ahead and how he can go ahead and retract himself. Does he really gonna get away with this? I mean, that is just gonna be a whole disappointment if he's back in there. But no, I agree with you. Democrats need to be on the offensive. We need to follow and do something as a nation, as a nation of people interested in democracy. We gotta do- Okay, thank you. Hey, we're almost, once again, we're running out of time. Winston, I wanna get you on the record and Cynthia, I certainly wanna get you on the record on this point. Go ahead, Winston. Is this about Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Yes, yes. She rested in peace. She did not get much peace for resting. I mean, what if a man says something like that right after she's died, that her last dying wish? We can imagine that's exactly what she would have said that she needed to telegraph that in a video beforehand. Yeah, I wanted to clarify one thing that about this 200,000 number for COVID, I don't know where that comes from of people saying that's more than the battle deaths, but just on the VA's site, which hopefully the VA is still having back here at informationva.gov, it shows 291,000 battle deaths in World War II. So the total battle deaths of all wars through 1991 was about 650,000. Sadly, we will reach that with COVID. So just, I don't know that we should compare those two numbers exactly because they're different. And it's, you know, it's not that people died, but they're apples and oranges. We need to focus on what COVID is and what it is. As far as Ruth Bader Ginsburg goes, it's saying you're gonna increase the court numbers. That never stops, you know, laying your cards on the table like that. At this point, that is probably a lost cause unless there is some person, some Republican candidate, a Senator out there who when it comes time for the vote, scans up and says, I vote no. And that will take an act of enormous courage in this place and time when even Romney rolled over. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Winston. Cynthia, I know election, election security is always paramount in your mind. What about Donald Trump's statement about the fact that this new judge could be used as part of the vote to validate his protest to a rigged election. And when he protests that and they, you know, try to appeal their election results, that this new addition of a judge will become in quite handy as a vote to basically validate and uphold his protest. And it will, that is a true fear that we should all worry about. And the woman that is being put forward, at least the one we hear about the most right now that's being put forward is part of, is it faith freedom? I believe is the name of the organization she's part of. It is a patriarchal, men are in charge and have authority over women kind of a organization. And if that is the case, she goes beyond just being a conservative. She goes to the far, far, far right. Is this a situation where Donald Trump expects loyalty in order to get the nomination? You're gonna have that behind the scenes? Absolutely. And to just a quick finish from before, they found the original order from the CDC that didn't have any of that other language in it. And it was after Trump's man was put in place and it was changed. And that's what's gonna happen everywhere. When Trump puts his people in place, then he has broader power and broader support. And we all should worry. Well, 1933, place called Germany. We saw that all the agencies were dismantled and his loyal couples were put into place. And that was the beginning of the end. Hey, we got, we're out of time, but I want one word from each of you as far as one word on describing what's going on next week. Jay, we'll start with you. Barton Gelman. It's a name. And it's an article that appeared in the Atlantic today. And it lays out what is going, the scenarios that are going to happen in the election. It is not a happy article. And it is very credible, very detailed and very- Okay, say the name one more time. He wrote, Barton Gelman wrote an article in the Atlantic today. Okay, thank you, Jay. Stephanie, one word, next week. Pelosi and Schumer get on the offense and do it and stop following the norms and the directions. Do the max, push the edge. I hope they're, and they're after Nancy, she has nothing to lose because they're after her. All right, Winston. I have a toss up between 1984 and pray. Well, how about both? I know I said one word, but you know what? Let's take both because we need them. They're two separate classes. Don't pray for 1984. Well, we're already there. You don't have to pray for it, we're already there. Watch the movie, read the books, folks. Yeah, you know, Cynthia, you get the last word and it is one word. I shoot, it's more than one word. It's a name. Okay, go ahead. We ought to tell her nobody was charged in her death. Nobody. That's a valid point. All right, thank you one and all for joining us on Trump week. Join us next week, Wednesday at 11 o'clock. I'm Tim Appichell, your host and hang on and let's move forward. Aloha.