 back to Think Tech, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Coronavirus What's Next on a Given Thursday. Today, we're going to talk about Trump and how he lied about the danger of COVID with Stephanie Dalton, Winston Welch, and, of course, Tim Apichella. So this is a week of revelations, really, Tim. And everyone has seen the Bob Woodward book came out with tapes to back it up, where Trump said that he knew that this was a deadly disease, even while he was telling the public it was nothing much. It's just a sniffle of flu, what have you. And what does this mean? Because not everybody takes it the same way. Well, Jay, I think it means that he lied. In your intro, you said he lied. And his lies, in my opinion, and I think the opinions of many other Americans, is those lies cost lives. I'd like to just read a real quick quote from Christina, and I'll put her last name, Urgoiza. And she said, my dad trusted this president. He listened to the president and followed his advice. So my dad did not panic. Instead, he died. Donald Trump said, I didn't want to panic the public. So therefore, I didn't come out to reveal what I actually knew. And that wasn't the reason. You and I did a show back in early March, 2020. And we both knew that he was more concerned about the Dow dropping. And the Dow, of course, is what he ties his success to the economy. And if the Dow drops, the economy drops, therefore his chances for reelection go in the toilet. And his concern wasn't for the American people. His concern was for his own reelection. He knew how deadly this thing was, and he lied. So that's the bottom line. He called it a hoax, you remember? He called it a Democratic hoax. And we said back in March, we don't think so. We think this is real. And I wish Republicans would stop believing Donald Trump on this point. Well, here's a case where this daughter has said her father died as a result of following Donald Trump and not taking it as seriously as he ought to have. Joe Biden is correct. He said he failed his job. He failed to do his job on purpose. This is a dereliction of duty. And it is. It's a dereliction of duty. And it's probably one of the most shameful things next to his frame, you know, using the suckers and losers for our war dead. It's probably one of the most shameful things I've seen happen in decades. I mean, I've never seen anything like this from any president. Yeah. What would the dead say? They would not have good thoughts about this. So Winston, you know, he came right out and said that, oh no, he wanted to protect everyone. He didn't want anybody to panic. And he felt that that was his job, not to panic everyone. First question, and this is a two-part question. Do you believe that? All things considered. And the second question is, does his base believe that? Oh, no, I don't. We know that when Donald Trump is speaking, that there is hidden motives and lies often associated with whatever he's saying. And so we can't trust the basic information coming out of him. What I do appreciate is that he, when presented with this information, hi, Bob Woodward on tape, that he said, actually, yeah, I did say that. That was my voice. It wasn't a fake voice. And then Trencock did a story that he was trying to keep people from panicking. But what we needed and what we still need is simple honesty. People can deal with the truth, but when they're lied to, they have no idea. Then with the next thing that comes out of his mouth, is this a lie? Or is this a lie on the lie? And then folks covering it up when his spokesman, Kayleigh, she says, oh, no, he wasn't trying to hide this from the American public. He was exactly trying to hide it from the American public. He said he was trying to hide it. OK, if he was trying to prevent that, did he need to go on and then say it was a Chinese plot or a democratic hoax or that it would magically disappear? Did he need to add all of that? Or could he have said, we're taking a cautious approach here and we're going to listen to the CDC and the FDA? Didn't happen. His base, if he says whatever he says, they're going to believe. So and there's an interesting thing that I was watching that I recommend people watch is the social dilemma on Netflix now. And it explains why we don't get the same news. So in fact, while we are talking here and we have news sources that may include the nation, the Washington Post, Atlantic, New York Times, just standard journalism, they are being fed a completely different algorithm based on what they have clicked on in the past, who their friends are, what things they've typed into their browser. It's very interesting. So in fact, we are not dealing. And they are not dealing with the same set of facts that we are. They are given very slanted information. And they would say the same about us. I think the most important thing is to say get a wide range of news sources, incredible news agencies so that you can make informed decisions for yourself about COVID and all of their matters. So as far as his base, if they don't do any hunting or searching on this, but there were so many other things this week about what he said about the veterans that just if you don't have a bad taste in your mouth right now and think that some of this is true, you really got to start doing some soul searching, I would think. I'll tell you a short story. In late January, I became concerned about coronavirus. And I went to a party. And this was mostly a party of liberal Democrat people, not Trumpers, although I'm sure there were some undisclosed Trumpers there. And my party theme that night was to tell him that we had a problem. Houston, we have a big problem. It's coming soon. It's going to come down the way. And some of these guys were very influential guys and they all blew it off. One guy was an executive with one of the airlines. He blew it off. Why? Because he wanted to believe Trump. And I think we forget that back in January, February, we all wanted to believe this was not coming to the United States of America because we were exceptional. We could deal with it. It was not a problem for us. And I find that even though not everybody believed Trump, even though he had told what at the time 15,000 plus lies a lot of people wanted to believe him and we wanted to believe him. Do you remember that Winston? Did you have an experience like mine? No, I knew immediately that this was going to be a major global epidemic. You cannot have 60 million people in China on complete lockdown. When those images came out, I realized, yeah, this thing is gone worldwide now. We just are waiting until it pops up everywhere. We had a chance to do some really good containment at that time. America certainly had the ability to leave the world in contact tracing containment. Whatever we needed to do, we have road maps for this. We have planning that the administration was handed. I knew that it was going to be something right away. I had talked with friends. I'm not talking about you because you're special. I'm talking about the people you were dealing with. I think that there's so much else that was coming down the pike with regards to what's going on in our nation that it didn't take. It's a crowded marketplace of disasters. So for COVID to come in here and then all of the lies and confusion around it so that you have people and then having him saying, we need to liberate Michigan or liberate whatever states and cities that were democratic led. These, no matter if he was trying to keep the people from panicking, he made the situation much, much worse and now has shock credibility in large part of it. The ACDC and then politicized this thing so badly. Well, that's one of the big arguments. You didn't want people to panic and yet you have been divisive on every issue. You have created divisiveness and panic in so many other ways. It's hard to believe you now when you tell us that you didn't want anybody. So Stephanie, I have a very juicy, luscious question for you. I've saved it for you. I hope you're ready. Okay, it's my revelation question. Thomas Friedman said the base still likes Trump right now today, that in many ways they have not been affected by the Woodward revelation. One, Trump doesn't back down. He's Trump and they think that's good. Two, that Trump understands them. And whatever he says, whatever he lies or doesn't lie, he understands them. And the Democrats do not understand them. And three or four, whatever. And this goes back to my story about the 19th century and how the Midwest really hated the New York railway guys, the Vanderbilt crowd and Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, the robber barons. The base resents people that attack Trump because they feel those people are more educated than they are, more privileged than they are and they look down on Trump's base. But they think that Trump does not look down, Trump understands. Therefore, no matter what Trump says, no matter what we find in Woodward's book, Trump is still their man. Thomas Friedman yesterday. So what's your reaction to that? I think that that's, I see that, I see that and I see that Trump is not of their ilk but they identify with him anyway because he's not got the Eastern establishment intellectual thing that they have to battle. So everybody else has that, Obama and George Bush tries to, but he's not got that edge of intellectualism. And I think that there it is, this is what the whole male thing was about, is anybody that was intellectual or learned, this was not of the people. And so I'm trying to piece together the Patrick Quilt here of these other experiences to understand why he presents one way but he actually is their guy. And so, I mean, it's also like gangs in New York City and Marshall Dillon and Gunsmoke, the bad guys come into town and they've got a leader and anything he says goes and he's going to get that damn in there and use all the, and everybody's going to go with that and that their identity is with them. And even though Marshall Dillon offers all this goodness and light and rational, doesn't matter these bad guys. So frankly, I do play over some of those Western shows I watched as he can because there's some, I can understand it better remembering that mob of black-headed guys rolling into town. I think we, on the keywords where we submit the keywords to YouTube, we should include Marshall Dillon here so people can always find the show. Okay, Tom, Tim, I have a very interesting also a revolutionary question for you. So we now have, as you mentioned, confirmation that Trump lied, that he really said those things, that he said different things to the public over a period of time. It wasn't just one day, it wasn't just one reference. It was for weeks and weeks and months and all that. Okay, so the question, this is like a cross-examination in a trial in court. So the question sequence would be something like, so we know now that you lied, how do we know that you're not lying now? You want us to believe you're telling the truth, but we know you lie. And so my question to you is when does the lying stop? How do we know, now that we know he lies, I mean, he has admitted he lies for his own reasons, how do we know when he is lying, when he's not lying? How do we know that he isn't lying about everything that he is saying about COVID and everything else in the very same way right now? I don't think the press has gone there, but you could make that argument that you would make in court logically to say, well, if he lied on the one occasion, why don't we take into account the fact that he's always lying? Can't you make that conclusion? Yes, well, I think whether you're a loyal follower and you know he lies, but you follow him anyway, or you're on the Democrat liberal side and you definitely know he lies because they've documented 20,000 of them, the post has, or you're that rare 11% that sits on the fence and isn't quite sure what Donald Trump is or isn't. I think you, I think almost everybody would believe that he has a compulsive need to lie. He lies whether he, if he doesn't even need to lie, he lies. And so I think for the last three and a half, almost four years, we've seen this compulsion of his and I think it's a given. If you really look at his argument of I didn't wanna panic the population, therefore I really didn't wanna reveal the nature of it, just look at the obvious. The obvious is, if you really didn't wanna panic people but you knew it was so serious, why didn't you quietly start producing PPEs for all the hospitals? Why didn't you start doing contact tracing and testing? Because these things would actually get at reducing the spread of this virus if you knew it was so serious. These are just a couple of examples of why, why didn't you encourage mask wearing if you knew it was this deadly airborne, deadly virus? So I'm not buying his, I didn't wanna panic the population argument, not for a subject. Well, the thing about lying on COVID, on the hoax, it's just a sniffle kind of thing is that people died, as you mentioned. And maybe people don't realize that we have also huge losses when he lies, for example, about the Ukraine issue, when he lies about the influence of Putin over his moves, including removing troops from Germany and Syria, when he lies about what the Chinese are doing or not doing, when he gets into these tariff fights with them. I mean, these are lies that do not result in immediate deaths the way the COVID lie has resulted, but they result in the decline of the United States. They result in a new world order in which all our lives will be changed. And when he lies about those things, there's also a very high price to pay. And so, I mean, I think we can extend the whole notion of lying with dastardly results to pretty much everything he's doing. But you know, Jay, it's not just, oh, I'm sorry, it's not just the lying, it's a strategy to defer or deflect responsibility. It's the what about this or what about that guy? He's doing it right now with this interview. He's saying, why didn't Woodward come out initially with it? If it was so serious, why didn't Woodward come out with it? So there's a classic, what about him? Don't look at me and my lies, but what about him? So this is gonna continue for the next 50-some-odd days. And I just don't think there's any end to it. I think his followers know there's no end to it, but we're gonna vote for him anyway. Those questions that Tim asked about all those questions you laid up there about why didn't he do this? Why didn't he do that? The masks, the PPE, those are such good questions. They are. Why didn't he do that? Well, maybe at the fringe of this, maybe he's losing some credibility. And I wanna talk about the big pharma decisions with Winston. You know, big pharma seems tired of hearing about the warp speed program that he says he's on. I'm not sure what that is anyway. He probably calls him and yells at him. That's his warp speed program. So they have a number of them agreed and spoke in writing that they were not gonna rush things no matter what the politics are. That was a direct reference to Trump who is using politics for his own political purposes to talk about warp speed programs. And Fauci agreed with that. But I think the most interesting one is AstraZeneca, which is a European company involved in trials. And they pause, that's a euphemism. They stopped their trial because one of the people in the trial got really sick. So it's not going well. And either the ones who signed that letter, I don't know if that includes AstraZeneca and certainly AstraZeneca are saying, we're gonna do this on our own, don't push us around. And so this opens the question of whether we're going to have a vaccine by October, just a few days. Remarkably, a few days before election day is true or another great big, ugly, ridiculous, fatal lie. And then of course, not addressing the question of even if there is a vaccine, whether it can be manufactured and deployed in any kind of expeditious format because it takes months or years to do that. You have to have two shots and you have to do the world, which is seven plus billion people. That's not gonna happen at the end of November or October. So anyway, what's your reaction to that Winston? Is he losing credibility here? Well, you know, as it says, we need 8,000 Boeing 747s to distribute a vaccine. And that's an entire ranging between two and eight degrees Celsius to ship this vaccine everywhere. Look, you know, these companies know Donald Trump is a blimp, but they're not. They're 100 year old companies. They're major pharma. They have a lot of money to gain or to lose if people stop taking their vaccines. You've already got a very strong anti-vaxxer movement in this country, combined with, you know, now combined with COVID denial or whatever. How many people are actually gonna get these vaccines? And they read the same newspapers you do that people say, I'm not gonna get the vaccine because it's a fake disease. And even if it isn't fake, I'm still not gonna get it because it's being rushed or it's being made in China or whatever. So these companies had invested interests. That's true. And it goes back to the hoax thing that Tim and I were talking about. When he was saying it's a hoax, it's a sniffle, it's a flu, that has a momentum. And it lives with certain people. They are stuck on that from months ago. They still believe it's a hoax. Therefore, anti-vaxxers. And they're anti-vaxxers because of whatever reasons, this is desperately anti-science administration. But these folks working in these things, if nothing else, it's the almighty dollar that's motivating them. I think there's good people working in these companies that are interested in public health. But they banded together. It was nine companies banding together. This wasn't just one of them sticking out its neck so it could be chopped off. They realized they needed to speak in unison as an industry to say, we are not coming forward until these vaccines are safe and proven. Now, whether they included Russian or Chinese vaccine manufacturers in there, I don't know, but I'm just guessing no. I'm guessing these ones, they want it to be able to be sold in Switzerland, Sweden and Germany, just as much as the United States. And if they don't have credibility, it's not gonna happen. I have a question I was talking about before the show began, and that is espionage. There was a piece I think in the New York Times about global espionage is going on, partly because Trump is isolationist. And maybe largely because Trump is isolationist. So whether the article talked about whether Russians are doing espionage in the American universities that are doing research on COVID in the companies that are trying to develop vaccines and that the Chinese are likewise doing that. And also that the US through its intelligence network is trying to do that. They're all hacking and looking and sending people around to find out the state of research. So instead of what the World Health Organization would like to do, and encourage everybody to collaborate as science should always do, what we have is a kind of chaos in the research now, according to this article. What's your reaction to that, Stephanie? Yeah, I understand that I've read there are 369,000 Chinese national studying in the US. And the Trump admin has yanked 1,000 of those graduate students out of the universities where they're stealing, or learning about military secrets. So yeah, I think he's doing that. And also I wanted to just thank Winston for bringing up the 8,000 cargo jets because that was called the mission of the century to get this vaccine now. It will be the mission of the century they're starting to talk about that way because it's such a huge task. So I mean, I think, we're looking at something it's gonna go on for another year. I think your question about the vaccine, the question about the vaccine is a good one because it represents the terrible issue we have and it also is another example of his lying. And one of the reasons, one of the motivations for his lying is that he's trying to garner the credit. So what he's doing is getting the benefit of the effects of getting the vaccine in without it ever happening. So, you know, you wanna talk about a hoax. Who knows that it will ever even happen anywhere near. He's looking for the credit. This reminds me of the incident back a couple of months ago where he tried to buy the intellectual property of a German pharma company for a billion dollars and take away all their researchers. And Angela Merkel stepped in and the researchers said no and his initiative fell flat. But clearly he wanted to do that so he could claim and maybe make some money from, claiming that it was an American solution. And it does give the base, it does give the base energy. Let me go to the college issue. You know, the numbers are coming up in the colleges. And Trump is pushing the colleges to open as he is to have the economy open. But a lot of colleges have hundreds and hundreds of people, the students who are sick and some of them are sending them home. And education, higher education as well as lower education is in chaos now. There are hotspots around these colleges and Ames, Iowa, I'm thinking. You know, where the schools weren't careful, the students weren't careful. Everybody's confused, there's chaos raining. They don't wear masks, they don't practice social distancing. And they get sick, it's a, we have a big problem in this country. It's those early remarks that still have an effect. Trump doesn't wear a mask. It's not clear that he's really recommending masks or some social distancing and they're pushing to have the colleges open and press them, what do you expect? We're gonna have a lot of students sick. So, you know, here we are in a place we have been before, I think, where the economy is still in the toilet, where now the schools are being pushed and they're in the toilet. Where is this gonna go, Tim? Well, according to Donald Trump, the economy's not in the toilet because the Dow is at its all-time high again and the NASDAQ and the S&P is at its all-time high. Again, he's convinced Americans and his followers, his voters, that the economy is the stock market. Those numbers have come back since the 19-5 on the Dow, they're back to 28-5. So he'll argue things have never been better. The bottom line is the students are being used as cannon fodder. And it's not about his concern for the students or their level of education. It's concerned to get the parents back into the workplace. And the only way that's gonna happen is by getting the kids in school so that his precious economy in the next 55 days is still gonna appear that it's vibrant. And therefore, I'll garnish a vote based on that. Yeah, okay. Well, Winston, here's the hard one. We only have a little time left. I said, what's gonna happen this week? I mean, he's taken some real hits here, even among his base, I'm sure, on these books, on Woodward's book, and on the revelation that, what was the other one, serious revelation. Yeah, open the newspaper, it's so many, it's hard to keep. Yeah, it's true. But I mean, so he's taken some hits. His credibility is at least for some people in jeopardy and maybe people are reacting. And my guess, we should all be guessing on this, is he's gonna come up with some new distraction, some new lie, and my question to you, and I'm asking you because you're so creative, and you can figure out what he's gonna do, right, Winston? What is he gonna do this week? What can we expect? I think we can expect a lot more of the same, followed by an extra helping. But remember, he is God's imperfect vessel, so it doesn't matter what he does, his personal characteristic, his lies, his whatever, because he's carrying out the mission of God and is the anointed one. And I just hope that some of his people see, maybe it's time to unanoint him and put him back down and say, this is a flawed person giving us really bad information, dividing us and producing chaos. And we need to step up as human beings, as Americans. The Lincoln Project is doing that. The Lincoln Project has a variety of ads out there that demonstrate that he is and what he says he is. For example, that he was not pro-life before, he was pro-choice before. All of a sudden, he's changed. It doesn't matter. We have to, at the end of the day, Jay, this is, well, Donald Trump is constant in all of our lives and discussions and dominates everything. It's up to us. We have to take control of our own situation as best as we can locally, personally. We're seeing it here in Hawaii. We're seeing it in Honolulu. The states, the cities, countries all around the world are having different ways of coming up with dealing with this. And the best ideas will float to the top. The same for these vaccine manufacturers. We have to remain optimistic and cheerful because there are a lot of other good players here that are going to go around and do the best they can. Okay, Stephanie, I'm not surprised that Winston is optimistic. That doesn't surprise me. But what about you? Are you optimistic? And are you optimistic while we know that the post office is failing? We're waiting on mail now that we know it's sent two weeks to go plus and we haven't gotten the mail. And I think it's just lining up for more extraordinary delays around the ballots. Are you optimistic? What do you think that Trump is gonna do in the next week to distract us from the realities of COVID and voting? He'll do something because Bill Maher's already unleashed the next North, like the South Carolina guy. He say, no mail, no cards, no flowers, no beauty products, no Amazon, do not mail it. And all the corporations that are sending out all this junk junk that they gotta stop sending that for two weeks and just let the post office dwindle down to nothing but having to deal with these ballots. So I think Trump's not liking that because I believe we can do something like that. And that's why at first, like when you were alarmed in January, I wasn't because it's America. We could deal with this, you know, we just beat Ebola. We had two Ebola problems. So you were optimistic in January. Are you optimistic now? We don't have a problem. She's optimistic now. Okay, Tim, how about you? Are you optimistic or are you planning a trip to a remote location in the world to wait this out? Well, hi, Modus Operandi. I was planning for the worst and hope for the best. The bottom line is, no, I mean, Donald Trump is gonna create something out of nothing. Again, a shiny silver object and it's gonna be a big one because he's the Bismarck and he's taken a direct hit on his interview with Woodward. And so he's gonna create a big, grand shiny object and watch it, it's coming. It'll be here in about a week, week and a half. Okay, before we go, I remember the other, you know, place that he took a hit and that was with the military comments. I was gonna say, yeah, the military comments. And where's that? So, I'll only quickly ask all three of you. Tim, the military comments, is as he lost the military, yes or no? He's losing them fast. Yeah. And Winston, what do you think? I agree that this is one thing that actually is making a little bit of a ditch. Yeah, good. Stephanie? I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful like what Tim and Winston say. Yeah. Let's all be hopeful. And they're not making a big food ad out of it. They're just. What I like about Corona is that we don't get distracted. Corona, watch. We look for the distractions, but we don't buy them. We're on it. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Thank you, Winston. Thank you, Tim. See you next time. Bye-bye.