 Wednesday, it's 11 o'clock, October the 14th, can mean only one thing, it's Trump week. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. Today's title is, White House admits COVID herd immunity is best path. Mayo Clinic states 2 million, 200 million cases are needed. You know, a few shows ago we were talking about why we don't get any action out of Donald Trump since February 2020 about COVID and why this pandemic that's killed now over 217,000 Americans, and we still are on a path of doing nothing. And it's come clear to me, and now this recently reported by the New York Times that two White House officials have privately and going on the record with the New York Times that the chosen path of how to handle COVID is through herd immunity. Well, we've talked about herd immunity. You need to let that entails. And the bottom line is, in order to get herd immunity, you need about at least minimally a 60% infection rate. Now, if our country is 320 million, you take 60% of that, you put that at 192 million. And then our current mortality rate here in the country is about 2.97%. So you take that and you come up with 5,700,000 potential deaths. And I find that an unacceptable number. I find 217,000 unacceptable. And why is the White House, why has Donald Trump been taking in with Dr. Scott Atlas's great theory that herd immunity will take care of everything? Well, the answer is obvious. With herd immunity, the concept is that no one has shut her down. The economy is completely open as if it were before COVID. And we go about our business. And if you're a senior over 65 or your immune is compromised, then you're to be shuttered away and never to be seen again. So that's kind of where we're at today. And that's why people keep scratching their head going, why isn't anything being done? So let me go to our guests. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to introduce Jay Fidel. Stephanie Dalton, Winston Welch and Cynthia, Lee Sinclair. Good morning, everyone. And Jay, straight to you. I find it really a jaw-dropping that someone or a couple of members of the White House have actually confessed to the fact that that's the path that, and strategy the White House has been moving into. Yes, Habrand. Atlas is Habrand. Trump is Habrand. But you know, you sound surprised. I mean, he sort of telegraphed that to us a month or two ago. He's following through. When he makes these Habrand statements, you really got to worry because it means later he's going to do that. It's remarkable and it's not supported by the science at all. But don't be surprised because so many of his decisions, you know, just picking one out of the air, another one, climate change or immigration. I mean, it's all backward. It's all Habrand. And you know, I don't think we should be surprised. And I think he, it's out of 1984. Remember George Orwell and it's all about, you know, knocking off people who he thinks are not necessary for the economy. It's not just that he wants to build the economy. He's going to kill people. He is killing people. He has killed people. It's really bizarre. It's evil. It's nefarious. But it's exactly what he has intended for a while. Well, this dovetails right into his, you know, his new energized election campaign, his rallies. I mean, when he was in the hospital for a brief glimpse, like for about five seconds, he said, and I quote, I understand it now. I get it. He doesn't get it. No sooner did he say that he was off infecting a secret service personnel. But now if we look at these rallies, particularly in Stanford, Florida and Johnston, Pennsylvania, we literally see thousands and thousands of people elbow with no mass. And so these are super spreader events and it's business as usual. Any comment about what your observations were on during these rallies when we see this on TV? Well, I think he's making a calculated, taking a calculated risk. And a risk is the people will not get affected from the rallies and the press won't catch it until after the election. So he figures he'll get votes and he won't pay a price because it'll happen at a timing. It won't happen until after the election or this way until after people have voted. It is insidious. It is obvious. And it is intentional. Well, Jay, that's a pretty ghoulish calculation. Stephanie, your thoughts about the rallies and the recent official admission from the White House, even though it's anonymous, that herd immunity, I almost did a Donald Trump on that. Herd immunity is the path, the chosen path on which how we should treat COVID. Well, the revelation has been our insight, right, for a long, long time. And even before Atlas, you know, it was clear he was, you know, tending, you know, that was driving him because it's the do nothing approach. The do nothing approach. And he's touting that this is the best way to go, of course, because he's using the do nothing approach and the do nothing approach was originally supposed to get us like 2 million debt or something like that when it was talked about, you know, months ago, that if we did a do nothing thing, like a Sweden thing, that we would have just huge numbers of dead people. And now he sees that his do nothing approach, otherwise known as herd immunity, is at working because there are very less numbers of people dead and infected than would be if it had really been one of those. But I mean, he's frenetic at every rally. He's promising everybody everything. He's telling the old people that he's disgusted by them in his ads and then turning around saying, he'll do everything, you know, to make sure they have their healthcare. He's telling the women that, you know, I protected your homes and green grass in suburbia, which would- You know, let me give you the quote on that one because this one's priceless and, you know, it really does show how really desperate he is right now, but here's the exact quote on what you just said. He said this at Johnston, Pennsylvania. I have a favor, women, suburban women, please like me. I saved your damn neighborhood. What does that mean? He saved their damn neighborhood. And he's asking them to like a P-U-S-S-Y grabber. I mean, he's asking them to like somebody who is not gonna treat them nice. And he's telling them, you know, that he's done something for them, but nobody knows exactly what that is. So that's what he does, the con man. Here's all this good stuff I've done for you and all this good stuff's gonna happen. And there's no grit. There's nothing to it. So he's just doing con man and he's being cute and kind of whining and the dancing at these and the getting into the rhythms and clapping his hands is absolutely terrifying. Like he has on mad. So I think that that's what's driven Nancy Pelosi to just get this 25th amendment up here and get ready because as the numbers keep coming in, even though he has the experience of 2016 to bolster him and keep him on the path to winning in his mind, it made him that this thing, this training has left the track, left the track, not just the station. So it's gonna get worse. Yeah, thank you, Steph. By the way, sun has got COVID, haven't heard a thing about it from him. Yeah, that's been pretty quiet for us. All the White House folks that were infected from the Rose Garden event. So, hey, Winston, your thoughts about what you're seeing on the rallies, some of the desperate pleas or it seems to be desperate pleas to vote for Donald Trump and this kind of admission, not 100% formal admission, but this admission from the White House that herd immunity is the chosen path. Well, it's nice to at least have some admittance that this has been the strategy all along. As I've said, we've given up for a while. I mean, any pretense is just being given up now. Florida is our sort of extreme model where we're just gonna just let everybody go in until every convention center and exhibition hall is filled with beds, people coughing and dying or whatever the max is, they'll tamper down as time goes by, but that's basically what we've done, even here in Hawaii. This plan to open up the state. Let me interject something on your point about Florida and the seniors. Joe Biden at Primbook, Primbook, I think it's Palms, Florida, was appealing to seniors. And what he was saying is exactly what we're talking about is that Donald Trump really doesn't care about the seniors and they're just there for a vote, nothing more. And they have to be shuttered and if they die, well, they're part of that economy that doesn't need them anymore. Who does he care about? I mean, honestly, at the end of the day, he cares about himself and I mean, I wanna think that there's something in there that cares about something else, but at the end of the day, he wants to stay in power so he'll appeal to whoever he needs to. But all of that said, it does matter. The American public has finally woken up at least that elusive 8%, 5%, whatever it was and just said, I don't want this anymore. I don't want the chaos, the noise, the anger, the lies, whatever it is, it beats the other things of us becoming a Venezuela, a QAnon, rules, a state. I mean, it's so ridiculous and I do wanna just throw out a couple of things because we've wondered often, how do people continue to support Donald Trump? And I think it's a question that we ask because it's hard for us to understand there's a couple of really good articles, I think that the Washington Post put out recently that I do wanna appoint people to, which was October 12th by Christopher Ingram. He put out something called New Research Explores the Authoritarian Mindset of Trump's Core Supporters. And it's very interesting because it talks about why people are drawn to what we might call authoritarians. It's a short article, but it's based on research from Oxford University. Another one is written by columnist Max Booth on October 13th in the Post as well. He brings in other sources of information in there about, especially from the Pew Research Center that says that people watching Fox, 86% of them say that Donald Trump's completely right or mostly right. So, and he's 61% right about coronavirus all and most of the time and most disturbing 39% of Fox News viewers say that QAnon is somewhat good or very good for the country. This is actually really scary because this says that absolutely insane theories, you know, we might as well say that half of us walking are Martians unless you got some proof that we're Martians. I was gonna say Calakian, but Martians is working well too. Well, whatever, yes, whatever it is. We're dealing with people that are number one, maybe inclined towards authoritarianism and so that's what's being expressed. It's not gonna go away after Donald Trump and I encourage people to go to that article because it helps us understand why the support is there. The other one is that the sources of information and media that people are getting are not well-rounded. They are so one-sided, especially when it's just coming from Fox or like Fox, it corrupts everything. So to get to your question, doesn't matter what Donald Trump is saying now, enough people have woken up that it's pretty clear where this is going. We just have to be concerned about the follow-up in the aftermath and I'm sorry, the death toll is just gonna keep going up and up and up when Biden and Harris take over because this is on a train and they're gonna do as best as they can but basically I'm not sure that they're gonna be able to abandon the free-for-all that's happening. They may be able to help with some controls or federal assistance with PPE and that sort of thing but I don't know what they're really gonna be able to do about this. All righty, well thank you very much Winston. Say Cynthia, I'd go back to Jay's comment about fatigue, Trump burnout. Is that starting to rear its head during these rallies and throughout the nation? Do you think people are just, I get it, I agree with Jay. There's something in the air and it's an intuition there. It's just something, it's not fall because we don't get seasons here but there's something in the air that this smells and feels like Trump is on the way out. Your thoughts and your thoughts about the rally and your immunity approach. Well, I think this wishful thinking I think that Trump is on his way out. I believe that the consensus of the majority of our country wants him out, is trying to vote him out. Whether or not the votes will be counted safely and in the right way is my question and my big worry. There's a lot of people voting on electronic voting machines that are not really safe and there's no backup to find out down the road. You can't do a recount, right? And say, oh yeah, these people. But the herd immunity thing, I'd like to read a quote from Fauci that he just put out. He said, maybe 50% of you have ate me because you think I'm trying to destroy the country but listen to me for six weeks or so and do what I say and you'll see the numbers go down. So, I mean, we've got the top scientists saying, listen to me, don't go with this. That probably won't happen because I think Donald Trump either is going to fire Dr. Fauci for his standing up against being used in a campaign ads or there's a doctor named Dr. Irwin Redliner who in the Daily Beast Tomorrow is gonna do an opinion piece asking for Dr. Fauci, Dr. Bricks and three other, you know, the head of the FDA to step down and protest on this approach that we're taking, this administration is taking to COVID and why play along at this point? Just step down and resign. Absolutely. And you know, when Jake Tapper was interviewing him about this when he was used incorrectly and without his permission and out of context in a Trump ad, when he was asked, you know, if it's going to happen again, what would you say? And he said, well, that would be terrible. Might actually come back to bite them on that because that would mean they're playing a game that we don't want to play. So basically he was saying, you know, they better not try to use me again or I'm gonna come back. Yeah, no, that was a line in the sand and I haven't seen that ad so maybe they're taking it seriously. One last point before I move on to Jay, did you happen to see, again, I think the poll numbers are reflecting that 65 and older demographic is moving on. Even the Republicans, it's moving away because they don't feel like Donald Trump has their best interest in mind. I think it was yesterday there was a tweet with that was Photoshopped of Joe Biden in like a senior home environment with other seniors in wheelchairs. And Joe Biden has been Photoshopped in one of the chairs, wheelchairs. And it said Biden for president but the P has crossed out and said resident. The bottom line is how does that get him votes when he's mocking people in wheelchairs, seniors in wheelchairs and saying that Joe Biden is one of them? Yeah, I don't think it does get him votes. I think it shows how crass and low he's willing to go to try to get votes or try to make it look like he's getting votes or to try to just distract us from the stuff that's really important to look at. And that's the part that I see is that instead of talking about election security we're all talking about what he did with Fauci or this or that. And I think it's important to not lose sight of that. And to Jay's point about the fatigue, that is a real thing. I make sure I don't watch news on the weekends and still it's not enough. I have that feeling of dread when I first turned the news on Monday morning. And I think that's something that's affecting a lot of people that I talked to. And unfortunately, just taking the weekend off isn't really gonna work as we get closer and closer to election. So I think we need to follow what Stephanie says often. Don't look at the shiny objects, right? Try to stay focused on the important things and then we won't get so filled with dread, right? Okay, thank you so much Cynthia, as always. Hey Jay, day three now for the confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett. There's certainly been a lot of questions and some of her answers have been really kind of surprising well, not surprising, but so vague and over such questions that doesn't require a vague answer. I think one in particular was with Corey Booker about the insurance of a peaceful transference of power to the next president. And she just said, well, I can't get involved with that that answer because Donald Trump's currently involved with that issue. What planet do we deal with not having a peaceful transference of power and a potential Supreme Court justice not be willing to opine about that? Jay? She wants the job. Every lawyer, every judge wants that job. You're written into history as soon as you get that job and people will do extraordinary things to get that job. Remember Kavanaugh. But Kavanaugh hasn't yet played out. I mean, we know what kind of a guy he is, we know. We knew from the hearings and we've seen some of his opinions but the critical ones haven't been written yet. And talk about confirmations. My favorite one, my favorite one of all is Bill Barr where he lied up and down and it wasn't ours after his confirmation that he broke every rule in the book and he backed up on everything that he promised them. So you can't have a lot of confidence in answers they give in the confirmation. This is really a play for the public. It's a play for the voters. Democrats wanna make their points and the Republicans wanna make their points. At the end of the day, they will confirm her. But what troubles me to answer your question is that she belongs to Trump. That's clear. He said she belongs to him and everything she's done really on those issues before this hearing and at this hearing confirms in my mind that she belongs to him. She's gonna vote for his stuff and that includes all the issues that have been discussed. So it's really tragic that we really don't have a Supreme Court anymore. Let me put it, we have a show on Fridays. Chuck Crumpton runs this show and it's about the rule of law. They have a bunch of lawyers including lawyers who are outside of Hawaii and they talk about the Supreme Court and they talk about other courts and the general takeaway evolving in this show is that the courts have turned. Think of the court that agreed with the Texas governor about the drop boxes, wasn't it, Texas? Oh yeah, yeah, one for county. The governor ordered one drop box for each county, I think it was. And there's one county in Texas that has 4.7 million people and they all share the same drop box. Are you kidding me? And he said, oh, this is to avoid fraud. Well, the federal district court disagreed with him and required him to put the drop boxes back but the court of appeals, all Trump appointees disagreed and they turned it around. And there's no good reason because there is no fraud. So what you have is a corruption in the federal judiciary. And it's not beyond understanding and belief that we also see a corruption in the Supreme Court of the United States which has held the mantle of all our values, all these years. And now we really have to question it. And she's part of that. She's not the only part of it but certainly she's gonna be a Trumper. And that is very troubling for a part of that. Do you think she should commit to recusing herself if there is an election protest and the Supreme Court gets involved to try to decide its way out of some of these legal maneuvers from the Trump administration? Do you think just out of the gate she should recuse herself from all votes? She's not gonna do that. She's not gonna do that. She's not gonna recuse herself. When's the last time you saw a judge on the Supreme? Well, I guess it does happen. It happens because they own stock in a company or something like that. Financial. Yeah, but she's not gonna recuse herself. Forget about it. And so she's gonna vote on whether the election is valid. There's no significant reason she should recuse herself just because he said he owns her. Doesn't mean that she should recuse herself. So I think we got a real problem here, Houston. And I don't know what can be fixed about it. Well, what can be fixed about it is you, the Democrats take the Senate, they keep the house and they have a Democratic president and you legislate many things that the Supreme Court is getting wrong. I'm concerned about the Affordable Care Act. I'm concerned about the Roe v. Wade and I'm certainly concerned about gay marriage and how that's now at risk. And don't forget appointing, creating new judges, new judge jobs on the Supreme Court. Good point, yeah. I mean, whatever Biden says now, the reality is if she gets confirmed and they turn all the way right, which I think will happen, that's one strategy that he could and should adopt, change the mix on the Supreme Court. All in all though, this is not promising. And when you think of the other confirmations, when you think of Kavanaugh, how they made it so political and it resulted in a guy who really shouldn't have been confirmed, getting confirmed. And then the judge that Obama put in never even getting a hearing, she was. I mean, it's become so politicized that it shouldn't be a surprise that the court itself has now become politicized. Okay, thank you, Jane. Hey, Stephanie, should they make a rule that no speeches during the confirmation hearings from anyone? No opinion on that. I'm just getting tired of the speeches for both sides of the aisle. I have hope and a fix. And I think that we need to be aware of what I heard not too long ago on NPR, shared with some of you that Ted Cruz was asked about the records and he also offered that he had researched the records of the various justices who are recommended by conservatives versus progressive presidents. And he said that within his research, he saw that all of the Republican-ly appointed justices, they stayed on course in their conservative, excuse me. He said that all of the liberal judges, when they were appointed, they stayed on course and were progressives throughout their tenure. And it was the conservative justices that swayed from their original... Well, John Roberts in his Affordable Care Act vote was a prime example of that. And he said, this is what Ted Cruz was getting to, the reason he brought it up, was because he said it was because these judges were seeking the approval of the journalists, like the journalists from the New York Times. And he said even Jay's sister-in-law, that Linda Greenhouse is the kind of writer that can influence these people to change their ways. And he mentioned other writers on the New York Times staff too. So I think that there is some hope here that once in and even though she is his creature, so the creature sometimes can start scrambling around the cage in a different direction. But let me just say one more thing about what I understand happens, okay, addressing some of the points that were made. How long have we had a civilization? Do we usually think about it as 15,000 years from the Sumerians or something like that? But Babylon, I mean, but in 15,000 years, there has been authoritarianism and dictatorship right up until like about the last 20 minutes. So it's only in the last 20 minutes in America got this genetic miracle of Jefferson Madison and the rest of them to do something different and be, and so here we are working on something different that the humans have never done before in case the Martians are watching us. They must be pretty proud that we actually were trying something other than dictatorship and authoritarianism. All right. I think we need to bear that in mind. And remember Britain since the Magna Carta in the 12th century with King John, they didn't get to any democratic stuff and end of Victoria after... Well, that's why the United States is a history and democracy we haven't seen before. So... We're worried about it and we... All right. We are out of time. I wanted to go around the panel and say one word for next week and I'm gonna do it. Winston, one word next week. What do you see? Next week. Well, I just have to say, you know, we've got a lot coming down the pike in the next three weeks. So just keep your eye on the ball, folks. Remember, we are that great experiment. We can come back to it, whether the court gets conservative or not, they're losing the Congress, they've lost the hearts of the people. So there may be some balance that comes out of it anyway. We have hope. PBS has a great series on religion in America. I encourage people to go there. Amy Barrett is no doubt a very fine person she'd be a wonderful neighbor. I don't know that she's represents the will of the majority of the people, but we'll see what happens. And I don't... She only has to submit to her husband. I don't know that she has to submit to Donald Trump. Thank you. So let's see what happens. We really are out of time. Cynthia, I'm going to you. I want you to... One word very quickly next week. Voting and it's two words security. All right. Thank you so much. Jay? Battle, a battle between shenanigans and fatigue. All righty. I like that. Stephanie, for you. Take naps, so you have some energy. Naps, okay. And with that, a nod of the head to my longtime and missed favorite news anchor, Walter Cronkite. That's the way it is. 2020, October 14th. I'm Jim Appichella. Join us next week, Trump week and Wednesday at 11 o'clock. Aloha, everyone.