 So we keep passing more and more grim milestones with regard to COVID-19, more than 220,000 deaths due to COVID-19, record highs in new cases per day, as high as 85,000 new cases. So the situation is bleak. And if Donald Trump wants to win this election, he's got to give us at least some assurance that going forward, he's going to be a little bit more competent. He's going to try to handle this as if there are some adults around him advising him to do the right thing. But unfortunately for Donald Trump, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said the quiet part out loud and admitted basically that we're not going to try to do anything to control the virus. What do you want us to do? He actually admitted this in an interview on CNN with Jake Tapper. And it's astonishing that he'd say this a week before an election. And let me tell you the aftermath of what he said here. The fallout was just, it was huge. But first let's watch and see what he had to say. On your website yesterday, Jake, your website is talking about, well now we think the spread is coming from small social groups and family groups. First it was large groups. Now it's small groups. It's coming from all sorts of places. Well that's exactly the point. So here's what we have to do. We're not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations. Why aren't we going to get control of the pandemic? Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu. But why not make efforts to contain it? Well we are making efforts to contain it. By running all over the country and not wearing a mask? That's what the vice president is doing. Jake, we can get into the back and forth. Let me just say this. Is what we need to do is make sure that we have the proper mitigation factors whether it's therapies or vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don't die from this. But to suggest that we're going to actually quarantine all of America, lock down our account and sing them. Well they are. Joe Biden's saying that. He says lock everybody down. We're going to have a dark winter. We're going to have a dark winter. That's what health officials say. That's what health officials say that it's going to get worse. We have the two worst days. Jake, let's be honest. Let's be honest. Friday is Saturday. Let's be honest. The health officials did not say dark winter. Those were Joe Biden's words. He was quoting a health official. I think he was quoting William Masltyn. When we look at the number of cases increasing, what we have to do is make sure that we fight it with therapeutics and vaccines, take proper medication factors in terms of social distancing and mask when we can. And when we look at this, we're going to defeat it, Jake, because what we are, we're Americans. We're going to do that. And this president is leading while Joe Biden is sitting there suggesting that we're going to mandate masks. Wow. He literally took a jab at Joe Biden for wanting to mandate masks nationally. When we are dealing with a pandemic, a virus that's highly contagious, you mandate masks. You wear masks. That's what you do. I mean, other countries, they don't have an issue with this. Trump hasn't been encouraging his supporters to wear masks. If anything, he's discouraged them. He has paid lip service to this idiotic idea that, you know, you can't mandate masks because that would violate people's liberty. Well, if you don't wear a mask, you're violating other people's liberty because don't people have the right to not have your disgusting germs spread on them? And to give you some context, this interview, basically the entire time Jake Tapper was questioning him as to why Mike Pence, after people around him tested positive for COVID-19. He's still going out doing rallies, not wearing a mask. And what does he do? He says, one, we're not going to try to control it. And two, I think that Joe Biden wanting a national mask mandate, that's bad. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I mean, you heard what he said. We're not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas. So let me tell you something. It's not like your administration is putting on lab coats and creating a vaccine yourself. What companies are doing this, Johnson and Johnson is creating a vaccine. Other companies, I mean, the US government is funding them to a degree, sure, but it's not like the White House is creating this vaccine directly. So meanwhile, while the vaccines are being prepped, you have to take action to mitigate the spread. You can't just let it wash over America as Trump initially wanted to have happen. You have to try to contain it because a vaccine can only do so much. If you don't get it under control, then a vaccine alone will not suffice. We need a multitude of things. Social distancing and yes, a shutdown in certain states where it's spreading. Now there are economic implications if you shut down the economy of a state or a city and small businesses will suffer. Yes, that's correct. But you do this intelligently. You don't just shut down that economy and leave small businesses and individuals out left to dry. You give them economic relief. That's why we need another stimulus, a UBI, more PPE, more loans for small businesses that we exclude large corporations from having access to. But you don't want to do that. But yet you don't want there to be any negative economic repercussions because of the virus, which is why we have to open and pretend like it's not a thing and send kids back to school. But what they don't realize is that you don't get to pick and choose. If more and more people get the virus and they die, that's also going to have an impact on the economy. If people are afraid of the pandemic and the virus and they don't want to go out, that's going to hurt the economy. So you can't just not control it. You have to do what you need to do to get it under control. And sometimes that means you take swift action, severe action, and you shut down economies, but you don't leave them hanging. You give them assistance, use the power of the purse or the federal government and make sure they don't go under if they have to shut down. But they don't want to do anything. They don't they just don't care. Tapper asked them, why aren't you going to get control of the pandemic? And he said, because it is a contagious virus just like the flu. So there's nothing we can do. We just sit on our asses and we pressure these private companies to hurry up and get that vaccine out to us as soon as possible. Meanwhile, we're not going to do jack fucking shit. We're just going to pretend like it's not a thing and downplay it. Yeah. So, um, expectably Joe Biden seized on this because right before an election where the number one issue on Americans minds is COVID-19, you don't say something like this. So Joe Biden hit him and he hit him hard. Yesterday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows run on television to admit to the country that the administration wasn't even trying, trying anymore to deal with the pandemic. He said, and I quote, we're not going to control the pandemic. Washington Post headline today says it's White House gives up on trying to slow virus spread. No caveats, just a deadly admission. Early in this pandemic, some of you had to cover me for a long time called and Trump called himself a wartime president fighting the war against an invisible enemy. I've been saying for months, as you well know, that he waved the white flag all the way back then. He wasn't doing much at all. Some people said I was being harsh, that I was being unfair. The White House was coming right out now and admitting what I said months ago was absolutely true. And look, how many people are dead, two hundred and twenty thousand and expected as many as another 200,000 could die between now and the end of the year. And he said, we're not going to control it. Not going to control it. The bottom line is Donald Trump is the worst possible president, the worst possible person to try to lead us through this pandemic. Yeah, I mean, Joe Biden is right here, not just on the substance, but he's right to hit them on this strategically because this has been the strategy from day one. Donald Trump hasn't just been downplaying it, but he doesn't want to take it seriously. There was a report that the White House is hoping that Americans just grow numb to people dying from COVID-19 because they're not going to take any action because they don't want to hurt the economy. So we have to sacrifice your grandparents and your loved ones to the gods of capitalism because God forbid we shut down and give, you know, small businesses, loans and give people a UBI. God forbid we do that. We have to make sure that we pretend like everything is normal because we don't want to hurt the economy. If you die, well, that's better than the economy dying. That's their logic. Now, of course, Mark Meadows was asked about this because there was a lot of fallout. So much so that Trump had to do damage control after Mark Meadows, his chief of staff said this. Now, usually Trump will say something stupid and his staffers have to do damage control. But this time, Trump had to do damage control. So he was asked about this when this blew up because obviously if you admit that you're not going to try to control the virus, that's pretty controversial, I would say. So basically what he did was he moved the goalpost and tried to make it not seem as bad. The only person waving a white flag along with this white mask is Joe Biden. I mean, when we look at this, we're going to defeat the virus. We're not going to control it. We will try to contain it as best we can. If you look at full context of what I was talking about is is we need to make sure that we have therapeutics and vaccines. We may need to make sure that when people get sick that that they have the kind of therapies that the president of the United States has that we can provide. Those emergency use authorizations hopefully will be coming in very short order. So once again, he poked fun at Joe Biden for wearing a mask. I mean, this might play well with your base, but most Americans don't like when you say this because most Americans know that wearing a mask is essential if we want to contain the spread. I mean, do you know how quickly we'd get COVID-19 under control if all Americans were a mask? If you got 95% of Americans to wear a mask, how effective that would be at containing the spread? But he's saying, no, no, we're not going to control it, but we will try to contain it. That's what control means. So what you're saying, it doesn't matter. It's a distinction without a difference. You said you're not going to control it. That's basically the same as you saying you're not going to contain it or try to contain it. And now that you see the backlash, now you're trying to move the goalpost, walk it back a little bit. But once the damage is done, like it's already done. And the thing that Mark Meadows realizes that it's not like this is surprising. This is what Americans had already suspected because Trump's administration has not taken this virus seriously. But Trump, after tooting his own horn repeatedly about how wonderful of a job he's done, didn't like what Mark Meadows said. And he said, no, no, of course, we're trying to control it. Like, what are you talking about? I won't win this election. So yeah, we're trying to control it, even though we're not. No, not at all. In fact, the opposite. Absolutely the opposite. We've done an incredible job. Take a look at what's happening in Europe. What's happening to Europe is nobody's seen anything like it. And you used to tell me all about Europe. Now we're doing a great job. We are absolutely rounding the corner other than the fake news. Once the scare everybody, we are absolutely rounding the corner. Go ahead. When you have Trump trying to do damage control for Mark Meadows, that's when that's when you know they're in trouble, right? And Trump actually took to Twitter to tweet about the wonderful job that he's doing just for good measure to make sure that we know he's doing a great job. Guys, he says, we have made tremendous progress with the China virus, but the fake news refuses to talk about it this close to the election. Covid, Covid, Covid is being used by them in total coordination in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation. Should be an election law violation. Really interesting. Maybe, and this is just me, maybe the media isn't talking about the tremendous progress you've made with regard to Covid-19 because you fucked up at every single step along the way. And right now, this close to the election, we're seeing new spikes, dumbass. So why would they give you credit when the situation is worse? We're entering our second wave in most states when some states arguably aren't even out of the first wave. So why the fuck would we give you credit for that, you dumb bitch? Dumb bitch. Like Trump is the dumbest human being on the planet. But I mean, he's still, you know, by making this tweet, you can tell that he's trying to get ahead of this narrative. Don't let Mark Meadows and what he said about them not wanting to control it be the thing that, you know, dominates the headlines. Trump wants to make sure that people think he's doing a good job. But that's just demonstrably false. So, you know, I don't know how this is going to play. It might be too late to affect the election, because I think most people with a brain know that Trump has botched this pandemic. It's been terrible. But this could very well be the final nail in the Trump campaign's coffin, because to say that this close to the election as numbers tick up, as deaths tick up, it's just political suicide at this point. Mike is the worst progressive on YouTube. Please don't subscribe to him or become a patron. David Dole is so much better. Trust me, folks. He's doing a great job. He really is. OK.