In a week in which radio “personality” Rush Limbaugh said Americans had gone soft in regard to the pandemic and should become more like the infamous Donner Party of 1846-1847, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything–ever–anymore. For those who have forgotten this grisly chapter of U.S. history, members of the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism when they got trapped by deep snows in the Sierra Nevadas. This gasbag wants us to “adapt” more to the pandemic. Agreed! Let’s be mildly inconvenienced and wear masks and wash our hands. I don’t think I need to resort to eating my parents.
The highlighting of the Donner party’s, er, “adaptations” by Limbaugh was not the only utterly absurd move by Team Trump this week. In an unprecedented, shocking move (How many more times are we going to have to say that during this administration?), Trump used the White House Rose Garden for a campaign speech. Please close your eyes and imagine what would have happened if President Obama had made such a move. Okay, never mind. Silly exercise. Obama and his team would never have cheapened that setting–a place were President Kennedy welcomed home the Project Mercury astronauts and where presidents since Herbert Hoover have held actual press conferences.
It was billed as a “press conference.” But Trump actually took only a handful of questions over the course of nearly an hour in which he rambled–truly incoherently at times–and attacked his opponent, Joe Biden. He turned a supposed news conference on China into a campaign event. Trump and his aides were clearly disheartened by needing to cancel the NH rally scheduled for this week due to fear of poor attendance.
Here’s a bit of Trump’s drivel so that you can get a feel for the vibe in the Rose Garden yesterday:
He said: “Sign new immigrants up for welfare immediately. This is Joe Biden. So they walk off and they come in and they put a foot into our land, and we sign up new immigrants up for welfare. We sign them up immediately. They get welfare benefits. United States citizens. Don’t get what they’re looking to give illegal immigrants. Think of that. Sign up. It’s hard to believe I’m even reading that, new immigrants for welfare immediately. Not to mention the cost of this which is incalculable. The cost of this is so crazy. End requirement for immigrant self-sufficiency and maximize their welfare. Now, this is us writing this. Who’s not coming to the United States? Every person from South America is going to pour in. Every person from other countries, they’re going to be pouring in. End requirement, think of that, for immigrant self-sufficiency and remember to maximize welfare. So we give it a maximum. Then we have massively expand immigration during a global pandemic, taking jobs from unemployed Americans. End all travel bans including from Jihadist regions. So now we have travel bans. A lot of you said I didn’t get the travel ban and you were wrong. We got the travel ban. We lost in the Ninth Circuit. We lost again in the Ninth Circuit. And then we won in the Supreme Court. We have a very strong travel ban, and we don’t want people that are going to come in and blow up our cities, do things.”
What. The. Actual. Hell.
But I think my favorite part was when Trump said Biden was hellbent on eliminating…windows! Trump tore into Team Biden’s climate action plan that had been released earlier in the day. He asserted that Biden’s plan for reaching net-zero carbon emissions for all new building construction by 2030 “basically means no windows, no nothing.”
I love/hate that CNN needed to put this disclaimer at the bottom of this quote in its analysis of the speech: “That is also nonsense. Buildings with a whole bunch of windows can have net-zero emissions, which means they produce as much renewable energy as the energy they consume. And the task force’s proposal wouldn’t mandate net-zero buildings; rather, this would simply be a “national goal.”
I think we’re past time when the press should simply walk out on the president’s “press conferences.” This event was absolutely not news. It was a crappy campaign speech and a visious diatribe against a perceived enemy. We’ve reached the point at which the free press is being held captive by the Trump cult. The longer reporters stay to watch this theater of the absurd, they stop being our eyes and ears and start serving as an unwitting arm of the president’s propaganda machine.
