How silly do Donald Trump's briefings get?

TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2020

As triggered by OAN: How silly do President Donald J. Trump's daily TV shows get?

It's just another way of asking how silly our discourse is. The Q-and-A which ended last night's briefing helps us answer our question.

Once again, the commander-in-chief fled to the welcoming arms of the ladies of the crackpot site, OAN. He then talked and talked and talked and talked, and then he ended the session.

Yesterday, we noted the ridiculous question Trump received at Sunday's briefing from OAN's Jenn Pellegrino. Believe it or not, that question went like this:

PELLEGRINO (4/19/20): Thank you, Mr. President. The CDC has finally admitted to profound failures with testing kits from the beginning of the outbreak. Is this a function of lax oversight from the Obama-Biden administration?

Given the fact that this was OAN, this was clearly intended as a way for Trump to bash Obama/Biden. The CDC's errors in 2020 were supposed to be blamed on them!

Even Trump didn't attempt to go there. Yesterday, though, after his tussle with Yamiche Alexander, he threw to OAN once again.

This time, he threw to Chanel Rion for the day's final question. Her "question" went like this:

TRUMP (4/20/20): Please.

RION: Mr. President, thank you, Chanel Rion with One America News.

TRUMP: Please. Go ahead.

RION: Going back to the topic of friendship and bipartisanship, Americans—with the exception of Pelosi, Schumer and even Romney—Americans have seen an unprecedented chapter of bipartisanship and cooperation on the political landscape. On a personal note, what has been the most significant signal that your relationship with Democrats below the leadership level have changed for the good of America?

The softball floated over the plate and the president hit it hard. Believe it or not, he orated for a full eight minutes and 30 seconds, largely concerning his personal greatness and the ways he's been mistreated.

Pelosi had been "very nasty." Schumer "just did what he was supposed to do and he didn’t do very well with it."

The media "foments a lot of anger...I’ll be asked a tremendously hostile question from somebody, and then I’ll answer it in a hostile way, which is appropriate. Otherwise you look foolish."

You can watch the full filibuster at the end of this White House videotape. More than eight minutes after throwing to OAN, the rambling commander in chief ended the session like this:

TRUMP: But I just say this. If we would have done that, we would’ve lost anywhere from a million to more than two million people. Now, with all of the death that we’ve seen at 50 or 60,000 people heading toward, right now it’s at 40, but 50 or 60,000 people, probably over 50 [INAUDIBLE], but that’s with our guard up! If we took our guard down and just said, “Okay, we’re just going to keep this open,” we would have lost millions of people.

Can you imagine? Look how bad it looks now when you look at the bodies, when you look at Hart Island in New York where they have the mass grave, and all of the things that you see, can you imagine if we had the guard down, if we didn’t do anything and we just said, “Let’s ride it out?” It would not have been sustainable in any way. It would have been an atrocity.

So we’ve done the right thing. We’ve really done the right thing. And the people that have worked so hard and dangerously, I’ll tell you again, I say it, but I watched those doctors and nurses and medical people running into those hospitals, and they don’t even have that gear on. Forget about gear, whether it’s great gear or not, and we’re bringing in the best gear in the world, but they’re running in with open everything.

I mean, the job, they're like warriors, the job they’re doing. But if we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, 2 million people dead. So multiply that times 50, you’re talking about you would’ve had 10 to 20 to 25 times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The 50,000 is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by 20 or more? It’s not acceptable.

So it’s a very good question. I appreciate it. We’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll see you tomorrow.

PENCE: Thanks, everybody.

For a full eight minutes and 30 seconds, the rambling, semi-coherent commander had explored an array of his favorite topics.

This is aired nightly, in prime time. Such is the state of our discourse.

A final observation: Whoever sold Trump on this Civil War monologue ought to be frogmarched away:

TRUMP: You know, maybe we could have just gone right through. I was somebody that would have loved to have done that, but it wouldn’t have been sustainable. You can’t lose a million people. That’s almost double what we lost in the Civil War.

I use that as a guide, Civil War, 600,000 people died. So it’s not sustainable.

But it could have been much more than a million people. I mean if you took a number and cut it in half and half and in half again, you’d end up at 500,000 people, okay, if you want to make a very conservative guesstimate. 500,000 people is not acceptable. Is that a correct sort of an analogy?

So I mean I see it all the time. My friends of mine, people that I have great respect for. Well we could have done this, we could have done, and remember this, when we say 50 and they compare 50 to the 35 of the flu, because it’s averaged 35, 36,000 over a 10 year period. It’s a lot. Who would think that?

That too comes from yesterday's closing oration. We'll say it again:

Whoever sold Trump on that "Civil War cutting-it-in-half" monologue ought to be frogmarched away.

Plus, is this person OK?