CSI: American Carnage (Monday, May 4, 2020)
NEW YORK – Hey, says the Times guy, haven’t seen you in awhile. He lifts his glass of BrewDog and toasts the Post guy who does the same. The Post guy says, Like your backdrop. The Times guy says, Yeah, I had an old photo of Gough’s blown up and put behind me. The Post guy says, What a great place it was. Remember the pressmen collapsed on the floor in the vomit? The Times guy says, Yeah, sure do. Remember the mailers beating each other up? They fall silent, lost in the reveries of the long ago. The Times guy leans back, looks at his computer screen, and says, Hey, you see Donald today? The Post guy says, I just caught the part when he snuck in the fact that they’re now looking to 80,000-90,000 victims. Yeah, says the Times guy, that was quite the moment, he just mentioned it, like an afterthought. He says you can go to the beaches, go to the parks. “Keep the spread,” he says, and then it kind of comes in from the side. He says, The public has been incredible with what they — that’s one of the reasons we’re successful. That’s one of the — if you call losing 80,000 or 90,000 people successful, but it’s one of the reasons that we’re not at that high end of the plane, as opposed to the low end of the plane. Brett stopped him though. Brett says, That number has changed, Mr. President. You said it was 60,000. You said, 60,000, 70,000. Donald, very terse, says It’s going up. No, it’s going up. Brett says, Now you’re at 80,000. Donald says, I used to say 65,000. And now I’m saying 80,000 or 90,000. And it goes up. And it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the very lower end of the plane, if we did the shutdown. The Post guy shakes his head. He says, And he says all this at the Lincoln Memorial. I can’t believe he didn’t compare the great pandemic death success to the 600,000 dead from the Civil War. He usually does. The Times guy says, I think he was put out by the complaints that he was using the Lincoln Memorial to push a political agenda. The Post guy says, Maybe, but unlikely. There was the woman’s question about that. She praises him. Says she prays for him. Then she wonders why he can’t use less divisive language. And Donald says to MacCallum, I’m not sure, but I think I like that question. I appreciate it. I appreciate the prayers, too, very much. Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said Lincoln — nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse. You’re there. You see those press conferences. They come at me with questions that are disgraceful, to be honest — disgraceful — their manner of presentation and their words. And I feel that if I was kind to them, I’d be — I’d be walked off the stage. I mean, they come at you with the most horrible, horrendous, biased questions. And you see it, 94 percent or 95 percent of the press is hostile. And yet, if you look in Florida today, we had hundreds and hundreds of votes going up and down the Inter-coastal, “Trump, Trump.” We have tremendous support, but the media is — they might as well be in the Democrat Party. And why, I don’t know. Nobody treated worse in the history. Honest Abe they called him and he would agree. – Monday, May 4, 2020