CNN still calls itself a news channel, but it operates more like a house of mirrors wherein everything is distorted, and viewers are led to believe that what happens in real life is not true.
During a tiresome segment Monday on the pandemic, anchor Jim Sciutto said President Trump was “doubling, tripling, quintupling down … on this attack on the facts and the science” by “mocking Joe Biden” for having his vow to lock down the national economy if a scientist tells him it’s necessary.
What Trump said at a campaign rally in Nevada the day before was that Biden is “going to want to lock us down.” He then made fun of the former vice president’s horrific assertion that he would shut us all down again the moment it was advised.
“He’ll ‘listen to the scientists,'” Trump said. “If I listened totally to the scientists, we would, right now, have a country that would be in a massive depression instead of — we’re like a rocket ship. Take a look at the numbers.”
On those perfectly accurate remarks, CNN White House correspondent John Harwood said the president “has gone so far away from reason and rationality that he’s actually mocking Joe Biden for listening to the genuine experts on this pandemic.” He then did one of those brave “fact checks.” (A “fact check” in the Trump era means sternly condemning whatever Trump says as “false,” regardless of whether it is.)
“Now, of course, that’s false on a couple of levels,” said Harwood. “Joe Biden has said he would only move to lock down if the scientists recommend it.”
So what Trump said, repeating what Biden had said verbatim — he said in August, “I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists” — was, to Harwood, “false on a couple of levels.”
Really.
Trump is not only right about what Biden said, but he is also right about the value of scientists’ opinions (as opposed to science). If Trump had done everything scientists were advising — some of them are demanding indefinite lockdowns on commerce and self-isolation — the economy would be in a depression, and it probably would not have recovered to the extent that it has. Biden and Democrats believed the answer to economic catastrophe was to keep printing money and giving it out to the millions of people who lost their jobs, businesses, and life savings. But that’s temporary and, as we’ve seen, Congress cannot be counted on to come up with the money quickly enough.
Perhaps Trump refuses too often to do some of what “the experts” say he could do, but that’s the way decisions work. You take all of the available information and considerations and weigh them to make the best possible choice. That often means some things have to give.
There’s a pandemic going on, but Trump still has a multi-trillion-dollar economy to oversee. This is no different than what every normal adult has to handle. Experts say you’re supposed to get eight hours of sleep per night, but not everyone can do that — even at great risk to their long-term health. Some people have children or second jobs that prevent such a thing.
Trump and Republican governors are trying to keep the country moving. Biden and Democrats have their finger on the trigger to send us back into lockdown mode.
