If you’d like some pure, unadulterated Donald Trump injected straight into your veins, the New York Post is here for you. The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid got an hour-long interview with Trump and is running the semi-coherent bits a little at a time. The big headline? Trump says Trump was right about the novel coronavirus, and “there’s a great optimism” in the United States right now.
No, really. Never mind the polls, never mind the steadily rising death count or the unemployment: “I think they’re starting to feel good now,” Trump said of Americans. “The country’s opening again. We saved millions of lives, I think.” Of himself and the lessons learned from coronavirus (as if it’s not still an ongoing crisis), he said: “Now, the one thing that the pandemic has taught us is that I was right,” Trump said. “You know, I had people say, ‘No, no, it’s good. You keep—you do this and that.’ Now those people are really agreeing with me. And that includes medicine and other things, you know.” Shockingly, Trump doesn’t seem to have named the people who previously disagreed but now think he did everything right.
Polls do not reflect the optimism Trump claims to see.
Trump also said he'd be bringing back coronavirus press briefings on at least an occasional basis despite the negative political fallout from them (which he continued to deny), but mostly he is yearning for some big rallies: “I hope we’re going to be able to get the rallies back before the election,” he said. “I actually think it’s very important. I think that would be a big—a big disadvantage to me if we didn’t, if we couldn’t have the rallies back.
“People are wanting the rallies. They want to have them so badly. They were informative but they were fun.” Yes, “people” want that. “People” named Donald Trump in particular.
Trump did draw one tiny bit of correction from the New York Post, emphasis on New York, when he claimed that blue states in particular need federal bailouts. The newspaper noted that New York actually pays more federal taxes than it gets federal funding and that “the imbalance has cost the Empire State $116 billion since 2015.” That’s not an isolated statistic and it’s going to continue to be true during the pandemic, too. But the false claim is a convenient way to play to Trump’s base, which is dedicated to believing that other people are mooching, be it immigrants paying taxes they don’t get the benefits of or blue states paying more in taxes than they get in funding.
Trump must really be climbing the walls with frustration at not being able to command an audience with his coronavirus press briefings, and this interview is what we get as a result: vapid and false blathering to a friendly newspaper that’ll publish even the most ridiculous claims. Optimism? Please!
