How is everyone doing? On this week’s Burke’s Law podcast, CFR Executive Editor Leonard Jacobs and I are joined by Michael Houk, our producer and expert editor. It was the end of Week 1 of our national “Get To Know Your Family Again” shelter-at-home time! (For those of you with children, our heart goes out to you.)
Where Week 1 was pretty easy, we agreed that Week 2 will be more difficult. Nine months from now, we’ll either have a baby boom or boom times for divorce lawyers. All kidding aside, this is an unprecedented time as we all grapple with how long we have to shelter in place. What will happen to life as we know it when we (hopefully) return to normalcy in May. Or June. Or the summer. Or maybe the fall. Or maybe not until 2021.
And we still have no idea who has the virus because, as we are painfully aware, we don’t have enough tests or testing. We are months after this virus went viral — months we could have spent preparing, manufacturing masks, respirators and working to flatten the curve, all wasted. This unfortunate selection of our president spent from January to basically two weeks ago mocking coronavirus at rallies, calling it a hoax, and not working with countries such as South Korea and, yes, China in order to understand the devastation heading our way. He knew about it publicly since Jan. 22. Here’s his timeline of wishing it away. It is all truly horrific and this will define his presidency and this will send him packing in November.
His is a massive, massive failure of leadership all across the board. Only when the markets tanked did the Orange Fool start to realize the predicament we’re in. Again, we had months to prepare — months to mobilize FEMA, months to ready hospitals, months to educate the public. Those were the months that Twitler went golfing, that Twitler dismissed his daily intelligence briefings. And that was before he called it the “Chinese virus.” This racist-in-chief didn’t care until he personally lost money in the market. What a disgrace.
Each day we’re subject to his asinine press conferences. We watch the podium in the White House press room crammed full of people in direct defiance of what we’ve been told not to do! We’re watching the spectacle of a completely unfit, ignorant president get fact-checked in real time by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man with the hardest job in the universe.
We have clear leadership from many governors, both Democrats and Republicans, and none from this inept White House led by a moron. When asked why the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense was closed in 2018, Orange Ghoulious literally said he knew nothing about it: “It wasn’t me!” Then he turned to Dr. Fauci and said “Tony?” Trump doesn’t even know that Dr. Fauci works for the National Institutes of Health. So either the Orange dingbat has no idea what his staff are doing or he’s lying. Which one is worse? We all know nothing is his responsibility.
Trump is such an unmitigated disaster that even calm, cool, collected Dr. Fauci facepalmed during a live briefing when the Inept Moron called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” When Peter Alexander of NBC news asked the softest of softball questions — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — this angry, in-over-his-head asshole called him a “terrible reporter,” then blasted him and the press:
America has no leadership — except for the governors who have taken control. The US, as of the recording of this podcast episode, had 32,000 cases of the virus. There were 3,000 on March 15 — that was tenfold growth in five days. Restaurants, bars, tourist attractions, small businesses, all non-essential businesses — closed. Millions upon millions will be out of work and who knows if they will ever have a job whenever we come through this.
We live in scary times with an Orange Buffoon in office. He has no plan; he’s ignorant as to this crisis. He doesn’t understand how clinical trials work, or differences between antibiotics and vaccines. I just facepalmed.
Leonard, Michael and I, from a safe distance of many states apart, discuss all this and how we’re handling all our alone time. How about you? Are you cooking? Are you reading? Are you being creative? How long can you sustain being alone? Or with your families!
So take a deep breath, listen to our episode, and let us know what you think, OK? Thanks, as always, to our 2.57 listeners for your fractional support. If you enjoy this podcast, do leave us a review and share this episode on social media or wherever humanity is allowed to gather for the next few centuries. On Twitter, follow Liz at @burkeslawNYC and follow CFR at @TheCFReport.
