Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: It was said that if Donald Trump, the candidate, ever became president, he'd likely become less bombastic and confrontational, that his personality might take on a different cast when he was put in charge of the country. Well, that didn't happen, proving that a leopard, especially one of advancing age, does not change his spots. And the same can certainly now be said of Trump's successor, Joe Biden, after a disturbing response to a question about China in his first town hall appearance since he became president. It was a rambling response to the enduring question that surrounds him, his approach to China, in which he fulfilled three stereotypes. He lost his way, didn't really answer the question, and explained away Chinese transgressions.
President Biden: You know, Chinese leaders, if you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been the time when China has been victimized by the outer world is when they haven't been unified at home. So the central ... Vastly overstated. The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China. And he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that. I point out to him no American president can be sustained as a president if he doesn't reflect the values of the United States, so the idea I'm not going to speak out against what he's doing in Hong Kong, what he's doing with the Uighurs in western mountains of China and Taiwan trying to end the one-China policy by making it forceful, he gets it. Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow.
Tim: Incredibly, Biden was not asked a follow-up question on that apparent statement that China's massive human rights violations and its crackdown on Hong Kong, and its attempt to crush Taiwan are just part of what the Chinese expect from their ruler. Excuse me, what?
But, wait, that's not all. In a statement so reminiscent of the gaffes from his recent past regarding black people and other minorities, Biden said he's fearful that black and Hispanic people seeking to get vaccinated don't know how to use the internet.
Biden: A lot of people don't know how to register. Not everybody in the community, in the Hispanic and the African-American community, particularly in rural areas that are distant and or inner-city districts, know how to get online.
Tim: Folks, I don't know what to tell you other than 81 million people supposedly voted for this guy.
Biden's appearance on CNN came shortly after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump on his second impeachment by the House in just 12 months. And the spectacle put on by the House managers designed to depict Trump as ordering the Capitol riot is not something most Republicans will soon forget. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) delivered an ominous warning about what's good for the goose being just as good for the gander.
Lindsey Graham: We've opened Pandora's box to future presidents. And if you use this model, I don't know how Kamala Harris doesn't get impeached if the Republicans take over the House because she actually bailed out rioters. And one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody's head open. So we've opened Pandora's box here, and I'm sad for the country.
Tim: That's a crystal-clear message from one of the Senate's most powerful Republicans. First that the GOP is saying to Democrats, "You want to play the impeachment game? Well, two can play that game." Second, referring to the possibility of impeaching Harris, Graham drops the hint that he believes the vice president might soon be president. But at the same time, seven Republicans voted to convict Trump. So, the GOP is all carved up right now, trying to find its footing, looking for what to put on the plate and present to the public for 2022.
But there were some other takeaways from the second act of impeachment theater. Trump lawyer David Schoen fully and finally put the lie to the very thing that Biden said caused him to run against Trump, Charlottesville.
David Schoen: This lie traveled around the world a few times. It made its way into the Biden campaign talking points and ended up on the Senate floor, the Charlottesville lie, "very fine people on both sides," except that isn't all he said. And they knew it then, and they know it now. Watch this.
Donald Trump: But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
Tim: Okay, that's the only part the House managers used to show that Trump is a full-on white supremacist. And one more time for posterity, here's the part they censored years ago, and then again for the latest impeachment show trial.
Trump: You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. You're changing history. You're changing culture … And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.
Tim: So there it is one more time for you. Proof positive that the left's signature claim, its smoking gun proving Trump is an unreconstructed racist, is based entirely on a falsehood.
But we've got bigger things on our minds these days than Biden or Trump, like the vaccine. More than two million people a day are now being vaccinated, but CDC Director Rochelle Walensky says we can't let our guard down.
Rochelle Walensky: We are still at about a hundred thousand cases a day. We are still at around 1,500 to 3,500 deaths per day. The cases are more than two and a half fold times what we saw over the summer.
Tim: But what's roiling parents across the country right now is all the public schools that aren't letting kids back into school even though young children are the lowest risk group of all.
Walensky: We know that most of the disease that comes into the school comes into the community, and with universal mask-wearing, we know that there's very limited transmission within the schools and that that transmission is largely from staff to staff.
Tim: Meaning the teacher-union objections to returning to in-person teaching have only to do with themselves and not the students.
Finally, the first fallout from the 2020 census. Further confirmation that the population trends in this country are from North to South -- now reflected in meaningful changes to the apportionment of Electoral College votes for the next two presidential elections. YouTube put together a useful video summarizing the changes.
YouTube Narrator: There's been a general trend around certain regions of the country, most notably the Rust Belt region, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota. This region had a much larger population in years past. When you're looking at a lot of these states in terms of their previous electoral presence, they had more electoral votes in the past. Now they've since lost them, and they are on track to lose even more moving past this year. These states have fluctuated back and forth, traditionally are Democratic states, but as the population does decrease, the Democratic Party's chances of victory there do get slimmer. We're talking Milwaukee. We're talking Minneapolis. We're talking Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia.
Tim: As it stacks up for the next two elections, ten states have lost enough population in the last ten years to each lose one electoral vote. Seven of those were won by Biden in 2020. Five states will gain one electoral vote -- two for Trump, three for Biden. And there are the big ones with the fastest rising populations in the country, both won by Trump: Florida picks up two more electoral votes and Texas three. All in all, it's a total shift of 14 electoral votes from blue to red -- 14 out of 538 -- not earth-shaking, but not insignificant. And certainly enough to make the difference in a close election.
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Read more from Tim Donner.
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