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: Joe Biden is leading in the polls, most all of the polls, as Election Day approaches in just over five months. But if President Trump fails to win re-election, it won't be because he wasn't out in front of the voters enough or not sufficiently promoting himself. Okay, that's an understatement. He has, of course, been, if anything, overexposed during the pandemic, which begs another one of those simple questions with a complicated answer: Will the daily exposure and amplification of him during this crisis ultimately help or hurt President Trump? Will the voters see him as a take-charge guy who by most accounts has done at least a decent job handling a sudden deadly crisis threatening the world? Or will they say, "Enough of this guy. Four years of him is enough."
Now, Trump is well-known for his braggadocio. We all know that. And we often don't take him literally so much as seriously. But there were two bold claims he made this week that deserve to be evaluated, to say the least. Here's the first about the Coronavirus.
President Trump: In every generation, through every challenge and hardship and danger, America has risen to the task. We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.
Tim: "We have met the moment and we have prevailed." Have we? Or have we allowed too many to die? Or have we, on the other hand, gone too far in compromising our liberties and crippling the economy for as far as the eye can see? Talk to a hundred random people, and you get a hundred equally earnest yet different answers. But sure enough, atop the list of issues the voters care about is one they'd never even heard of when this year began: the pandemic. And when Trump said, "We have prevailed," while he later explained he was most specifically referring to prevailing on testing, he went one big step further in another public statement this week which doubled as a reminder of all the slings and arrows he's dodged from his enemies on the left.
President Trump: What they've done to the presidency and what they've done to this country can never be allowed to happen again to our country. And despite all of that has been done, everything that's been done, we've had one of the greatest presidencies ever. Nobody's accomplished what we've accomplished in a relatively short period of time.
Tim: "We've had one of the greatest presidencies ever,” despite the nonstop attacks of the left. True or false? Well, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends what the meaning of economy is. Meaning Trump would certainly get credit for the robust economy of the first three years of his presidency, but now that the bottom has dropped out of the economy, will he any longer get credit for where it was until the pandemic? Will he ultimately be blamed for over 40 million lost jobs, even if many of those are restored before the election? Because in the end, it happened on his watch, and people will want to make a clean break from this pandemic. Or will the voters believe that things would have actually been worse if the economy had been weak when the virus hit and that, if Trump did so much for the economy once, he can do it again?
Joe Biden is hardly a candidate who's inspired confidence, but perhaps the biggest challenge Trump faces is that, this time around, the voters don't dislike his opponent more than him, according to widely respected veteran political forecaster, Charlie Cook.
Charlie Cook: All of the people that have an unfavorable view of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, how do they break on the trial-heat? Biden is ahead 49 to 18 among the people that dislike both of them, while they cut by a 20-point margin against Hillary Clinton. It's not just that President Trump's unfavorables are sky-high, but that they look like they're going to bite him and that Biden is just not in the same place that Hillary Clinton was at this point. And, you know, we'll see about November.
Tim: So Biden is more likable than Hillary -- that's a low bar. Rest assured, though, Trump will come at Biden with everything he's got, and it's a lot and will undoubtedly drive down Biden's favorability considerably. But that statement by Cook points to another version of that same question we asked before: Is Trump a president people want to come in and mow down a few big targets and then split after four years because that's all the day in, day out pitched melodrama they can take? Or do they know that he needs to be given eight years in order to achieve what has been, lest we forget, an incredibly ambitious agenda of major structural change right down to the foundations of the permanent bureaucracy, which has now been repeatedly discredited and disgraced, thanks to Donald Trump? The next few months will tell.
We close with a couple of truly headshaking comments, one from politics, the other from sports. First, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). She has fired every bullet in her chamber at President Trump -- or so we thought. But after years of attacking his character, his beliefs, his record, this week, in joining her leftist cohorts in attacking the president for using hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug which has helped some people recover from COVID-19, ol’ Nancy expressed her deep concern for Trump's physical condition.
Nancy Pelosi: But he's our president, and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group, and in his, shall we say, weight group. Which is morbidly obese, they say.
Tim: "Morbidly obese, they say." Next thing, they'll say he's a full-on white supremacist. Oh, I forgot, they already used that one.
Finally, we present the remarks of a star major league pitcher -- arguably the most tone-deaf remarks I've heard almost ever. With Major League Baseball doing all it can to work a deal to get some kind of season, Blake Snell of the Tampa Bay Rays, he of a seven-million-dollar annual salary, threw cold water on the whole thing, because it's all about the Benjamins.
Blake Snell: You're all like, "Bro, Blake, play for the love of the game, man. What's wrong with you, bro? Money should not be a thing." Bro, I'm risking my life. What do you mean it should not be a thing? It a hundred percent should be a thing. If I'm going to play, I should be getting money I signed to be getting paid. I should not be getting half of what I'm getting paid because the season's cut in half, on top of a 33% cut of the half that's already there, so I'm really getting like 25%. On top of that, it's getting taxed. So imagine how much I'm actually making to play. You know what I'm saying? … No, I got to get my money. I'm not playing unless I get mine.
Tim: "I'm risking my life," like regular people making a whole lot less than seven million bucks a year aren't. "And no, I got to get my money. I'm not playing unless I got mine." All I can say is when baseball does resume, Blake Snell should be on his knees in gratitude that there won't be any fans in the stands, because if there were, he'd be booed out of probably every stadium, including his home ballpark. And he will now forever live in infamy.
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Read more from Tim Donner.
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