Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year That Wouldn't End by Dave Pell

Author:Dave Pell [Pell, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 21st Century, Humor, Form, essays, Topic, politics
ISBN: 9780306847394
Google: ytlYzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2021-11-09T00:24:08.381523+00:00

SWAN DIVE

August 3, 2020

In what could have been Trump’s craziest interview while in office, Jonathan Swan found the president’s kryptonite: follow-up questions.

Trump: You know, there are those that say you can test too much, you do know that.

Jonathan Swan: Who says that?

Trump: Oh, just read the manuals. Read the books.

Swan: Manuals? What manuals?

Trump: Read the books. Read the books.

Swan: What books?

Trump: Right now, I think it’s under control. I’ll tell you what—

Jonathan Swan: How? One thousand Americans are dying a day.

Trump: They are dying. That’s true. And you have—it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.

Jonathan Swan: Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.

Trump: You can’t do that.

Swan: Why can’t I do that?

Almost every answer Trump gave in the Axios on HBO interview was a lie. CNN’s Daniel Dale, the undisputed champion of real-time fact-checking during the Trump era, counted seventeen lies in thirty-five minutes.

Trump wouldn’t say whether or not John Lewis was an impressive person, but did say, “I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration… I never met John Lewis, actually.” He also insisted that the intelligence about Russia putting bounties on US soldiers never reached his desk. It probably had. But if it hadn’t, it would be even worse. And once he knew about the intel, why didn’t he bring the issue up with Vladimir Putin during a subsequent phone call? “That was a phone call to discuss other things.”

It all made one wonder why this president had so rarely been pressed with simple follow-up questions.

How could this be the case? To quote the president about the now 155,000 dead Americans: “It is what it is.”

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