July 15, 2020: Trump's Goofy Press Conference

 

7/15/20: Grab your AR-15’s Trump fans – but not your masks, because masks are for sissies. (See: 7/21/20.) 

Joe Biden is coming for your windows. 

In a baffling, stream-of-consciousness press conference yesterday, the president gave voice for more than an hour to whatever random fragments of thought percolated to the surface of his consciousness and spilled from his lips. 

If you missed it, or plowed through and read a transcript, you had to feel sorry for reporters stuck listening in the Rose Garden, tasked with deciphering the message. It was a sticky day in Washington and Trump started by apologizing. He said there might be time for questions, “maybe at the end,” if ‘it’s not too hot.’”

 

You might imagine the U.S. is facing a health crisis. Not so, said Trump. “So, we’ve had a big day in the stock market,” he noted.  

“Things are coming back, and they’re coming back very rapidly,” he added, “a lot sooner than people thought. People are feeling good about our country. People are feeling good about therapeutics and possible vaccines.” If you’ve never noticed, Trump often substitutes the words “thing” or “things” for facts when he speaks. But Americans were “feeling good” he claimed. 

 

He cared about protesters in faraway cities. 

Trump’s rambling discourse started off almost normal. He said he would be punishing China for “its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong.” He said the Chinese government was “extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom.” 

“We’ve all watched what happened,” Trump continued. “Not a good situation. Their freedom has been taken away. Their rights have been taken away.” He wanted the world to know he cared about protesters in faraway cities. He just wasn’t a fan of protesters in front of the White House.  

After that, it was off to the races, except that Trump had no idea which way he was running or why. He bragged about how he was making China pay “massive tariffs” and how he was using billions of dollars raised by tariffs to help America’s farmers. “I’ve given quite a bit to the farmers and ranchers of our country because they were targeted,” by retaliatory Chinese tariffs.  

The president still didn’t understand how tariffs work, or how importers pass costs on to consumers. He said he’d given the farmers and ranchers $12 billion. Then he gave them $16 billion more. 

Trump didn’t give them a dime. Consumers footed the bill.

 

Had he mentioned Joe Biden? He thought he should. “Joe Biden’s entire career,” Trump explained, “has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity of – of errors that they’ve made.”  

Did he mean “comedy” of errors? There’s no way of knowing when this president speaks. He might have meant “cornflakes.” 

Why was he elected? Trump said, it had to do with “a lot of bad things; things related to trade.” No telling what things he meant. He didn’t like the World Trade Organization. That was for sure. And China had been ripping us off for years. 

Whose fault was that? 

Biden!

 

 

He’s coming for your windows and your eyeballs. 

Trump wanted us to know. Biden was bad. He was in favor of the Paris Climate Accord. “No good,” Trump grimaced. Okay. Sure. Two hundred other countries signed the Accord. Trump said he saved us. He got us out of a bad deal. A terrible deal. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I did there,” Trump insisted. “It took a certain amount of courage, I guess, because it sounds so nice – the Paris Climate Accord – but it wasn’t good for us at all.” (See: 7/16/20.) 

If Joe Biden got elected, we’d all be screwed. That would be it for the windows we used to love. 

Also. Our eyeballs! Our eyeballs would be wrecked. Trump explained. Biden and the Democrats wanted to: 

….mandate net-zero carbon emissions for homes, offices, and all new buildings by 2030. That basically means no windows, no nothing. It’s very hard to do. I tell people when they want to go into some of these buildings, “How are your eyes?” Because they won’t be good in five years. And I hope you don’t mind cold office space in the winter and warm office space in the summer, because your air conditioning is not the same as the good old days.

 

Trump’s aides must have told him he was polling poorly with white suburban women. Trump wanted them to know that Joe Biden had a dastardly plan. He wanted suburbs to allow low income housing to be built outside of cities. Trump hates American cities. Too many Democrats! 

He explained the threat: 

Abolish – in the suburbs, you’re going to abolish the suburbs with this [emphasis added]. Enforce Obama-Biden’s radical AFFH – that’s the AFFH regulation that threatens to strip localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning laws to fit the federal government’s demands. So what you have – I mean, I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood. 

 

Biden! Biden wanted poor families to have better lives. He wanted their kids to go to school with yours. 

He wanted to abolish the suburbs. 

Well, I’m ending that rule. I’m taking it out, so – I spoke with Ben Carson the other day. We’re going to be taking it out. I’ve watched that whole thing go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs – in the suburbs.

 
Mothers aren’t happy about that. Fathers aren’t happy about that. They worked hard to buy a house, and now they’re going to watch the housing values drop like a rock, and that has happened. It dropped like a rock. So we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the exact opposite.

 

According to Trump, Biden wanted “to defund our military.” Not Trump. He wanted to spend more money. Because China is “building a massive military.” 

Trump did not call China’s president Xi Jinping his friend, as he so often has before. That’s not working out so well, lately. 

As for the coronavirus, Trump bragged that he took care of it himself, with the China travel ban. “And I was a crowd of one, because even experts didn’t want to do it. They thought it was a mistake.” It came at us, the disease. It wasn’t his fault it spread. “But we did what we had to do, and now we’ll put out the flames as it – as it happens. We have to get the schools open. We have to get everything open. A lot of people don’t want to do that for political reasons, not for other reasons.” 

That is why, in one recent poll, nearly 70% of parents said they worried about sending kids back to school. 

 

“He’s really bizarre.” 

For most of an hour Trump babbled on about Joe Biden, and what a terrible person he was. Biden, he insisted, “He’s really bizarre.” 

The president riffed about face masks. He didn’t like them. “I see people now, friends of mine – they walk up, they want to say hello, and they have to keep their distance, and they’re all covered up, like you’re all covered up, with facemasks,” he said, motioning at reporters, cooking in the sun. 

Trump eventually pulled out a list his aides had prepared, and ticked off all the mortal sins of the former vice president. Biden is all for letting MS-13 gang members come to the U.S., commit heinous crimes, and avoid deportation. “So, in other words, we’ll take all of these people – many of whom are in prison for rape, murder, lots of other things.” It wasn’t clear how, but Trump insisted Biden wanted to “incentivize illegal-alien child smuggling.” By comparison, he claimed he had built “259 miles…of great, powerful wall.” Not counting the part that fell down earlier in the week. (See: 7/11-12/20.)

 

Trump said that we had great asylum agreements with other nations in the Western Hemisphere. Trump named three: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Rather than people coming here as refugees, he said those incredibly poor countries had shouldered the load. 

Who wants refugees, anyway? I think that’s what Trump meant. At that point you had to listen carefully to get what the president was trying to say, and even then, you probably couldn’t. 

In fact, we might as well let the comedian Sarah Cooper take over for this quote:

Trump wanted everyone to know, he had a “great meeting last week with the President of Mexico. Great guy. Friend of mine – become a friend of mine.” The two had never met before. This claim reminded me, when I read through the speech, of other friends Trump has said he has.

Kim Jong-un. 

Xi Jinping. 

Jeffrey Epstein. (Okay, that one is kind of a joke.)

 

The wall with Mexico. It was genius, Trump said, “because it stopped people coming in from heavily infected areas of Mexico.”  

What about that infection? That COVID-19? “But it’s still – we’ve done a great job; get no credit for it,” Trump complained. “And I don’t want the credit.” 

(You know he did.)

 

He said he had kept people out of this country “that are going to come in and blow up our cities, do things.” Maybe the “liberal Democrats running the cities” wouldn’t mind if people came in and blew them up. “But I would mind,” Trump said, “and the people of this country mind.” 

That’s how Trump’s press conference went. He didn’t think the people in the cities would mind if they got blown up. 

But he would mind – even though he hated Democrats in the cities. 

 

Joe Biden hates statues. 

Also, Joe Biden hates statues. Trump? He loves statues. Really, he loves Confederate statues almost as much as grabbing women’s…. 

Where were we? Yeah. Terrible people wanted to destroy our best statues. Terrible people. Like African Americans. 

And liberals. 

But this has been going on, and I found an act that we’ve used. And we have many, many people in jail right now – many, many people in jail, all over the country – because they tried to destroy or, in some cases, got – got it down, a federal statue or monument.

 

I signed an executive order a couple of weeks ago, and it says very simply, “Ten years in jail.” You do it, 10 years in jail. The amazing part is we’re able to catch everybody because, thanks to all of you on television – we appreciate it – but we have their pictures. We have the man standing on Andrew Jackson’s horse.  

 

Roger Stone? Seven-time convicted felon? No. No jail time for him. 

Eventually, the president took a few questions. Was he down in the polls, a reporter asked? “Do you see yourself as an underdog in this race?” 

Trump said no. “I think we have a really good poll numbers.” His good poll numbers were not fake. How could he be so sure? “You look at the Intracostal in Florida. You look at the lakes. You see thousands of boats with Trump signs, American signs. You’ve got the Trump-Pence sign all over,” he explained. “You look at what’s going on. You look at bikers, for miles and miles, riding up highways proudly with their signs.” 

Bikers with signs had nothing to do with actual polls, but you figure reporters were nicely browned after an hour in the sun, and only hoped to get away before Trump bragged about himself for another hour.

 

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TRUMP ALSO FOUND TIME in his schedule the same day to pose with an array of Goya food products, while sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The company owner had praised Trump’s bold leadership. Latinos, who love Goya foods more than they love Trump, called for a boycott. 

Trump stepped in and pitched some beans.

 

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NEW COVID-19 cases for the day: 

67,404.