President Donald Trump was up bright and early Thursday morning – calling in to Maria Bartiromo’s show on the Fox Business Network to riff on everything from Kamala Harris to Bill Barr to cows. (Yes, cows.)
I went through the transcript of the interview and pulled out the lines you need to see.
1. “Well, she’s radical left, now she tries to pretend she’s not, but she is the most liberal person in the US Senate, acknowledged to be.”
In a bit of a swerve, Trump starts the interview with a true fact! According to Govtrack’s 2019 ideology report card, Harris is the most liberal senator by voting record. And away we go!
2. “Think of it, we’re almost back to where we were and we’re still in the pandemic, which will be going away, as I say, it will be going away. And they scream, ‘how you can you say that?’ I said, ‘because it’s going to be going away.’”
There’s zero evidence the coronavirus is “going to be going away.” Like, none. In fact, there were more than 55,000 new cases on Wednesday alone, according to the CDC.
3. “You have to rebuild cities because too much light gets through the window, so let’s make the windows nice and small. Let’s rip down the Empire State Building and replace it with no windows.”
Trump’s allegation here has to do with a proposal within the Green New Deal that would aim to put more energy-efficient windows in large office buildings and homes. As far as I can tell, no one has proposed tearing down the Empire State Building. You’re shocked, I know.
4. “The cows – I don’t know if they actually put the cows in. They’re getting hit very hard by the animal rights groups but they don’t want to have cows, they don’t want to have any form of animals.”
Democrats want to ban cows??? Monsters! Oh wait, no they don’t.
5. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And now you have a – sort of a mad woman, I call her, because she was so angry and so – such hatred with Justice Kavanaugh.”
In which the President suggests that former Vice President Joe Biden is totally out of it and leans on the oldest trope in the book – this lady is angry!! – to caricature California Sen. Kamala Harris. These words coming out of any other President’s mouth would lead a news cycle for days.
6. “These are seriously ill people.”
What, you ask, is wrong with Biden and Harris in Trump’s mind? He didn’t say – and Bartiromo didn’t ask. Great journalism!
7. “And I’ll tell you a good poll because the real poll – we’re doing very well on the polls, and they love the suppression polls.”
Waiter, I’ll have one word salad, please. Also, there are no polls out there where Trump is doing “very well” at the moment.
8. “And I got 306. Remember they said the night before the election there is no way he gets to 270. I didn’t, I got to 306 in the Electoral College.”
The 2016 election was 1,374 days ago. I counted.
9. “I mean it’s crazy. These people are crazy.”
How did Bartiromo follow up on these attacks on Democrats? This way: “It’s partly because you focused on jobs, and you made campaign promises to people about bringing the economy back which is exactly what happened after the tax legislation, the deregulation and your policies around energy.” Wow. Nailed it.
10. “Look, we got hit by the China plague and we’re not going to forget it. We got hit by the China plague.”
Yes, Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan province of China. No, it is not the “China plague.”
11. “I built the greatest economy in history, greatest job numbers, greatest stock market numbers, greatest economic numbers.”
Nope!
12. “Nobody’s ever seen it. I was cruising to election. They weren’t even going to be a factor.”
The idea that Trump was “cruising” to a second term before the coronavirus pandemic is farcical. How do I know? Polls. All of them.
13. “George Washington would’ve had a hard time winning, you know that.”
If I am reading this right, Trump is saying the father of our country couldn’t win this election because of the impact of coronavirus. So, does that mean he can’t win either, or …
14. “Nobody’s blaming me for the fact that the – call it whatever you want, the China virus, as you know there’s 20 names for it. You have your pick of names, right?”
Well, not really. It’s either Covid-19 or the coronavirus. Definitely not the “China virus” or the “China plague.”
15. “Came out of China, should have never been allowed to happen, but the fact is this plague came in and I closed it up, saved millions of lives, now we’re re-opening.”
This doesn’t feel like exactly what happened …
16. “And we’re coming back and coming back strong and my biggest headwind is Biden because everyone knows that if Biden gets in, this market’s going to crash.”
“Everyone.”
17. “AOC was a poor student – I mean, I won’t say where she went to school, it doesn’t matter. This is not even a smart person, other than she’s got a good line of stuff.”
So, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a “poor student” who Trump insinuates didn’t go to a prestigious college? (She went to Boston University, which ranked as the 40th best college or university by US News.) And she is “not even a smart person” too? How does Trump know all of this? He doesn’t! He’s just slandering her.
18. “I mean she goes out and she yaps.”
The President of the United States saying that a female member of Congress “yaps.” Not misogynistic at all!
19. “So these people are scaring, and Schumer’s going to get beaten. Yes, and Schumer’s going to get beaten by her, she’s going to run against Schumer. And he knows that and he’s going to get beaten by her unless he can talk her out of doing it, he has no chance.”
No one has been more of an advocate for AOC to primary New York Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2022 than Trump. Will she actually do it? She might!
20. “They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent, that’s election money basically. They want 3.5 trillion – billion dollars for the mail-in votes, OK, universal mail-in ballots, 3.5 trillion. They want $25 billion, billion, for the post office. Now they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
Yes! Democrats do want more money for the US Postal Service, so that they are able to handle what is expected to be a large rise in mail-in ballots due to concerns about in-person voting given Covid-19.
21. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
He said the quiet part out loud! The White House won’t let any legislation for co