-Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the attic.
Last week you may recall we addressed speculation
about the sudden disappearance of my copy of "The Thorn Birds,"
the 1977 Australian romance novel that inspired
the hit 1983 miniseries
starring a frequently shirtless Richard Chamberlain.
In 1983, it turns out that was the exact right amount
of chest hair for a leading man.
Chamberlain never would have survived in these hairless times
we're living in, where our sex symbols are all Chrises
with chests smooth enough to eat off.
Anyway, the point is, I left the window open overnight
to get rid of the wasps, but then "The Thorn Birds"
flew out, we think, because it's mating season.
But as you can see, Thorny is back
and maybe with child? Impossible to tell.
Meanwhile, the president is pregnant with rage --
that's a segue, a bad one, but technically still a segue --
and decided to give up in the fight against coronavirus
in order to reopen the economy.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
You would think that putting aside his venality,
his narcissism, and his deadly incompetence,
Donald Trump could at the very least muster
a little empathy for the victims of this pandemic,
their loved ones, and the millions
who have put themselves in harm's way,
lost jobs, or made tremendous personal sacrifices
during this crisis.
But of course, he can't do that,
because he's incapable of empathy.
He only has two emotions -- boredom and rage.
He's either staring off into the distance
while someone talks about complex policy details
or hissing at reporters like a snake
whose nest was just disturbed.
In fact, just listen to the cold, detached way in which
Trump talked about allowing Americans to die
in order to reopen the economy
and the 30 million people who have lost jobs
because of his handling of this crisis
during an interview on ABC yesterday.
-Do you believe that's the reality we're facing?
That lives will be lost to reopen the country?
-It's possible there will be some, because you won't be
locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is.
-There are 30 million Americans who are unemployed.
You don't need me to tell you that.
We're expecting the new unemployment rate this week.
There have been forecasts, 15, 16, 17%.
One of your advisers projected an unemployment rate of 19%.
That's nearly one in five Americans without a job.
How bad is this going to get?
-Well, that is what it is.
-Wow. What soaring words.
It reminds me of Martin Luther King's
"I slept pretty good last night" speech.
Or FDR's famous response when they told him
about Pearl Harbor -- "Well, [bleep] happens."
Usually when someone is that soulless and dead-eyed,
you're not asking them questions about the economy,
you're holding up a Rorschach test.
"And what is this, Donald?"
[ As Trump ] "It is what it is.
"Very, very interesting. Okay, guards,
you can put him back in his restraints now."
"Oh, I don't think the guards can hear you."
"Donald, what have you done?"
Yesterday Trump also made his first major trip in months
to tour a Honeywell factory in Arizona, a trip that gave us
what may end up as one of the enduring images of this crisis.
Trump toured a mask factory as his White House signaled
they were basically just giving up
on suppressing the coronavirus pandemic
to focus on reopening the economy instead.
And has he was doing that,
someone chose to blast "Live and Let Die"
on the speakers.
-The material traps the particulates.
-♪ Live and let die ♪
♪♪
-Wow. Welcome to the resistance,
Honeywell factory floor deejay?
Doesn't get much more on the nose than that.
What were the other songs on that play list?
-♪ It's the end of the world as we know it ♪
♪ It's the end of the world as we know it ♪
-You can hear all those classic hits and more
on "Now That's What I Call Symbolism."
"Live and Let Die" playing while Trump tours a mask factory
during a pandemic is the surest sign yet
that we're living in a video game.
And if we are in a video game, does anyone have the cheat code
to get rid of wasps?
Because I tried up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
B, A, start, and that just made them angrier.
Anyway, sure enough, during that same trip,
Trump brushed off the growing death toll
and said he was eager to force Americans
back to work prematurely,
telling them to think of themselves as participants
in an armed conflict.
-And you see what's going on. They have to open.
And the people of our country should think of themselves
as warriors.
Our country has to open.
I'm viewing our great citizens of this country
to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors.
They're warriors.
We can't keep our country closed.
We have to open our country.
The people of our country are warriors.
And I'm looking at it.
I'm not saying anything is perfect.
And yes, will some people be affected? Yes.
Will some people be affected badly? Yes.
But we have to get our country open,
and we have to get it open soon.
And I said it before and I'll say it again.
The people of our country are warriors.
-That's right, Trump wants you -- you to be a warrior
while he sits safely in isolation in the White House.
"I would join in, but I feel another bone spur coming on,
which is devastating to me, because the last one happened
right before the Vietnam War.
I mean, what are the chances that it happens again now?
I mean --"
This is truly sadistic.
The president is telling you to go out and face off
against a deadly virus all for the sake of the stock market.
The only way that could be more out of touch is if he said it
while dousing himself in Purell
and holding a 36-pack of toilet paper.
Every day it seems we pass a grim new milestone
in the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 70,000 Americans
now dead and at least 30 million out of work,
which, according to Trump means it's a perfect time
to stand down and wrap things up.
-We can't keep our country closed for the next five years.
You know, you could say there might be a recurrence,
and there might be.
And, you know, most doctors, or some doctors say
that it will happen.
And it will be a flame and we're going to put the flame out.
We've learned a lot, you know.
We've learned a lot about the coronavirus.
-First of all, who's "we"? You haven't learned anything.
Whenever the doctors are up there talking,
you do that thing where you zone out
and sway back and forth like a drunk guy
who's trying to pretend he's sober.
And then you get back up to the podium having only heard, like,
three words and try to sound like you know what's going on.
"So what I'm hearing is -- what I grasped when the scientists
were talking, is that powerful lights will cure the coronavirus
and give you superpowers.
You know, I saw that in a documentary once.
Only down -- turns you green.
That's the downside side effect.
So still -- still pretty promising news."
You are incapable of learning.
You showed up to the CDC in Atlanta surrounded by
some of the best doctors in the world and all you did
was hold up a printout of a virus like a kid
who forgot to do his science project until the last minute.
"As you can see here, the virus is called Wikipedia.
Side effects include further reading and external links."
Although actually I will give Trump credit.
In the span of two months, he did at least learn one thing --
the name of the virus.
-So you can't put them down in the, uh, in the category
of the overall population in terms of this, uh, corona flu.
-Yes, corona flu.
Remember when a deadly virus was racing across the globe
and the president was getting intelligence reports about it,
and he got the name wrong,
like the worst member of your bar trivia team?
"This English rock band is led by front man Mick Jagger."
"Oh, I know, it's The Rolling Scones.
Rolling -- In America they're called The Rolling Muffins.
That's an extra piece of trivia."
Second, no one, and I mean no one,
wants to keep the country closed for five years.
It hasn't even been closed for five months
and we're already losing our minds.
I spend six hours a day washing my hands,
I wipe down every package like it's coated in anthrax.
I've watched so much Netflix that my home page says,
"We have nothing left for you. Try Hulu?"
And I've inhaled so much Lysol, my urine smells like lemon zest.
No one wants to live like this.
In fact, we didn't have to.
Lots of other major developed countries
have successfully suppressed their outbreaks by acting early,
testing aggressively, and implementing a system
of isolating cases and tracing their contacts.
Some never even had to fully lock down, and others
have already reopened, like in South Korea,
where they had their first case on the exact same day
we had ours.
And while here in the U.S.,
almost every day at least 25,000 new coronavirus cases
are identified, in South Korea,
the rate of new confirmed cases of coronavirus has slowed down
dramatically in recent weeks to less than ten a day.
Of course if you pointed that out to Trump,
he probably wouldn't accept it.
"It's not a fair compar--
South Korea is 13 hours ahead, so they had a jump on it."
In fact, while we're all stuck in our homes watching reruns
of "Blue Bloods" at 2:00 in the afternoon,
Korean baseball is already back playing games,
just without fans.
In fact, ESPN is now airing them here in the U.S.,
which has introduced us to some truly incredible
team names, like the NC Dinos and the SK Wyverns,
which are mythical winged two-legged dragons
with barbed tails.
Last year they even used augmented reality
to have a dragon fly into the stadium and breathe fire.
Our baseball teams need more mascots like that.
The only mythical creature we have is, I don't know,
is it like an aardvark?
Like a -- like a hairy aardvark who loves baseball?
Hmm.
We've been highlighting success stories like that
from South Korea to Iceland to New Zealand to Taiwan
because they're out there.
There are lots of countries with competent governments
that managed to suppress the outbreak
and allow their societies to safely return
to some semblance of normalcy.
Trump has repeatedly lied and claimed that, as he put it,
the cupboards were bare when he took office three years ago
and that's why he's failed to fight the virus.
But in a new ABC interview, Trump was asked
why he didn't do anything to fix the situation.
-You're three years into your first term.
-Yeah. -You're now applying
for the job again.
What did you do when you became president
to restock those cupboards that you say were bare?
-Well, I'll be honest, uh,
I have a lot of things going on.
-No, you don't. All you do is watch TV,
and whenever your aides let you out of your straitjacket, tweet.
And when you're not golfing, you're tweeting about golfing.
Like on Sunday, when you retweeted a post
from your golf course in Scotland claiming
they had been named best golf course in the UK and Ireland
by a European golf magazine.
"So nice to see this great honor, thank you,
but haven't played golf in a long time."
First of all, that's not true. You played golf in March
with members of the Washington Nationals.
Damn it, Nationals!
You were supposed to be the feel-good team
everyone could be happy with over the cheating Astros.
Now, I mean, who are we supposed root for
when baseball comes back, the Mets?
I mean, they're the only team that's doing better
during quarantine.
Pretty sure the last president they met with
was William Henry Harrison, and then he died ten days later.
That was the year Mr. Met caught typhoid.
And now, instead of taking any responsibility
for the situation, Trump and his toadies on state TV
are whining that he hasn't gotten enough credit
for only letting 70,000 Americans die
and 30 million lose their jobs,
like human beer keg Jesse Watters
on Fox News this week.
-Can you imagine, Greg, the media, how they'd sound
if Barack Obama were president during the pandemic?
It'd go something like this --
"Barack Obama, putting politics aside and sacrificing,
the key to a successful reelection,
shut down the economy just in order to save lives."
That's what it would sound like.
Now, I know the president's not going to get
great coverage like that,
but the president just wants fair coverage,
because he never got credit for winning the election.
They said Russia cheated.
He never got credit for the economy.
They said it was Barack Obama's.
And he's not getting credit for anything,
for ventilators, for flattening the curve.
-My God, you sound like the whiniest pledge
in Sigma Chi.
"The dean is shutting down our blackface party,
completely ignoring the fact it was a fundraiser
to help local cocaine dealers."
The U.S. is the richest and most powerful country on Earth,
and yet we're also the epicenter of a deadly outbreak
that has been suppressed in lots of other countries.
And now the president wants to send you to war
against the virus for the sake of the stock market.
But at least when he does send you to war,
he'll do so with this soaring battle cry.
-That is what it is.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
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More and more New Yorkers are turning to them
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Stay safe, wash your hands, we love you.