-Hello, everyone, and welcome back
to another edition of "Late Night"
in a makeshift home studio.
And as you can see, we're trying yet another location
in my house.
We had been shooting in a garage,
but we abandoned that because it was so cold
that by the end of Monday's "Closer Look,"
my nose was redder than a cartoon drunk.
I mean, look at that thing.
It was like "Late Night with Andy Capp."
No, I never would have made an Andy Capp reference
in front of a live audience because silence
would have been deafening,
but these days that's the reaction to everything.
So I figured, you know, why not let it rip?
So today we're giving it a shot from a crawl space in the attic,
and when I told my 4-year-old Daddy was going up to the attic
for a while, he said the cutest thing.
"If you and Mom are getting a divorce, just tell us."
Kids, right?
And it looks like I'll be doing these shows from home
for a while now that the president has extended
the social distancing guidelines to the end of April
while he and allies try to memory-hole
their early dismissal of the coronavirus outbreak.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
Donald Trump has tried repeatedly to claim
that no one could have seen this crisis coming,
even though he was repeatedly warned
in intelligence briefings in January and February
that it was coming.
In fact, the "New York Times" reported Tuesday
that White House economists published a study
last September that warned a pandemic disease could kill
a half million Americans and devastate the economy.
It went unheeded inside the administration.
"Unheeded" is a generous description.
In reality, what probably happened was an economist
put the study on Trump's desk and said,
"Sir, you should read this,"
and he said, "What is it, nerd?"
And then the economist said,
"It's about a possible pandemic."
And Trump said, "What's a pandemic, Poindexter?"
And then the economist said,
"A pandemic is when a disease spreads,"
and before he could finish, Trump was asleep on his desk
with a Burger King wrapper stuck to his face.
Probably.
And of course it went unheeded. Trump doesn't heed.
He doesn't heed the law. He doesn't heed advice.
And he especially doesn't heed studies.
In fact, he makes it actively harder
for everyone else to heed studies.
For example, at his press conference Tuesday night,
he turned the mic over to task force coordinator
Dr. Deborah Birx, who took the room of reporters
through a series of important slides of valuable data,
and Trump just wandered over
and stood right in front of the screen.
"Hey, man, we're trying to read. Get out of the way."
"Should I stand right here in front of the screen
so you can't read it?
Is that helpful, Dr. Birx? Dr. Birx?
Maybe I'll stand in front of the part that represents the time
I should have done something when I didn't do anything?
What do you think, Fauci?
Oh, oh, I got you again, Fauci.
I got you to touch your face again.
Oh, this is my favorite game, Fauci, and I always win.
I'm just kidding, we're pals.
Trump and Fauci, the original Lenny and Squiggy.
That's what people say."
Seriously, man, the only reason
anyone tunes in to these briefings
is to hear the scientists.
They're the feature presentation.
You're a dancing box of popcorn singing --
♪ Let's go out to the lobby ♪
♪ And ignore this terrifying data ♪
And that wasn't the only warning the Trump administration got.
In fact, before Trump even took office,
President Obama's outgoing team tried to prepare Trump
and his aides for a scenario exactly like this one.
-Days before Donald Trump took office,
some of President Obama's advisers
walked the incoming president's team
through a hypothetical scenario remarkably like the one
we're living through now.
It was a briefing on what would happen if a quick-spreading
virus were to race through London and Seoul,
and in that scenario they presented governments
imposing travel bans,
there were shortages at hospitals across the country,
and today, roughly two-thirds of those Trump administration
officials who participated in that simulation
are no longer in government.
-Of course they aren't.
This administration runs through employees faster
than an ice cream shop on the Coney Island Boardwalk.
Someone should have run a simulation for what happens
when an egomaniac fires every staff member
who ever disagrees with him.
"After three years, the simulation does show
it will be down to you, a professional liar,
and a Victorian-era teenage ghost."
I mean, Trump has had four, four Chiefs of Staff
in four years, and the current one, Mark Meadows,
officially started on the job yesterday.
Man, what a time to start working for this White House.
"All right, show me to my new office."
"I can't, it's been turned into a field hospital.
Also, you're the surgeon general now."
And what's his next move, zookeeper
at Joe Exotic's animal park?
And even if the officials in that briefing were still
in government, I bet they didn't learn anything anyway
because Trump was standing directly in front of the screen.
So Trump had many warnings
that something like this was coming,
and yet he and his aides repeatedly downplayed
or dismissed the threat.
He said cases would go down to zero,
that it would miraculously disappear,
and compared it to the flu even though coronavirus
is much more infectious and much deadlier.
-This is a flu. This is like a flu.
You treat this like a flu.
It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for.
And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this
in a fairly quick manner.
The flu in our country
kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year.
That was shocking to me.
Over the last ten years, we've lost 360,000.
These are people that have died from the flu,
from what we call the flu.
-What do you mean, what we call the flu?
It's the flu.
We all call it the flu.
Trump talks about regular words
like they're complicated medical jargon.
"We in the scientific community call it the flu.
It's called that because it started over in Europe
and then it flew here."
Also basically everything he said in that clip was wrong.
Turns out you aren't an expert in science
just because you look like a science experiment.
He's like a bunch of body parts a dead gangster
has sewn together and brought to life
by a guy who went to school with Dr. Frankenstein
but dropped out sophomore year.
I can just see him being tormented by villagers
with torches -- "Ah, fire bad,
but not that bad, basically the same as the flu.
Ah!"
Trump should be in a documentary where Jane Goodall
teaches him sign language.
"Donald, can you say the words 'distribution emergency'?"
-Distribution
-And then less than a month ago, Trump tweeted,
"So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common flu.
It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year.
Nothing is shut down.
Life and the economy go on.
At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases
of coronavirus with 22 deaths.
Think about that."
Any time a world-renowned idiot like Donald Trump
tells you to think about that, that's your cue
to exit the conversation.
He's like the dumbest guy at a cocktail party
trying to make conversation by telling you
something he read on a Snapple cap.
"Broccoli, you know, only vegetable that's also a flower,
so, that's something to think about."
Of course, the lie that coronavirus is just like the flu
did obvious damage.
You know how many people heard that and then repeated it?
Even if you hated Donald Trump
and knew not to trust a word he said,
everyone had that one friend or relative
on the text chain who said,
"You know, it's not going to be so bad.
It's going to be like the flu."
Or I should say, "It's going to be like
what we call the flu."
And now that his White House is projecting as many as 100,000
to 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus,
Trump has once again shifted his tone.
-I've had many friends, businesspeople,
people with great actually common sense,
they said, "Why don't we ride it out?"
A lot of people have said, a lot of people have thought about it,
"Ride it out, don't do anything, just ride it out
and think of it as the flu."
But it's not the flu. It's vicious.
-You're the one who said it was the flu.
Those friends of yours were you.
Or more likely, your other personalities.
That's serious Trump, angry Trump, sweaty Trump,
and silly Trump.
"And they all told me this is just like the flu.
Silly Trump even said it with an old-timey car horn.
[ Horn honks ] [ Laughs ]
Oh, Silly Trump, you're incorrigible."
And then Trump tried to claim that despite repeatedly
ignoring the problem,
failing to surge hospital capacity,
and falling behind on testing which inhibited
our ability to trace and quarantine cases
the way South Korea did, his administration actually
deserved credit for bringing the projected death toll
down to only 100,000 to 200,000.
-What do the models suggest is on the low end
if you have full mitigation?
-It says 100,000 to 200,000.
Anything -- it's a lot of people, right?
It's a lot of people.
Well, you didn't ask the other question --
What would have happened -- because this is the question
that I've been asking Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx for a long time,
and they've been working on this for a long time --
The question is, what would have happened if we did nothing?
-That is what you did.
You did nothing, and you do nothing.
You work less than CBD oil.
And doing nothing is the only thing you're good at.
Even when you had your own game show, you were only on it
for like five minutes at the end.
You were Alex Trebek if he only showed up for Final Jeopardy!
"Let's take a look at those scores, and, yikes,
looks like someone doesn't know their potent potables."
And really it's a shame you're president right now
because both you're deeply ill-equipped for the job
and because if you weren't president,
you would have been great at quarantine.
All you'd have to do is sit at home, order takeout,
watch TV, and tweet like the rest of us,
and those are all your favorite things.
You would have killed it in quarantine.
President Hillary Clinton would have held you up as an example
of how to do social distancing.
"We all have to follow the advice of doctors
and stay at home, just like Donald Trump,
who is currently sitting in his pajamas
watching a rerun of "Maury" and tweeting,
"Colonel Sanders should be promoted to General Sanders.
He is a national hero."
And yet, because he managed to restrain himself for an hour
after weeks of lies and serial failures
that led us to this harrowing moment,
some in the media were actually gullible enough
after four years to give Trump credit
for his change of tone.
-President Trump just moments ago with a somber tone.
-Now, for his part, and this gets to the tone
and demeanor change,
Trump warned that the next two weeks would be tough.
-It was a very sober president that we saw.
-The president did strike a very somber tone
in his latest briefing.
-This was a different Donald Trump tonight.
-My God, these people could be fooled by Jeffrey Dahmer.
"This is not Jeffrey Dahmer the crazed murderer.
This was a more serious Dahmer,
just quietly home-cooking a meal for one."
Of course it was a different Donald Trump.
It's a different Donald Trump every night, which means
it's always the same Donald Trump.
He never fundamentally changes who he is as a person.
He just swings wildly back and forth
from one extreme to the other.
He's like a werewolf but for the sun instead of the moon.
But Trump isn't the only one trying to memory-hole
his initial response to the crisis.
There's also one of his closest and most loyal defenders on TV,
Sean Hannity.
A few weeks ago, Hannity tried to claim
he was taking the situation seriously.
And on Monday he actually accused others in the media
of spreading conspiracy theories.
-This program has always taken the coronavirus seriously.
And we've never called the virus a hoax.
How does anyone trust the outright conspiracy theorists,
that whole network full of lies, conspiracy theories?
-Dude, all you do is spread conspiracy theories.
You're like Alex Jones without the brain pills.
In fact, you should probably take some.
Your network spent years promoting
insane conspiracy theories from death panels
to birtherism to nonexistent voter fraud.
Fox has even interviewed an actual lizard person.
And in particular, in this particular case,
Hannity lined up behind Trump during his early claim
that the coronavirus was no big deal,
using the word "hoax" to describe criticism
of Trump's response and even suggesting at one point
that it might be a deep-state plot to destroy the economy.
-They are now sadly politicizing and actually
weaponizing an infectious disease,
in what is basically just the latest effort
to bludgeon President Trump.
They're scaring the living hell out of people.
And I see it again as, like,
"Oh, let's bludgeon Trump with this new hoax."
There's an MIT guy I noticed on Twitter, he said, quote,
"Coronavirus fearmongering by the deep state will go down
in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies,
suppress dissent, and push mandated medicines."
May be true.
-You're not a news show if you end your segment
with "May be true."
That's a tagline you get at 2:00 A.M.
after one of those shows about ancient aliens
teaching the Aztecs how to grow grain.
"May be true. Probably bull [bleep]."
Seriously, we should get Trump in there
to stand in front of Hannity during a show.
So one more time, side by side, here is Sean Hannity.
-They're scaring the living hell out of people,
and I see it again as like,
"Oh, let's bludgeon Trump with this new hoax."
This program has always taken the coronavirus seriously
and we've never called the virus a hoax.
-Man, that takes some balls.
If Donald Trump turned out to be an incredible president
who brought the country together, I'd eat my words.
I wouldn't sit here and swear
that I never once said he should be in a documentary
where Jane Goodall teaches him sign language.
Trump should be in a documentary
where Jane Goodall teaches him sign language.
No, sure, I mean, yeah, when you cut it together like that.
The president and his allies wasted precious weeks
when we could have been preparing for this crisis.
We saw it coming. We could have ramped up testing
and hospital capacity, quarantined and traced cases
to contain the spread.
Now we're facing the prospect of a horrible tragedy.
And when the time for accountability comes,
Trump should be removed from office...
-In a fairly quick manner.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
Stay safe. Wash your hands. We love you.