-Hello, everyone, and welcome back
to the captain's quarters on the S.S. Pandemic.
As we've established, I found my way here via a portal
that connects my attic door to my in-laws' fireplace,
leading many of you to ask,
"What's happening in the attic now that you're gone?"
Well, according to my dear friend and attic sitter,
Ethan Hawke, the wasps
have taken over the cameras and are filming
their very own late night show.
But apparently they spend the whole time complaining
about this one moth who's king of the insects.
And, I don't know, to me it sounds like
that would get pretty repetitive.
And speaking of dumb jokes,
the president shook up his flailing campaign
as the coronavirus outbreak spirals further out of control.
And now, he's honing in on two key reelection strategies --
less testing and more racism.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
Given that the country is currently on fire
after a once-in-a-century cataclysm inflamed
by the president's cruelty and incompetence,
he's had some trouble
coming up with a solid re-election message.
It's not a great sign when your own campaign manager
is advertising face masks with your name on them.
Each breath you take could be the one that kills you!
Four more years?
Which is why he called a fake press conference on Tuesday
to spin his wheels and try out yet another
deranged campaign message --
the Democrats want to abolish everything.
-These are actual key elements
of the Biden-Sanders unity platform.
Abolish immigration detention.
They're going to abolish immigration enforcement.
Abolish law enforcement as we know it.
Abolish completely the death penalty.
They want to abolish our police departments.
They want to abolish our prisons, I guess.
Abolish all charter schools.
Abolish educational standards.
Abolish in the suburbs --
You're going to abolish the suburbs with this.
-First of all, most of that sounds awesome.
All you're doing is listing a bunch of things people hate
and claiming the Democrats will get rid of them.
"Democrats want to abolish telemarketers, the DMV,
gate-crashing at the airport, and in-laws."
And of course, I would never abolish in-laws.
If someone else owned this house, they'd probably want me
to cease taping a television show immediately.
Also, I love how transparent he is
that he's just making stuff up when he says,
"They want to abolish prisons, I guess."
He sounds like your dad describing a movie he saw on TNT
last night as he was falling asleep.
"They were on a boat, I guess,
and Tom Hanks was in it, I think.
It was just a disagreement as to who was captain."
-I'm the captain.
-Oh, sorry, I wasn't talking about you.
-Okay.
-Third, when Trump said Democrats want to abolish
the suburbs, he was talking about a program
implemented by the Obama administration to desegregate
the suburbs by enforcing the Fair Housing Act of 1968,
which outlawed discrimination
and racial segregation in housing.
So not only was Trump's lie racist, it was absurd.
He makes it sound like Democrats are trying to ban
strip malls and cul-de-sacs.
"They want to take away your Hot Topics
and your Auntie Anne's.
But we're not gonna let that happen, folks."
Without suburbs, who will borrow our pruning shears
and not return them?
Where will our adorable space aliens land
and befriend our children?
Where will our fathers painstakingly restore
classic cars in a vein and desperate attempt
to recapture their youth?
This is all Trump has left, racist grievance politics.
In the middle of a raging pandemic
that is spiraling out of control,
has killed nearly 140,000 Americans,
and put tens of millions out of work, the president
took time out of his day to pose
with a bunch of Goya food products
on the Oval Office desk.
Well, at least he didn't have to clear anything off his desk
to take this photo.
He looks like a divorcée trying to prove he's fine
by posting on Facebook, "About to make dinner.
So sorry, Leslie, I guess I can do this by myself."
But at least that smile -- that smile
on the president's face is sincere.
Let's punch in on that.
Jesus.
He looks like he just took a big swig of ice water
and forgot he had a temporary filling.
The U.S. set a record for new daily coronavirus cases
on Tuesday, but by all means,
celebrate with a chocolate wafer.
And to anyone who would promote a product from the Oval Office
during a pandemic, Goya [bleep] yourself.
-Good one, Seth.
-Thank you, Captain.
-Thank you for the wordplay.
-The thing is, none of this is working.
Yesterday, Trump got yet another devastating poll result
when Quinnipiac found that he was behind by Biden
by 15 points, and that a stunning 60 percent of Americans
disapprove of Trump's job performance.
I guess my only question about that is, who are the other 40?
Do they all work at the Lysol factory?
And yes, I know we've been here before,
so we absolutely must be cautious.
It is by no means a given that Trump will lose.
But as NBC News reported this week, the Trump campaign
has struggled to land a punch on Biden.
As NBC reported, the Trump campaign feels like
none of the president's attacks have worked.
He has tried tagging Biden as untrustworthy -- "Corrupt Joe"
and lethargic -- "Sleepy Joe" --
but it hasn't dragged Biden down with voters as Trump had hoped.
"Sleepy sounds pretty good when you've had four years
of exhaustion," a White House official quipped.
And it's hard to tag someone else as sleepy and corrupt
when you look like a Mafia don
who falls asleep in his spaghetti.
But yeah, "Sleepy" sounds great, and that's Biden.
He's a human Ambien.
He's so boring that even when he starts telling a story
about some knife fight between rival gangs
at a public pool, your first reaction is to say,
"Don't start until I get my blanket!"
And that's great.
You know what I'd give to go one day without waking up
and immediately seeing six different news alerts
on my phone about crazy [bleep] the president did?
At this point, I'd vote for one of those drinking birds.
So now Trump is shaking up his campaign,
demoting his campaign manager, Brad Parscale,
after the campaign's embarrassing Tulsa debacle,
in which Trump spoke to an empty arena that somehow
also managed to seed a coronavirus outbreak.
And I'm no expert, but generally speaking,
things are not going great when you're firing
your campaign manager 100 days before the election.
That's like a jockey jumping off his horse in the home stretch
and deciding to run the rest of the way.
But hey, at least Parscale can go back to his old job
as the, I don't know,
drummer for a Norwegian black metal band?
Dude looks like an out-of-shape Conor McGregor.
Trump's campaign is sputtering because the coronavirus crisis
isn't a problem Trump can just B.S. his away out of.
It's a real thing with real consequences,
and the only way to make those go away is by governing,
which is just not in his skill set.
In fact, when it comes to actually governing,
Trump has had one very specific obsession
since the start of the this pandemic, and that's
his obsession with slowing down testing for coronavirus
so he can hide the numbers and make himself him look better.
And because Trump isn't just a criminal, but a dumb criminal,
he has openly confessed to this many times.
One of the first times was in back in March
when he said publicly that he would prefer
not to let American coronavirus patients off a cruise ship,
because it would make the numbers worse.
-I mean, frankly, if it were up to me,
I would be inclined to say, "Leave everybody on the ship
for a period of time and use the ship as your base."
But a lot of people would rather do it a different way.
They would rather quarantine people when they land.
Now, when they do that, our numbers are going to go up,
Okay? Our numbers are going to go up.
They would like to have the people come off.
I'd like to have the people stay, but I'd go with them.
I told them to make the final decision.
I would rather -- because I like the numbers
being where they are.
I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship.
I'd rather have them stay on, personally.
-That's right. President Jigsaw over here
openly said he wanted to keep Americans trapped on an infected
cruise ship like some sort of coronavirus-themed escape room.
Which, even if there was no coronavirus
would still be a punishment, because no one ever leaves
an escape room happier than when they entered.
In my experience, there's always a fight or whose fault it was
that you couldn't solve the riddle hidden under
the fortuneteller's crystal ball or whatever.
"Beth, I told you there was a clue in the tarot cards,
but you spent all your time rubbing the magic genie lamp!
Happy birthday, Beth, and go to hell!"
Trump has repeated this desire to hide the true extent
of the crisis from Americans many times.
At a White House event on Monday, for example,
a reporter asked him about the lie that more testing
leads to more cases, and he offered this
truly incoherent response.
-President Trump, you've said many times that the number
of coronavirus cases is going up because testing is increasing.
-That's right. -Do you acknowledge
that it's going up for other reasons, too?
For example, that it's actually spreading?
And what are you going to do to stop the spread?
-Well, you know that we have one of the lowest
mortality rates anywhere.
If you know, Biden and Obama stopped their testing.
They just stopped it. You probably know that.
I'm sure you don't want to report it.
But they stopped testing.
Right in the middle, they just went, "No more testing,"
and on a much lesser problem than the problem that we have,
obviously, with respect to
this is the worst thing that's happened since probably 1917.
This is a very bad -- all over the world.
It's 188 countries right now.
But, no, we are -- we test more than anybody, by far.
And when you test, you create cases.
So we've created cases.
-Okay. There's so much brain diarrhea
to wade through here, I might have to borrow
the sea captain's ship.
-Arrgh, she's hearty vessel!
But no match for that rusty chop!
-Gross, okay.
First of all, you're not "creating" cases.
The cases are there, whether you test for them or not.
You don't "create" a fire by putting a smoke alarm
in your house. If someone gets sick,
they're sick whether they get tested or not.
It's not like they're at home lying in bed with
a 104-degree fever and no sense of taste or smell
saying, hey, "As long as I don't get tested,
I don't have to get treated!
Now to spend the next three days crawling to my kitchen."
Second, why do you keep saying
the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic happened in 1917?
Trump has said this more times than I can count,
and apparently just no one has corrected him.
-We have a very unusual situation
where something came in that nobody has seen
for many, many decades,
probably 1917 would be the closest analogy,
if you look at it.
The likes of which this world
has not seen since 1917.
Nothing like this since 1917.
Last time was -- of this magnitude, 1917.
That's a long time ago.
-We haven't seen anything like this in 100 and some-odd years.
1917.
But 1917, so that's over 100 years ago.
1917, which was the greatest of them all.
Right? 1917.
In 1917, had they had the Internet and all the means
of communication, they could have practiced distancing.
1917, the pandemic. It was something.
1917. That's something.
You all know what happened in 1917.
The big one was 1917.
1917.
Who would have thought? 1917.
-It's weird, because it's arguably the least offensive
thing he's ever done, and yet it's so infuriating.
Just get it right.
It's like if Genghis Khan kept saying "supposably."
But of course he got the year wrong.
He's probably been getting dates wrong his whole life.
Last year, he sent Don Jr. a birthday card that said,
"Congrats on turning 8 or whatever."
So Trump has been very clear about the fact
that he wants to slow down testing
because it makes him look bad.
And now, he's getting his wish.
Today, it was reported that the CDC had removed
some coronavirus hospital data from its website
after the Trump administration announced a plan
to send that information to the administration and not the CDC.
And I'm sorry, but the last person I'd trust
with any kind of data is Donald Trump.
The dude brags that he can drink water with one hand
and identify a camel on a piece of paper.
You'd think he just got out of a decade-long coma.
And on top of that, we're once again we're seeing
nationwide testing problems and delays,
with cars lined up for hours in the scorching heat
and a major testing company announcing that
the turnaround for tests is now seven days,
with some waiting even longer.
-I'm Carter Evans in California,
where lines just to get a COVID test
stretch for blocks.
In Arizona, one of the hardest hit states,
the wait is up to 12 hours.
-The turnaround time for our testing in Arizona
is really bad.
You can get your test and those results
may not come back for seven or eight days.
-It took eight days for Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms
to learn she was positive.
-Eight days?
It takes as long to get your COVID test
as it took Trump to get down that ramp.
Ramp joke.
If we had two cameras, that would have been --
we would have taken a close-up there.
What's the point of even getting a test
if it takes that long for the results to come back?
It's like if your car alarm went off
eight hours after it was stolen.
Trump's getting exactly what he wanted, slower testing.
Meanwhile, Trump and the people around him
are tested constantly, and their results come back right away.
As long as they're safe, Trump couldn't care less about you.
But voters see through it, which is why his poll numbers
are bad as they've ever been.
The Biden campaign must turn on the news every day
and say to themselves...
-Our numbers are going to go up.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
-So many New Yorkers are needing to turn to City Harvest
for help feeding their families, and they need your support
now more than ever.
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Stay safe. Wear a mask. We love you.