Watch Trump physically prevent Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine.
"I answered this 15 times. You don't have to answer." — Trump prevents Dr Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine pic.twitter.com/8R1K1hDsaX
Trump’s response is understandable. The Press are not fools, and Fauci was highly likely to expose Trump’s own profound ignorance about hydroxywhatevertheycallit.
And Trump belongs to that special class of ignoramii who know instinctively when they are in over their heads: which is most of the time in Trump’s case, so he gets plenty of situation practice.
Trump did not say, “You don’t have to answer” to Fauci. He said, “You don’t have to ask that question” to the reporter.
Exposing Trump for the fool he is doesn’t require making things up, and when people who can be swayed see this kind of misrepresentation it makes them less likely to turn on Trump.
Also, Trump doesn’t say, “I’ve answered that question 15 times”. He says, “Do you know how many times he’s answered that question? Maybe 15 times.”
So it’s a complete misrepresentation to say Trump is blocking Fauci from answering because Trump has already answered. He saying Fauci has already answered it.
Come on, we’re on the side of truth here, right? We don’t have to wildly misquote like this to discredit Trump. There are enough real quotes to discredit him without resorting to this.
Come on, we’re on the side of truth here, right? We don’t have to wildly misquote like this to discredit Trump. There are enough real quotes to discredit him without resorting to this.
Trump is a political standover man, a political stalker, and a control-freak. His #1 priority is advancing the fortunes, political and otherwise, of Trump. Nothing much else matters.
So he decided to prevent Fauci from answering, and to control-freak the whole situation.
In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, he left his podium and stood right behind her as she was talking. (As he did with Fauci.) Watching that on TV from here in rural Australia, I could not believe that Clinton would let him get away with it. But she did, and I believe lost the election at that point.
I expected her to wheel around and ask in a loud, clear voice, “who do you think you are stalking, Buster?” And then to call upon the Chairman to order Trump back to his podium. I think that it could only have gained her votes in the US Bible Belt. They don’t like that sort of thing. There are scriptural injunctions against it, I am sure. I would look first at the Sermon on the Mount.
And Ruth did not say to Naomi: “Thy God shall be my God, and they stalker, my stalker.”
Omar, I agree with you on that moment. Hillary had been a bugaboo of the right for decades already, and they all had it in for her, but the election was down to the wire (i.e. requiring massive vote suppression and other dirty tricks). That moment (among others) could have made a difference. Why in the world she put up with that fucking creep heavy breathing down her neck escapes me. Perhaps her handlers told her never to turn her back to the audience and never to seem shrill etc. Result: instead she looked like prey. She should have said something, anything.
“I’m reminded of an old podiatrist’s joke: what did one toe say to the other toe? Don’t look now, but there’s a heel behind us.”
“Look at this guy now. He can’t win a debate, so he thinks he can physically intimidate me. Is he going to beat me up?”
“I have a question for the moderator: Is the heavy breathing guy behind me holding a knife?”
She knew it too.
Clinton calls the episode “incredibly uncomfortable” in her forthcoming account of the 2016 presidential campaign, titled What Happened. “He was literally breathing down my neck,” she says. “My skin crawled.”
She also describes a kind of gut check: “It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say, loudly and clearly: Back up you creep, get away from me.’”
Most American women have not shared a debate stage with Donald Trump. But as Andrea Mitchell put it on Morning Joe on Wednesday, “every woman has had an experience with a man that is that kind of threatening moment.” And many have sat still while men invade their space or otherwise harass them, wondering whether to speak up or stay silent.
Clinton chose to ignore Trump’s looming, but she says she’s always wondered if she should have confronted him. “Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.”
If we’re dealing in 2016 counterfactuals (because, hey, why not?), we cannot simply assume that Clinton’s about-face to stand up to the bully would’ve played out like an inspirational ’80’s movie. At this point the *entire pundit class* assumed that she was going to be elected, and she remained the odds-on favourite until the middle of the actual election day. I’d give even better odds to the scenario where she turns around and shows him up going down *exactly* the other way around, with every single non-Fox talking head scolding her for coming across as a schoolmarm laying unjustifiably into the class clown, and Trump playing them all for fools.
I’d also bet that, all else equal except for that moment in that debate, the votes would have fallen more-or-less the same, Trump would’ve won, and counterfactual Papito and Omar would be patting themselves on the back after saying that Hillary would’ve won only if she hadn’t condescended to that jerk’s level, if she’d kept a cool head and showed herself as a serious, sober, thoughtful professional who could out-steel the Republican blowhards.
If Clinton had turned and confronted DJT, she would have been vilified as a shrill harridan. If Clinton had called on the moderators to intervene, she’d not only be shrill, but also whiny and weak, needing somebody to intervene for her, unable to stand up to DJT herself.
I thought at the time that, if the moderators didn’t see fit to admonish DJT to obey the rules, her showing nerves of steel while he demonstrated himself to be a creepy misogynist stalker, an intimidating bully, showed more clearly his absolute lack of character than intervention either by Clinton or by the moderators. That would have cut short his image as an intimidating mafioso thug; his continued stalking was one of the most spine-chilling displays of malevolence I’ve ever seen. If that wasn’t enough to convince voters that DJT is a bad person, not qualified for the office he was seeking, it’s hard to imagine what would.
There were so many other instances in which DJT showed himself to be cruel, heartless, bullying, dishonest, thuggish, grotesque, etc., or any number of other immediately-disqualifying character traits, that it’s still unbelievable to me that he was ever nominated or elected. But I have no doubt that, had someone, either Clinton or the moderators, called DJT on his misbehavior, Clinton would have been punished for it. In that sense, it was an unwinnable moment for Clinton. No matter what anyone did or didn’t do, in this society, the woman is the one who gets blamed, not the male bully.
I’m ringing in with Seth and maddog. I live in the midwest, and I promise you, that would not have helped her. She would be “shrill”, “aggressive”, “ball buster”, and “uppity” (though uppity would not necessarily be the word used). She would be a bitch, a c**t, a nag, a shrew. She would have overstepped.
One data point that supports me is that all my liberal friends here actually disliked the fact that she was “ambitious”. The anti-woman language flowed like a river, among the non-Fox crowd who felt she was cold, distant, ambitious, etc – all terms applied to her because she is a strong woman.
Clinton was in a no-win situation. Show strength? Too masculine, not warm enough, too strong – in short, not feminine enough. Not show strength? Too weak to be president, too emotional, too soft – in short, too feminine.
I really, really, really wanted to see Warren get the nomination this time – and at the same time, I didn’t. Why? Because we need to beat Trump. Because we need at least a veneer of sanity in the White House. And it is likely her vote would have fallen out similar to Clinton. People who so loved Warren in 2016, wished she was the candidate, would oh, so vote for her if it was only her instead of Clinton, started using the same words to describe her the moment she became a candidate. Too strong. Not strong enough. Not warm. Shrill (neither of them was shrill, and Bernie is shrill, but is never called that).
Note that I and, if I may be so bold, iknklast and maddog and latsot, aren’t saying that *we* would not have understood, and even personally loved, if she’d have rounded on the Leaning Tower of Pizza and kicked him square in the balls on air. I personally felt my skin crawl when I saw him stalking her; I knew just how unfair it was, and how wrong, and how indicative of the bastard’s lack of boundaries and his lack of even the most basic level of human respect.
But I also remembered Basket of Deplorables, and how the media went insane stoking the grievances and hurt feelings of people who were supposedly proudly anti-PC and anti-SJW and pro fuck-your-feelings. I remember how the simple message of empathy and understanding, the clarion call that the Democratic Party must find a way to reach out to the salvageable half of the forty percent of the country that had become enthralled by the cavalcade of racist belligerent nonsense, was elided into a sneer of contempt. And in service to the most nakedly and proudly contemptuous human being to ever run for president!
Remember that this faux-pas was fresh in her mind, and in the minds of everyone watching; she would not have just been rounding on Trump and giving him what-for, but she would have once again been laying a switch into the (by-then-proudly-self-described) deplorables, and they would have reacted like wounded animals.
But, in any case, these concerns properly belong to those not-exactly-halcyon days. They do us no good to ruminate upon overlong here and now. We’re stuck with a reality TV show clown at the head of an increasingly disunited states, and we’re hoping he doesn’t get an itchy finger that only a certain big red button can fix before we can be rid of him for good and all, this November or a few Novembers thence.
Oh honestly Skeletor. Rupar live-tweets the press briefing rallies, and it’s not easy to get what everyone says accurately when live tweeting, especially when there’s cross-talk as with Trump talking over the reporter. He didn’t “misrepresent”; he may have gotten some it wrong. (I haven’t replayed it.) It’s not “wildly misquoting” and the difference between what he tweeted and what you say Trump said is trivial. The point is that the reporter asked Fauci a question about hydroxychloroquine and Trump lurched forward like Boris Karloff with a bolt through his head and shouted the reporter down with the result that Fauci didn’t answer the question. Your indignant rebuke of non-existent misrepresentation is so beside the point it’s laughable.
Ok I played it again. I had to play it twice to be able to hear the first bit, because the reporter is still talking and what Trump says is very indistinct. The “you don’t have to ask” as opposed to “you don’t have to answer” is easier to hear, but Rupar was live-tweeting so he got it slightly wrong. But does the difference change the meaning significantly? Hardly. “You don’t have to ask that question” is rude to the reporter as opposed to rude to Fauci, but who really cares when the truth is he was being rude and abusive and dangerous to all of us because he was and is busily urging us to take a dangerous untested for this purpose med that can do harm to people, in direct face-to-face defiance of what the medical experts including Fauci are telling him and us. What DIFFERENCE does it make whether he told the reporter or Fauci “you don’t have to answer that question”?????
And to conclude – now that irritation has somewhat dissipated – you could have just said “To be exact, he said” and then what he said. It’s the framing it as underhanded malicious exaggeration that’s so annoying. Funny how it turns out to be you who’s actually doing that.
Skeletor is pedantic. But I think a lot of it comes from his need to feel above the rest of us. See? We are tied to partisan subjectivity, while he is an objective voice of reason crying out in the wilderness. He must see something no one else saw; otherwise, he is an unhappy Skeletor.
I know a lot of people like this. I usually avoid them when possible, because no one can have a conversation when they are around, and their nitpicking rarely makes anything more than a semantic or pedantic difference. And they tend to be smug.
Fortunately Skeletor can contribute to the conversation when not doing the nitpick thing, but a tiny nitpick combined with righteous indignation as if it had been conscious and massive misrepresentation CAN JUMP OFF A CLIFF.
The arguments that Clinton would have been served up on toast by Fox News etc etc and would have gone over like a lead balloon in the Midwest are arguments against the wisdom of her ever entering the contest or seeking to get anywhere in it in the first place. And that she would have done a lot better if she had just stayed home and baked a cake. Or something.
She was describable as an assertive and uppity bitch way out of line from the get-go, and yet she finished up with more of the popular vote than Trump did. He only rode into office on the peculiarities of that College of Cardinals, or the Electoral College, or whatever it is called.
That’s enough counterfactuals for one day. Now where was I?
Omar, I don’t believe I was making that argument. What I actually believe is that the Electoral College has given the midwest more power than they should have by their numbers. And that the media is to blame, not Clinton. The problem isn’t Clinton entering the race or winning the nomination; the problem is a larger one with a pundit class that blames her for all of this, and that trumpeted every word she said as if it was something awful. I believe she should have been in the race; I believe she should have won. She would have been far from perfect, but when have we had a perfect president? And her closeness to perfect would have been so much closer than the current occupant of the White House.
In functional democracies government leaders will tell their staff to not answer questions, its not a good thing when it happens, but it does. When they start telling the press to not ask those questions, that steps on the first amendment, and the step is on the way to dictatorship.
Trump’s response is understandable. The Press are not fools, and Fauci was highly likely to expose Trump’s own profound ignorance about hydroxywhatevertheycallit.
And Trump belongs to that special class of ignoramii who know instinctively when they are in over their heads: which is most of the time in Trump’s case, so he gets plenty of situation practice.
Trump did not say, “You don’t have to answer” to Fauci. He said, “You don’t have to ask that question” to the reporter.
Exposing Trump for the fool he is doesn’t require making things up, and when people who can be swayed see this kind of misrepresentation it makes them less likely to turn on Trump.
Also, Trump doesn’t say, “I’ve answered that question 15 times”. He says, “Do you know how many times he’s answered that question? Maybe 15 times.”
So it’s a complete misrepresentation to say Trump is blocking Fauci from answering because Trump has already answered. He saying Fauci has already answered it.
Come on, we’re on the side of truth here, right? We don’t have to wildly misquote like this to discredit Trump. There are enough real quotes to discredit him without resorting to this.
Skeletor:
But Trump did block Fauci from answering the question. The question was asked to Fauci and Trump prevented him from answering it.
Skeletor:
Trump is a political standover man, a political stalker, and a control-freak. His #1 priority is advancing the fortunes, political and otherwise, of Trump. Nothing much else matters.
So he decided to prevent Fauci from answering, and to control-freak the whole situation.
In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, he left his podium and stood right behind her as she was talking. (As he did with Fauci.) Watching that on TV from here in rural Australia, I could not believe that Clinton would let him get away with it. But she did, and I believe lost the election at that point.
I expected her to wheel around and ask in a loud, clear voice, “who do you think you are stalking, Buster?” And then to call upon the Chairman to order Trump back to his podium. I think that it could only have gained her votes in the US Bible Belt. They don’t like that sort of thing. There are scriptural injunctions against it, I am sure. I would look first at the Sermon on the Mount.
And Ruth did not say to Naomi: “Thy God shall be my God, and they stalker, my stalker.”
If Fauci keeps telling the truth, how are they going to make money off Jared’s hydroxychloroquine stockpile?
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-us-has-stockpiled-29m-hydroxychloroquine-pills-amid-pandemic-it-may-not-work-then-1496232
Omar, I agree with you on that moment. Hillary had been a bugaboo of the right for decades already, and they all had it in for her, but the election was down to the wire (i.e. requiring massive vote suppression and other dirty tricks). That moment (among others) could have made a difference. Why in the world she put up with that fucking creep heavy breathing down her neck escapes me. Perhaps her handlers told her never to turn her back to the audience and never to seem shrill etc. Result: instead she looked like prey. She should have said something, anything.
“I’m reminded of an old podiatrist’s joke: what did one toe say to the other toe? Don’t look now, but there’s a heel behind us.”
“Look at this guy now. He can’t win a debate, so he thinks he can physically intimidate me. Is he going to beat me up?”
“I have a question for the moderator: Is the heavy breathing guy behind me holding a knife?”
She knew it too.
Papito:
Excellent post. Thanks.
If we’re dealing in 2016 counterfactuals (because, hey, why not?), we cannot simply assume that Clinton’s about-face to stand up to the bully would’ve played out like an inspirational ’80’s movie. At this point the *entire pundit class* assumed that she was going to be elected, and she remained the odds-on favourite until the middle of the actual election day. I’d give even better odds to the scenario where she turns around and shows him up going down *exactly* the other way around, with every single non-Fox talking head scolding her for coming across as a schoolmarm laying unjustifiably into the class clown, and Trump playing them all for fools.
I’d also bet that, all else equal except for that moment in that debate, the votes would have fallen more-or-less the same, Trump would’ve won, and counterfactual Papito and Omar would be patting themselves on the back after saying that Hillary would’ve won only if she hadn’t condescended to that jerk’s level, if she’d kept a cool head and showed herself as a serious, sober, thoughtful professional who could out-steel the Republican blowhards.
Come on, guys.
Seth, it’s entirely possible it wouldn’t have made a difference. But in the moment I really wanted her to say something, and years later I still do.
I think Seth is right.
If Clinton had turned and confronted DJT, she would have been vilified as a shrill harridan. If Clinton had called on the moderators to intervene, she’d not only be shrill, but also whiny and weak, needing somebody to intervene for her, unable to stand up to DJT herself.
I thought at the time that, if the moderators didn’t see fit to admonish DJT to obey the rules, her showing nerves of steel while he demonstrated himself to be a creepy misogynist stalker, an intimidating bully, showed more clearly his absolute lack of character than intervention either by Clinton or by the moderators. That would have cut short his image as an intimidating mafioso thug; his continued stalking was one of the most spine-chilling displays of malevolence I’ve ever seen. If that wasn’t enough to convince voters that DJT is a bad person, not qualified for the office he was seeking, it’s hard to imagine what would.
There were so many other instances in which DJT showed himself to be cruel, heartless, bullying, dishonest, thuggish, grotesque, etc., or any number of other immediately-disqualifying character traits, that it’s still unbelievable to me that he was ever nominated or elected. But I have no doubt that, had someone, either Clinton or the moderators, called DJT on his misbehavior, Clinton would have been punished for it. In that sense, it was an unwinnable moment for Clinton. No matter what anyone did or didn’t do, in this society, the woman is the one who gets blamed, not the male bully.
I’m ringing in with Seth and maddog. I live in the midwest, and I promise you, that would not have helped her. She would be “shrill”, “aggressive”, “ball buster”, and “uppity” (though uppity would not necessarily be the word used). She would be a bitch, a c**t, a nag, a shrew. She would have overstepped.
One data point that supports me is that all my liberal friends here actually disliked the fact that she was “ambitious”. The anti-woman language flowed like a river, among the non-Fox crowd who felt she was cold, distant, ambitious, etc – all terms applied to her because she is a strong woman.
Clinton was in a no-win situation. Show strength? Too masculine, not warm enough, too strong – in short, not feminine enough. Not show strength? Too weak to be president, too emotional, too soft – in short, too feminine.
I really, really, really wanted to see Warren get the nomination this time – and at the same time, I didn’t. Why? Because we need to beat Trump. Because we need at least a veneer of sanity in the White House. And it is likely her vote would have fallen out similar to Clinton. People who so loved Warren in 2016, wished she was the candidate, would oh, so vote for her if it was only her instead of Clinton, started using the same words to describe her the moment she became a candidate. Too strong. Not strong enough. Not warm. Shrill (neither of them was shrill, and Bernie is shrill, but is never called that).
I’m with Seth and maddog for the reasons already stated. I have no doubt that Clinton would have been the one described as out of line.
Note that I and, if I may be so bold, iknklast and maddog and latsot, aren’t saying that *we* would not have understood, and even personally loved, if she’d have rounded on the Leaning Tower of Pizza and kicked him square in the balls on air. I personally felt my skin crawl when I saw him stalking her; I knew just how unfair it was, and how wrong, and how indicative of the bastard’s lack of boundaries and his lack of even the most basic level of human respect.
But I also remembered Basket of Deplorables, and how the media went insane stoking the grievances and hurt feelings of people who were supposedly proudly anti-PC and anti-SJW and pro fuck-your-feelings. I remember how the simple message of empathy and understanding, the clarion call that the Democratic Party must find a way to reach out to the salvageable half of the forty percent of the country that had become enthralled by the cavalcade of racist belligerent nonsense, was elided into a sneer of contempt. And in service to the most nakedly and proudly contemptuous human being to ever run for president!
Remember that this faux-pas was fresh in her mind, and in the minds of everyone watching; she would not have just been rounding on Trump and giving him what-for, but she would have once again been laying a switch into the (by-then-proudly-self-described) deplorables, and they would have reacted like wounded animals.
But, in any case, these concerns properly belong to those not-exactly-halcyon days. They do us no good to ruminate upon overlong here and now. We’re stuck with a reality TV show clown at the head of an increasingly disunited states, and we’re hoping he doesn’t get an itchy finger that only a certain big red button can fix before we can be rid of him for good and all, this November or a few Novembers thence.
Oh honestly Skeletor. Rupar live-tweets the press briefing rallies, and it’s not easy to get what everyone says accurately when live tweeting, especially when there’s cross-talk as with Trump talking over the reporter. He didn’t “misrepresent”; he may have gotten some it wrong. (I haven’t replayed it.) It’s not “wildly misquoting” and the difference between what he tweeted and what you say Trump said is trivial. The point is that the reporter asked Fauci a question about hydroxychloroquine and Trump lurched forward like Boris Karloff with a bolt through his head and shouted the reporter down with the result that Fauci didn’t answer the question. Your indignant rebuke of non-existent misrepresentation is so beside the point it’s laughable.
Ok I played it again. I had to play it twice to be able to hear the first bit, because the reporter is still talking and what Trump says is very indistinct. The “you don’t have to ask” as opposed to “you don’t have to answer” is easier to hear, but Rupar was live-tweeting so he got it slightly wrong. But does the difference change the meaning significantly? Hardly. “You don’t have to ask that question” is rude to the reporter as opposed to rude to Fauci, but who really cares when the truth is he was being rude and abusive and dangerous to all of us because he was and is busily urging us to take a dangerous untested for this purpose med that can do harm to people, in direct face-to-face defiance of what the medical experts including Fauci are telling him and us. What DIFFERENCE does it make whether he told the reporter or Fauci “you don’t have to answer that question”?????
And to conclude – now that irritation has somewhat dissipated – you could have just said “To be exact, he said” and then what he said. It’s the framing it as underhanded malicious exaggeration that’s so annoying. Funny how it turns out to be you who’s actually doing that.
Skeletor is pedantic. But I think a lot of it comes from his need to feel above the rest of us. See? We are tied to partisan subjectivity, while he is an objective voice of reason crying out in the wilderness. He must see something no one else saw; otherwise, he is an unhappy Skeletor.
I know a lot of people like this. I usually avoid them when possible, because no one can have a conversation when they are around, and their nitpicking rarely makes anything more than a semantic or pedantic difference. And they tend to be smug.
Fortunately Skeletor can contribute to the conversation when not doing the nitpick thing, but a tiny nitpick combined with righteous indignation as if it had been conscious and massive misrepresentation CAN JUMP OFF A CLIFF.
iknklast et al:
The arguments that Clinton would have been served up on toast by Fox News etc etc and would have gone over like a lead balloon in the Midwest are arguments against the wisdom of her ever entering the contest or seeking to get anywhere in it in the first place. And that she would have done a lot better if she had just stayed home and baked a cake. Or something.
She was describable as an assertive and uppity bitch way out of line from the get-go, and yet she finished up with more of the popular vote than Trump did. He only rode into office on the peculiarities of that College of Cardinals, or the Electoral College, or whatever it is called.
That’s enough counterfactuals for one day. Now where was I?
Omar, I don’t believe I was making that argument. What I actually believe is that the Electoral College has given the midwest more power than they should have by their numbers. And that the media is to blame, not Clinton. The problem isn’t Clinton entering the race or winning the nomination; the problem is a larger one with a pundit class that blames her for all of this, and that trumpeted every word she said as if it was something awful. I believe she should have been in the race; I believe she should have won. She would have been far from perfect, but when have we had a perfect president? And her closeness to perfect would have been so much closer than the current occupant of the White House.
#2 Skeletor
That’s worse.
In functional democracies government leaders will tell their staff to not answer questions, its not a good thing when it happens, but it does. When they start telling the press to not ask those questions, that steps on the first amendment, and the step is on the way to dictatorship.