It’s under control as much as you can control it
He’s bumpity-bumping down the stairs.
Donald Trump stumbled through his second damaging interview in as many weeks, floundering in a conversation with the news website Axios over key issues he is tasked with responding to as president.
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In a lengthy discussion about the US’s poor response to coronavirus, Trump described the pandemic as “under control”.
Swan responded: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
“They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”
Ohhhhhhhhhh I see, “under control” means “as under control as we can get it, which is zero, because we’re not trying, and in fact we’re trying to make it worse.” That explains a lot.
The president then appeared unable to distinguish between different measurements of coronavirus deaths.
Trump brandished several pieces of paper with graphs and charts.
“United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world. Lower than Europe.”
“In what?” Swan asked. As it becomes apparent that Trump is talking about the number of deaths as a proportion of confirmed Covid-19 cases, Swan said: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than Germany, South Korea.”
Trump responded: “You can’t do that.”
We can and we have to.
“It is what it is.” Well yes, so it is. Thank you for that. It is, indeed, what it is, there’s no denying that. Such profundity.
If only it were what it should be.
Of course we’re lower than the world. The world contains us, and everyone else, and our numbers are only a subset of that. (I know, when you talk percentage, we could be higher or lower than the world average; I talk about that all the time with my students, but it just struck me as hilarious how he worded it.)
Nooo, it’s under control as much as you can control it. If a sane person of reasonable faculties were to take a shot at it, she might be able to do more.
I forced myself to sit through it (I cannot stand Trump’s voice – as I remarked before, it’s like having liquefied slugs poured down you ears), and listening to him and watching him at some length, instead of watching dismissive replies in press conferences and reading capitalised, misspelled, raging twitterings, I found it very revealing. One knew beforehand, of course, that he was totally incompetent, moronic, and vile, but this ‘long form’ brings it home in a way I’ve never seen before.
John Crace has a piece worth reading on the interview in the Guardian.
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I know, I can’t stand watching (listening to) him for long either, but yes, long form is revealing – not least of the river in flood-like quality of his nonstop talking.
I think what came over more strongly than anything was his sheer childishness.
Oh yes. It always does, doesn’t it.
Stewart – how odd, It was only days ago that there was a Trump thing that made me think of the “no time to lose” sketch. Can’t remember what it was… that’s going to drive me nuts now.
Don’t rack your brains; forget about it for now and then try tomorrow and poof there it will be. The brain hides stuff from us and then unhides it in due course. Unconscious processing.
Happened to me a week or two ago with a flower the name of which I knew perfectly well. It vanished and then returned.
Do you then blurt the word out suddenly, or text it (without explanation!) to the person you were talking to at the time? Because that must be done.
Hydrangea. I need to use the word surprisingly often and can never remember it when I get to it in my sentence. I have to pause, think about how it has lots of flowers, flower heads, many-headed hydra, hydrangea! Of course, if I don’t need it, it pops straight into my head if someone just mentions not being able to remember the name of a flower. And of course, I know that I can always look it up at the beginning of one of the Harry Potter books, where Harry is hiding in a flower bed under the hydrangeas, listening to a news report about a water-skiing budgie.
Brains are weird.
Do I blurt the word out????? I BELLOW the word. At least if no innocent bystanders are around I do. The word “freesia” came back quite suddenly, when I wasn’t really even thinking about it, and I yelled it to keep it from vanishing again.
Haha. “FREESIAAAAA!” echoes around the neighbourhood. A car alarm goes off, startled crows rise up from the trees, and every dog in a half-mile radius barks for a solid minute.
Pretty much!
All very familiar problems :)
Considering Trump’s mastery of the English language, I can well imagine that a sketch about someone quite unacquainted with a perfectly common figure of speech could suggest itself.
I am unlikely to forget hydrangeas, because I think they’re what gives a halo-like effect to my head in what I believe to be the first picture ever taken of me…