Hello everyone, Welcome to Bad Table Talk I’m your host Oliver Niehaus and the year 2020 can pretty much be summed up with repeated use of the phrase “It can’t possibly get any crazier”, and then a police officer murders a black woman and gets charged for the bullets that missed, or schools reopen in Georgia and many other states with no precautions such as mask or social distancing requirements. So at this point, you could tell me something completely crazy, something like we barely have 7 years to curb greenhouse gas emissions if we want to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change, including unsustainable rising sea levels, flooding, loss of coral reefs, wildfires and other disasters, you know stuff like that. Oh, wait that’s actually true. It seems as if the phrase should be changed to, “It can and will get crazier” And that’s exactly what happened early this morning.
Around 12 am this morning, President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. I want to make this very clear from the onset. I do not wish ill will upon anyone and that indeed extends to one of my least favorite people on this planet, Donald Trump. I hope he and Melania make a quick recovery and we should all be hoping for the same. However, that does not mean that he is not solely responsible for his contraction of the virus, which he nearly is. Let’s examine the timeline of events that transpired leading up to him testing positive to demonstrate how he not only was careless himself surrounding his own safety but once again jeopardized the safety of others. As I’m sure you’re aware, Trump has been holding rallies, some indoors and some outdoors with thousands of people many of whom do not wear masks or social distance. On Wednesday, September 30th, Trump traveled to Minnesota to hold another campaign rally, and afterward, one of his advisors Hope Hicks began displaying coronavirus symptoms. She soon tested positive but the next day Trump, with full knowledge that Hicks, who tested positive and had been in close contact with him, continued with his schedule that day and attended a New Jersey fundraiser. So he knowingly went to an event and came in contact with people after he was aware that he had been in close contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid. He quite literally disregarded the health and safety of everyone, as he’s been doing since the beginning, to hold a fundraiser. Once again, he chose money and his own personal gain over the health and safety of the American people.
So what do we know about the situation involving President Trump and other people who have tested positive within the White House inner circle? Well here’s a list of the people who so far have tested positive. Obviously we have Donald and Melania, but we also have Senator Thom Tillis, Senator Mike Lee, University of Notre Dame President Reverend John Jenkins, Kellyanne Conway, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, as well as three other white house reporters and one white house staffer. Quick update since recording the part you are currently listening to. Two more people inside the white house and congressional circle have tested positive for Covid-19 and those are Senator Ron Johnson as well as Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. You know what all of the named figures I mentioned who tested positive have in common? They were all photographed at public events recently, not wearing a mask and not social distancing. Like honestly no one deserves to get this deadly disease, but like what the fuck are you doing? I swear it’s so easy to wear a piece of fabric on your face. So easy. And they just literally choose not to. It’s just beyond me how you could care so little about not just others around you but yourself as well. I as a 17 year old don’t only wear a mask to protect others around me, obviously that is a primary reason as it should be, but also to protect myself. This myth that has been perpetuated by even the president himself that children and young people are immune just couldn’t be more false. It’s totally dependent on how your immune system reacts. There are stories of healthy teenagers with no underlying conditions getting this and actually dying. This is no joke. I wear an N95 mask wherever I go and I strongly recommend you do so as well. As the CDC Director Robert Redfield said, If everyone wore a mask, we could have this thing under control in as little as 6 weeks. Imagine being able to have your normal Thanksgiving celebrations as well as Christmas and New Years parties, packed full with people having a great time. I know I miss that as well. And we could have that. It’s actually realistic. But due to the fact that people won’t wear a damn piece of fabric on their face, we’re stuck in this shitstorm, for way longer than it had to be, because people can’t seem to think long term. I attribute this largely to the individualist mindset that is pushed so much in our country, how if you’re born into poverty, well just work harder. If you can’t get ahead in the world, it’s your fault, and not the result of a system, designed to allow those with wealth and power to succeed and you to fail. This type of mindset has led to this lack of empathy and care for others and thus people refusing to wear a mask to protect others because, “It’s not my job to take care of you” I often think of this entire situation with people refusing to wear masks and social distance to kindergarten. Do you all remember when you’d have to line up at the door and you’d have to wait until everyone stopped talking until you could leave the room, but there would always be those couple of kids who couldn’t shut their mouths and thus you’d be waiting like 5 times as long because they don’t know how to follow the simple rules. Yeah that’s how I view Covid. We all have to wait way longer for this pandemic to be over because some people can’t follow the simple rules and wear a mask. It’s legit the same concept. At least the kindergarteners eventually fell in line. We’ll see if those people ever do.
So getting back to Trump in particular, what are some of the implications of him getting the virus, and what are the possible outcomes? Well from the time of recording this episode, Trump has already been admitted to Walter Reed Medical Center for supervision. They say that this is just a preventative measure and that he’s only experiencing mild to moderate symptoms at the moment, but likely the rationale behind this is that Trump who is 74 and obese or as he would probably say “The greatest shape frankly you see people and you just want to look away but not me I have the most tremendous health, some have said it’s the greatest health they’ve ever seen, believe me”, he is indeed the perfect high risk candidate to be severely impacted by the virus and thus they want to keep close supervision over him in case his condition rapidly worsens. He’s currently being treated with the drug Remdesivir which is a drug used to treat the coronavirus. In response, I sarcastically like to say, Why isn’t he being given hydroxychloroquine? The drug he so strongly advocated for as the most effective treatment. Seems like it’s a different story when it comes to him. But let’s discuss other implications as well that aren’t directly involving him. The Stock Market has plummeted both in the US as well as global markets. The leader of the free world has just been diagnosed with COVID-19. This is a huge deal. This also has large implications on the election itself. Unless Trump is able to make a swift recovery, this will destroy his entire goal which has been to downplay the threat, which he admitted on tape. Trump says he didn’t want to create a panic and thus didn’t tell the American people about the severity of the Virus when he knew back in February that it was much deadlier than the flu, which he then lied and told the American people it was just like the flu. It’s kind of comical when he says that he didn’t want to create panic. Ah yes of course, the man who declares Black Lives Matter a hate group, characterizes immigrants as criminals, rapists, and animals, and says that Antifa is coming to burn down your house with orders from Joe Biden and other outlandish shit like that, that man wants you to believe he was worried about creating panic when his entire campaign is based on panic, and fear. He couldn’t care less about creating panic, he just doesn’t want to panic the stock market because that type of panic would hurt his chances of reelection and upset his wealthy donors. People like to say that Trump isn’t a career politician, but after less than 4 years in office, he’s already in the backpocket of the pharmaceutical companies, fossil fuel companies, as well as the NRA. That’s why 90% of Americans support Universal Background Checks for firearms and even Trump himself has come out in support of the policy, but every time he meets with the NRA, he folds.
So yes it’s absolutely crucial to get Donald Trump out of office. But it’s equally disastrous for him to die from this no matter where you stand politically and here’s why. Donald Trump has really hit a nerve of hatred and bigotry within our country. I largely attribute this to the fact that many white Americans couldn’t stand seeing an affluent Black man in the White House for 8 years, one who was intelligent, well-spoken, and overall much more accomplished then they were. It drove them crazy for 8 long years and then comes along this brash man who says everything they had been thinking during the Obama Presidency, questioning his birth place, and validating many of their racist beliefs that had been building over those 8 years. And all that hatred and racism manifested itself in Donald Trump. Now don’t get me wrong, Donald Trump is indeed racist, but more importantly he’s the product of the environment that was created. And he has used that environment to his advantage. These situations we face such as the literal concentration camps at the border and forced hysterectomies of migrant women and the separation of children from their parents isn’t surprising when considering the state of the country currently. Genocide and mass human rights violations are predicated on two things, the wrong person coming to power at the wrong time, and both must be true, although if the latter is present, the wrong person will seemingly always find their way into the situation. For example, if Hitler had come to power in the early 1900s, he probably would have just been a right wing politician. But due to the decimated conditions of Germany after WWI and the growing sense of anger and hatred, Hitler hit a nerve within the country and from there, he followed the playbook of how to rise to power and was able to commit mass genocide.
Donald Trump is in many ways striking the same nerve within our country today the same way Hitler or Mussolini did back in the 30s and 40s. The Fascist playbook goes as follows. Step 1: Lie, and lie a lot. Because once you lie about the little things, it makes it much easier to lie about the big things and people don’t seem to care. Hitler would often give speeches filled with mistruths and misleading statements, but they were so frequent, and so often that people were desensitized to the lies and he stopped being challenged. Donald Trump is epitome of this. From the moment he got in office and even before, he was already lying profusely. From lying about the size of the crowd at his inauguration to claiming that the only reason he lost the popular vote was due to millions of illegal immigrants casting ballots and committing rampant voter fraud, he’s lied so much, it seems that when he says something true it’s out of the ordinary. And that contributes to the environment of bigotry. We no longer expect the President of the United States to be the voice of truth, so he can say whatever he wants and those of us who know it to be false just brush it off, and those who support him take his word as the word of God. And that has only been exacerbated through the rest of his presidency. Step 2: Create a common enemy. Tell the people that someone is coming to get you and I am the only one who can save you from them. Hitler obviously did this with the Jewish people, portrayed them as being the common enemy and blamed much of the problems of Germany due to the Treaty of Versailles which left them decimated, on Jewish People, thus harnessing this deep sense of anger and hatred due to the terrible conditions of Germany, and aiming it towards Jews. Jews were viewed by German society as not even being human and Hitler used his rhetoric as reinforcement.
Donald Trump has done nearly the exact same thing when it comes to immigrants. He has cracked down on deportations, increasing the rate at which they occur from the Obama Administration, and removed the 72 hour limit of family separation, thus resulting in families being separated for weeks, some of which never see their loved ones again. As one 10 year old migrant child recounted “Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come back from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.” Oh my mistake, that was actually a quote from Anne Frank describing what was occurring in Germany in the late 30s and early 40s. Scary how similar the situations are. And it’s not just the separation and deportation. It’s Donald Trump’s rhetoric as well. He generalized immigrants as being rapists and criminals and at one point even called them animals. This isn’t very different from the dehumanization efforts of Hitler and the Nazi Party to portray Jews as the source of Germany’s problems. And many people often say that it’s just illegal immigration that Trump is against but this is simply just false. On Trump’s campaign website where it lays out his second term policies, one of his so called policies which honestly there was barely any policy on that page, was that he wanted to prevent Americans from being replaced by foreign workers. Not legal or illegal, but foreign. And may I also remind you that it was illegal to be Jewish in Germany. Legality in no way constitutes morality so it’s irrelevant when having this conversation. Legal or illegal, the persecution of Jews was clearly wrong the same way legal or illegal, the persecution of immigrants is wrong. He blames immigrants for stealing American Jobs despite that claim being disproved time and time again. This is all too similar to the way Hitler scapegoated Jews. And all of that leads to more hatred towards those groups. And the same way Hitler required Jews to wear Stars on all their clothing to identify them as Jewish, immigrants are required to have their green card on them at all times as proof of permanent status in this country and many still get harassed by ICE agents regardless. The parallels between the situations are frightening.
Step 3: Refer back to a time of greatness, Hitler called his movement as a quest to achieve the Third Reich. The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire which lasted from the year 800-1806, The Second Reich was The previous German Empire which lasted from 1871-1918, and his movement would be the Third Reich. This was incredibly powerful as it gave people hope and a sense of pride in a country that had just been decimated after WWI. And Trump follows suit with this by making his campaign slogan Make America Great Again. This is even more concerning because it’s very ambiguous what he’s referring to when America was Great. When there was Slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, Redlining. Women couldn’t vote, We put thousands of Japanese Americans into internment camps? I don’t really see when. This slogan allows Trump to foster a sense of urgency or desire for greatness and considering the other forms of divisive rhetoric that we’ve discussed, it’s not unlikely that he’s referring back to a time that I mentioned, because many of his supporters do believe that was when America was Great.
Step 4: Silence all opposition. Mussolini, who was the fascist dictator in Italy around the same time as Hitler, had a group called the Black Shirts who would jail journalists who wrote disparaging remarks about him and he also required eventually that all news media publications be approved by him. That first part is already happening now. Many journalists have been arrested by police for reporting on the protests and riots that have been occurring recently due to the recent events of police brutality. The state is currently suppressing the free press. And Trump himself has been trying to discredit the media as fake news ever since he took office. These continual attempts to discredit the free press discourages people from listening to anyone other than him. And he can respond to any story with “fake news” and his supporters won’t believe it. “Fake News” has quickly become synonymous with “News stories that Trump doesn’t like” Fox News wasn’t fake news until they criticized Trump. Then he was quick to call them fake news as well. Interesting how it seems like we never had so much fake news until we had a fake president? Just a thought. Also Hitler heavily controlled the type of information taught in schools and this was considered the Hitler Youth program. Pro-Nazi propaganda was pushed in school and they were told that Germany was the Greatest country on the face of the Earth. Trump has recently unveiled a plan for what he is calling the “1776 Commission” which is meant to be a dig at the recent New York Times series “The 1619 Project” which discusses the beginning of America as it began when the first slave ship arrived in America. It’s honestly a phenomenal series and I highly encourage you to take a listen and I’ll link it down below. But regardless Trump says this teaches youth to hate America, when it fact it actually discusses a reality of our history that is crucial to the development of our nation and the effects of which are still greatly present today which I’ve covered briefly surrounding the topic of Systemic Racism in a previous segment which I’ll link down below as well. So this Patriotic Education is really just an attempt by the Trump Administration to ignore events in history that are inconvenient to their narrative. Let me make this very clear. Trump doesn’t give a fuck about anyone, but especially black people. People constantly bring up his prison reform and his donations to Historically Black Colleges and Universities as evidence that he cares about Black Americans, while at the same time has let a pandemic ravage the country which disproportionally infects and kills African Americans due to lower incomes due to systemic barriers present from things slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, Redlining, The War on Drugs, and so much more, most of which he is trying to suppress in schools through this “Patriotic Education” plan. His minimal prison reform and performative action with throwing money at HBCUs in the grand scheme of things is nearly irrelevant when compared to his denial to even acknowledge why African Americans are incarcerated and disenfranchised in the first place. And with his removal of racial sensitivity and white privilege training as well and not condemning white supremacists once again in the recent debate, it is clear that he doesn’t care about African Americans.
So you may have forgotten the original question that I posed due to all of that discussion, which was “Why is Trump dying from COVID-19 disastrous no matter where you stand politically? The answer is predicated off of what I just discussed. All of the issues I mentioned aren’t caused by Trump, but primarily the environment present right now. This is much more complicated than just Donald Trump as I hope I was able to demonstrate. The same way Hitler didn’t create the hatred that led to the Halocaust, Trump didn’t create the deep divisions present in our country, they were merely fostered by him. This also means they won’t be gone when he is. There’s this phrase which is “You can kill a person, but not an idea” and this is very much true. In order to hopefully alleviate the division and hatred that he’s fostered, he needs to be defeated, and not by a global pandemic, but by the democratic and judicial system he’s tried so hard to dismantle. Trump needs to stay alive so that he can be here when everything he’s done is truly exposed and face the consequences of his actions. People need to see him in an orange jumpsuit, not a body bag, in order to truly understand the gravity of what he has done. There will most likely be a period in 40-50 years or even less where anyone associated with Trump at all will be banished by society for enabling a fascist like those associated with Hitler were tried in the Nuremberg Trials. And guess what, the argument of “I was just following orders'' didn't fly. Fascists need to be defeated in the public square. So I hope he recovers, so that he can face the consequences of his actions and we can begin to recover. He needs to go to jail. And That will be the true testament of justice and how we actually defeat fascism and bigotry.
So I think that’s enough of a conclusion in itself so all I’ll say is thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed this segment. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of this uninterrupted outro music, which is crafted as always by Oscar Gregg. Take Care
