If you were to ask PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor to send you her location, you would get a ping that shows the White House and a response that says, “She’s on the president’s neck.”
On Monday, during a Trump rally disguised as a coronavirus press briefing, the president tried to run one of his usual lies that makes him look like a competent leader, and Alcindor was not having any of it. She asked the president whether he bears any blame for people getting sick when he continued to downplay the virus for months.
But it was Alcindor’s second question that stumped Trump in which she noted that a family got sick because of the president’s lax behavior as the coronavirus began to spread across the country.
From Mediaite:
“The second question I have about your language and how you approached the coronavirus at the beginning,” Alcindor said. “I interviewed someone who said his family got sick, they went to a funeral in mid-March and they said mainly because the president wasn’t taking it seriously. ‘If the president had a mask on and he was saying stay home then I would have stayed home,’ but he said his family members were sick because they were listening to you. Do you feel like maybe down-playing the virus that’s what people got people sick?”
“A lot of people love Trump, right?” the president said in a bizarre, self-congratulatory response, which did not at all address Alcindor’s very serious question. “And guess I’m here for a reason. To the best of my knowledge I won, and I think we’re going to win again. I think we’re going to win in a landslide.”
Finally, he approached the actual question.
“But just so you understand you’re talking about March, right? And yet — excuse me, excuse me —” he said, cutting her off as she attempted to elaborate, before once again highlighting his Jan. 31 commercial travel ban that prevented foreigners — but not 40,000 U.S. nationals — from returning to the country from China. “We put on a ban because I was reading bad things about China. The World Health Organization should have told us.”
We’ve all seen this Chipotle presidential word bowl before—this combination of random thoughts and incoherent ramblings around a very succinct question. It’s not hard for the president to follow but it is if he’s a liar. So here’s the truth: on Jan. 23, the World Health Organization issued a bulletin that explained in dire fashion that, “All countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread of 2019-nCoV infection, and to share full data with WHO,” Mediaite reports.
The president knew. He knows he did. We know that he did. We also know that he continued to travel and host rallies and play golf as the coronavirus lurked over America like a dark cloud.
But the president continued to lie: “So you tell me, Nancy Pelosi was having — she wanted to have a street party in Chinatown in San Francisco at the end of February,” Trump said. “That’s a month later. And then they tell me it’s only a political talking point, but you feed into it because you’re too good a reporter to let that happen. Really, you are a good reporter. You’re too good of a reporter to let that happen.”
Bitch, Alcindor doesn’t fuck with you. She doesn’t even slightly fuck with you. She doesn’t even kind of fuck with you. Like a journalist, she covers you, and her plan for the foreseeable future is to keep both feet firmly planted on your Sunkist bronzed neck.
You want to see a dead body? Keep reading.
Alcindor fought through Trump’s bullshit to check his ass: “You held rallies in February and in March.”
Live look at Trump’s reaction:
Mediaite reports that the Trump campaign held rallies on Feb. 10, 19, 20, 21, and 28, as well as one on March 2.
“I don’t know about rallies. I really don’t know about rallies,” Trump said lying his ass off. He lives for rallies. He’s turned coronavirus press briefings into rallies and he talks about the popularity of his press briefings as if they were rallies. He kept rallying even after he won the presidency.
“I know one thing, I haven’t left the White House in months, except for a brief moment to give a wonderful ship, the [USNS] Comfort…”
“You held a rally in March,” Alcindor again said shutting this bama down.
“I don’t know, did I hold a rally?” Trump said, waving his arms in a brazen attempt at ducking reality. “I’m sorry, I hold a rally. Did I hold a rally?”
“Let me tell you, in January, when I did this you had virtually no cases and no deaths and yet I put [the ban] on. So how could I not?” he said before pivoting back to Nancy Pelosi because it’s always about someone else whenever Trump is called out for being an incompetent leader.
If anyone is looking for Alcindor, you know exactly where to find her.