CNN host John Berman continued his mask meltdown on Tuesday morning’s 8 am hour of New Day, freaking out over President Trump taking his mask off from the White House balcony yesterday for a photo-op.
If the media had any sense of decency they would be celebrating that the President’s medical team felt he was doing well enough to continue recovering from coronavirus back at the White House. But CNN has no decency. A hysterical Berman likened the White House outbreak to Trump’s “Chernobyl,” a disgusting analogy the media made at the beginning of the pandemic:
BERMAN: 210,000 Americans are dead from coronavirus and the average daily case rate is rising. Masks save lives. Masks save lives and the president is taking his off. So this is what really happened in this grand theatrical gesture of whipping off his mask in this Sunset Boulevard episode on the White House balcony last night. He takes his mask off so the American people can see it. Masks save lives....He walked into this coronavirus hot zone. He walked into this building where we've seen people in hazmat suits cleaning up because so many people have been infected. It looks like Chernobyl inside now they're scrubbing it down so carefully. Beyond that, there is so much that this White House is now withholding.
They say don't be afraid of coronavirus. The president says. But they won't tell us if the president's lungs have been damaged, whether or not he has pneumonia. When was his last negative test? That matters not just for him, but dozens, maybe hundreds of others who came in contact with him. Now, these people are not being called in any kind of organized contact tracing effort. CNN has just learned from a federal health official the White House has declined -- declined offers from the CDC to help investigate what looks like an outbreak at that announcement of Amy Coney Barrett as the Supreme Court nominee.
Berman went on to postulate with CNN’s medical expert Dr. Sanjay Gupta that the president was endorsing “herd immunity” because he tweeted about how the flu kills tens of thousands of Americans every year and yet we don’t shut down the entire country because of it. Berman hysterically proclaimed that Trump wanted to let a “million” Americans die while he was being “kept alive” by “all kinds of drugs:”
“...[D]octors like you, Sanjay, point out could lead to a million deaths in the United States if we just let it rip. That's the President of the United States who is confined to the White House now on all kinds of drugs, keeping him alive, says, we need to let this virus rip, more or less," Berman claimed as if the administration has done nothing to fight the virus.
To senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson, Berman complained Trump doesn’t care about saving lives because of an anonymously-sourced NYT report saying there wasn't aggressive contact tracing from the Barrett event:
BERMAN: [P]resented with options that can save lives, including wearing masks, the president has often chosen the other direction. He chooses the opposite of what the doctors say will save lives...What does that tell us about how much this White House cares about saving lives?
NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON: It tells us that they don't care very much. I think the message that Donald Trump sent when he ripped off the mask was he doesn't care about the lives of those people in that building. He certainly doesn't want evidence that an event like the Amy Coney Barrett event actually was a super spreader event, and possibly he gave it to other people...
His equally apoplectic co-host Alisyn Camerota touted another anonymously sourced report from the Times hyping a conflict between the White House and FDA on the vaccine timetable as proof that the president “doesn’t care” about saving lives: “The scientists do not want to rush it before it's ready. Clearly the president wants an election day deadline,” she grumbled. Only CNN could spin the president’s wishes to get a life-saving vaccine out sooner than later as proof he doesn’t want to save lives.
This CNN segment that would’ve worked better as a campaign commercial for Joe Biden was paid for by advertiser Carvana. You can contact them at the Conservatives fight back page here.
