"You held rallies in February and in March..."/"Oh, I don’t know about rallies. I really don’t know about rallies...."/"You held a rally in March"/"I don’t know. Did I hold a rally? I’m sorry. I hold a rally. Did I hold the rally?"

That's a little back-and-forth between "PBS NewsHour" reporter Yamiche Alcindor and Donald Trump — from yesterday's Task Force press briefing (transcript here).

Was Trump still holding rallies in March? I had to look it up. His last rally was March 2d. (That happens to be the day when I went to the store for the last time. I was stocking up on food in anticipation of at least a month of seclusion.)

After vaguely wondering about rallies, Trump shifted the subject to actions he took in January. And that was — he said — when Nancy Pelosi was "holding a street fair...  in San Francisco in Chinatown to prove... that there’s no problem." Trump's action in January was to cut off (some) travel from China, but he still gathered big crowds together for those rallies in February and early March.

Trump moved on to the subject of what a great economy he'd built up and how hard it was to close it down. But he closed it down.

Then, in his characteristic style, he ended with optimism: "But you know what I say to you? We’re going to rebuild it, and we’re going to rebuild it better, and it’s going to go faster than people think. I built it once. I build it a second time."

And he proceeded to call on Chanel Rion with One America News, who, I think, can be counted on for a friendly question. Look at this softball:

Going back to the topic of friendship and bipartisanship, Americans with the exception of Pelosi, Schumer and even Romney, Americans have seen an unprecedented chapter of bipartisanship and cooperation on the political landscape. On a personal note, what has been the most significant signal that your relationship with Democrats [inaudible] level have changed for the good of America?

Trump proclaimed it a "great question" and it turned out to be the last question. The answer was long, first claiming that there is "bipartisanship," then veering to Nancy Pelosi, who is, he said, "very nasty":

She wasted a lot of time with a impeachment hoax. It was a total hoax, went nowhere, and that was not good. And Schumer, I guess it’s the same thing, but he sort of accepted it. He just did what he was supposed to do and he didn’t do very well with it.... We could have been doing things that would have been great for our country. They could have been looking into China. They should have been looking into China as an example. A lot of people are blaming the Democrats for wasting all that time because it was during that period of time, as you know, that it was fomenting, but I think we’ve had a great spirit of bipartisanship in a certain way....

Fomenting. The disease, I assume. Can a disease foment? Maybe he meant fermenting. I figured he said "fomenting" because the other day he was accused of "fomenting rebellion."

The country is coming together, and I’ll tell you what, the people are coming together. The people are really coming together. I think you’re going to find that our country is much more unified. I do think that the press, the media foments a lot of anger.

I think he knew he used "foment" wrong, so he needed to use "foment" right. The disease may not foment, but the media can foment...

I really believe it foments tremendous anger. For instance, I’ll be asked a tremendously hostile question from somebody, and then I’ll answer it in a hostile way, which is appropriate. Otherwise you look foolish. Otherwise it looks like just walk off the stage and bow your head. I can’t do that. You know? I just can’t do that. But a lot of these questions that are asked from certain networks are so hostile and there’s no reason for it. There’s no reason for it. We are in a war. This is a World War II. This is a World War I, where by the way, the war essentially ended because of a plague. That was one of the worst ever. They lost almost a hundred million people. But we’re in a big war.

This felt almost uncomfortably intimate, as if he were talking unfiltered late at night just to me...

And I’ll say one thing about, because I think it’s important, the last person, I did it early, but I was the last person that wanted to close down one of the great economic, you can’t call it an experiment, but everything I guess in life is an experiment.

It made me think of that woman who assumed the demeanor of a drunk as she lip-synched to Trump's voice on TikTok (blogged here, the 3rd of the 3 videos). Back to Trump — Trump unfiltered...

So let’s say experiments, but one of the great economic stories in history, I’m the last person that wanted to do it, but we did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would’ve had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe two million people dead. Now we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it. One is too many, but we’re going toward 50 or 60,000 people. That’s at the lower, as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people. We could end up at 50 to 60. Okay, it’s horrible. If we didn’t do what we did, we would have had, I think, a million people, maybe 2 million people, maybe more than that. And you look it, there’s one country in particular that decided let’s wing it. Let’s just keep going. They are being inundated with death. Now if you take a look at some of the hospitals, where one of them I knew growing up in Queens, and I’m looking at the bodies laying in hallways being brought into refrigerator trucks, the trucks, these massive trucks, bodies going in, multiply that times 10. It’s not sustainable. And many of the people that have this theory, Oh let’s, you know, maybe we could have just gone right through. I was somebody that would have loved to have done that, but it wouldn’t have been sustainable. You can’t lose a million people. That’s almost double what we lost in the Civil War. I use that as a guide, Civil War, 600,000 people died. So it’s not sustainable. But it could have been much more than a million people. I mean if you took a number and cut it in half and half and in half again, you’d end up at 500,000 people, okay, if you want to make a very conservative guesstimate. 500,000 people is not acceptable. Is that a correct sort of an analogy? So I mean I see it all the time. My friends of mine, people that I have great respect for. Well we could have done this, we could have done, and remember this, when we say 50 and they compare 50 to the 35 of the flu, because it’s averaged 35, 36,000 over a 10 year period. It’s a lot. Who would think that? But we’re not talking about with the flu. It just goes. We’re not locking ourselves in our units. We’re not locking ourselves in our apartments and not moving and not touching anybody and just saying, you know, the world. In this case we are, and we’re still going to lose between 50 and 60, but if we just kept it going on a normal basis, which is really the only standard that you can compare it to with the flu, because that was a normal basis. You get into an airplane, you travel to Florida, you go to Texas, you go wherever you’re going. But in this case, if we didn’t do anything, the number wouldn’t be 50 to 60,000, the number would be a million people dead. It would be 1,000,005, 1,000,002, maybe 700,000. It would have been a number in like that, and it’s so important because I see so much. Oh well, you know. You can’t compare it because I’ll tell you what, the people of this country, what they’ve done, they’ve gone out of their had the way they’ve lived. It’s not great. It’s terrible. Maybe the first three days, they’re all of a sudden, you see what’s going on. They want to get going, and I get that fully. But I just say this. If we would have done that, we would’ve lost anywhere from a million to more than two million people. Now, with all of the death that we’ve seen at 50 or 60,000 people heading toward, right now it’s at 40, but 50 or 60,000 people, probably over 54, and [inaudible 01:38:37], but that’s with our guard up. If we took our guard down and just said, “Okay, we’re just going to keep this open,” we would have lost millions of people. Can you imagine? Look how bad it looks now when you look at the bodies, when you look at Hart Island in New York where they have the mass grave, and all of the things that you see, can you imagine if we had the guard down, if we didn’t do anything and we just said, “Let’s ride it out?” It would not have been sustainable in any way. It would have been an atrocity. So we’ve done the right thing. We’ve really done the right thing. And the people that have worked so hard and dangerously, I’ll tell you again, I say it, but I watched those doctors and nurses and medical people running into those hospitals, and they don’t even have that gear on. Forget about gear, whether it’s great gear or not, and we’re bringing in the best gear in the world, but they’re running in with open everything. I mean, the job, they like warriors, the job they’re doing. But if we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, 2 million people dead. So multiply that times 50, you’re talking about you would’ve had 10 to 20 to 25 times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The 50,000 is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by 20 or more? It’s not acceptable. So it’s a very good question. I appreciate it. We’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll see you tomorrow.