Schiff Appears To Blame Senators Who Acquitted Trump for 50K Virus Deaths
Remember how we were all supposed to be in this coronavirus thing together? Don’t tell that to the denizens of Congress, who are still busy blaming each other for not caring enough about the novel coronavirus.
Well, at least some of us don’t imply that the senators who refused to convict President Donald Trump of the not-crimes he was impeached for have the blood of 50,000 people on their hands.
Thank goodness for Adam Schiff, a man who tells it like it isn’t.
Schiff was the Democrats’ point man for fast-tracking the president’s impeachment through Congress in the most debased sort of way, conducting an “inquiry” in the same way that show trials are inquiries.
He and other Democrats then insisted the Senate actually take this whole thing very seriously and, when they refused to play by those rules, pitched a fit. Schiff was the lead impeachment manager during the trial, distinguishing himself only by how boring he was.
We all have more weighty things to worry about now and I’m more than willing to stay away from the argument that the impeachment spectacle had any impact on coronavirus planning.
Heaven knows relitigating one of the more thoroughly useless political pageants of recent decades isn’t going to manufacture a single ventilator or piece of PPE, so let’s just pull an Elsa and let it go.
Schiff apparently isn’t big on “Frozen,” however, because he appears to be blaming the senators who didn’t vote to remove the president for 50,000 virus deaths.
The House Intelligence Committee chairman was on MSNBC with Chris Hayes last week, which is so seldom a good sign of things to come. Schiff said he was haunted by the trial because if we’d removed Trump in February we could have forestalled COVID-19 in … February.
Schiff talked about the point “where we knew we had to answer the question to the senators: ‘OK, essentially, House managers, you’ve proved him guilty, does he really need to be removed after all?'”
He was apparently not involved in the same trial he thought he was involved in, or else his self-regard is so great that he still looks back on those days and says to himself, “Boy, Adam, old chap, when you’re on, you’re on.” I can’t picture either reassuring Democrats about him being one of the most powerful individuals in the party.
But he continued: After all, there was an election in a few months, which raised a question he thought senators were asking themselves: “How much damage could [Trump] really do?”
“And we posed that question to the Senate and we answered it by saying that he could do an awful lot of damage — but frankly, Chris, I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do in the months ahead,” Schiff said.
All together now: How much damage could he do?
“There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead, in significant part because of his incompetence, because of his inability to think beyond himself and put the country first,” Schiff said, apparently without irony or self-awareness. “I don’t think we would have ever anticipated that his brand of narcissism and his brand of incompetence, sometimes his brand of malevolence, would be so fatal to the American people.”
Oh, but wait, this gets — well, it can’t really get worse from there, but it’s still bad. Schiff went on to talk about Trump’s feud with governors who were attacking him, “that really weren’t saying things about him that he could then turn into campaign commercials.”
“That was such a profound and disturbing echo of what he tried to do with Ukraine,” Schiff said.
.@RepAdamSchiff suggests “50,000 Americans” are dead because Trump wasn’t impeached
Republicans said “How much damage could he really do? … I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do … There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead” pic.twitter.com/QGH941MSlk
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 25, 2020
That’s accurate, if perhaps not for the reason Schiff thinks: Both of these things have been blown wildly out of proportion by Democrats to score political points.
If you like finding dark humor in this sort of thing, check out Chris Hayes’ look when he reappears on camera. His head is cocked to the side, bulldog frown plastered on his face. It’s the kind of face a man makes when he desperately wants to believe Schiff is being serious when he blames Trump for 50,000 deaths because Mike Pence isn’t president right now.
How this would have changed anything is beyond me.
Pence is leading the coronavirus task force, so clearly there’s not a whole lot of difference here. Or maybe Hayes lives in that strange dreamworld where Nancy Pelosi would have been president if both Trump and Pence were impeached. (You know, the legislator who delayed the coronavirus relief bill by offering her own riotous alternative.)
None of this would have saved any of those who died of coronavirus, and Schiff’s response is a massively fatuous one, even by the standards of Adam Schiff.
As Hayes tried to say something near the end of the clip, Schiff interrupted with the perfect coda: “A man with no moral compass will never find his way.”
I don’t know, one seems to found his way onto “All In with Chris Hayes.”
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