Did anyone watch Don the Con’s Comedy Hour on Tuesday night?
Granted, it wasn’t fun being soaked to the bone by his fire hose of falsehoods, but the pleasure President Trump’s Philadelphia “town hall” was seeing him rebuked by a real citizen. A black woman with a serious health condition.
“Mr. President,” said a Philadelphian named Alycee Block, “I was born with a disease called sarcoidosis, and from the day I was born, I was considerable uninsurable. That disease started in my skin, moved to my eyes, into my optic nerves, and when I went to graduate school, into my brain... I’m still paying almost $7,000 a year in addition to the co-pay.”
She then pointed out that Obamacare protects the coverage of people with preexisting health conditions. She started to ask whether that protection should be removed when Trump tried to jump in:
“No - “
But Block quickly cut him off:
“Please stop and let me finish my question, sir.”
Trump being upbraided by a black woman...That must’ve sent the bees in his head abuzzing. He was a long way from his rallies with unmasked saps.
Anyway, Block kept going: “Should that (protection) be removed? Within a 36 to 72-hour period, without my medication, I will be dead. And I want to know what it is that you’re going to do to assure that people like me who work hard, we do everything we’re supposed to do, can stay insured. It’s not my fault that I was born with this disease. It’s not my fault that I’m a black woman, and in the medical community I’m minimized and not taken seriously. I want to know what you are going to do about that.”
Then came his lies, gushing by the gallon, almost too numerous to count
“We are not going to hurt anything having to do with preexisting conditions. We’re not going to hurt preexisting conditions,” Trump said. “We’re going to be doing a healthcare plan very strongly and protect people with preexisting conditions.”
“We are not going to hurt anything having to do with preexisting conditions,” Trump claimed. “In fact, just the opposite. If you look at what they [Biden and the Democrats] want to do, where they have socialized medicine, they will get rid of preexisting conditions, if they go into Medicare for All, which is socialized medicine. “We’re going to be doing a healthcare plan very strongly and protect people with preexisting conditions. I will say this, they will not do that,” Trump added.
A couple of things worth pointing out:
1. Trump is currently in the Supreme Court, agitating anew for the total repeal of Obamacare - which, for the last 10 years, has protected the coverage of people with preexisting conditions.
2. Medicare for All would not “get rid of” people with preexisting conditions. Quite the opposite.
3. Biden doesn’t even support Medicare for All. He campaigned against it during the primaries. He would add a public option to Obamacare - an option to get government care - and thus continue to protect preexisting conditions.
4. Trump has been promising to unveil his own health care plan “very strongly” for virtually the entirety of his regime. He said in June 2019 that it was merely weeks away - nothing happened. He said in July 2020 that it was merely weeks away - nothing has happened.
Town hall host George Stephanopoulos asked a very simple question: So where’s this health care plan you keep talking about?
There’s no such plan, of course. There never was. But whenever Trump is cornered, he just floors the accelerator on his B.S. bulldozer.
The Philadelphia event was festooned with whoppers - like when he praised the stock market and said that “stocks are owned by everybody” and lied that Biden “wants to raise everybody’s taxes” (the Biden plan raises taxes only on those who make more than $400,000). He also said “a lot of people think that masks are not good,” putting him at odds with his own CDC director, and bizarrely claimed Biden - who is not president - has failed to institute a national mask mandate.
If you’re wondering how Trump will “debate” Biden in less than two weeks, look no further than Tuesday night’s transcript. We’ll all join Alcyee Block in saying, “Please stop, sir.”
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
