What A Day - The President Has Covid-19

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

In a tweet overnight, President Trump said that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus. The news comes after a White House aid, Hope Hicks, tested positive. She had been traveling with the President in recent days, including to the debate on Tuesday.House Dems passed a new slimmed down relief package yesterday, but Republicans still say it’s too expensive. In the meantime, layoffs continue across industries and about half the jobs that were lost between February and April still haven’t returned. The Senate officially subpoenaed the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter for a hearing on how they moderate content that’s posted on their platforms. As the election nears, Facebook says it is adding additional restrictions to political ads that will go into effect immediately, but critics stay it's still nowhere near enough.Special guest Yedoye Travis joins for the headlines: the DOJ’s task force on policing gets halted because it’s almost all policemen, skateboarding cranberry juice guy boosts Fleetwood Mac’s sales numbers, and closing the loop on a British zoo’s swearing birds.Show links:Comedian and writer Yedoye Travishttps://twitter.com/yedoyeOThttps://www.instagram.com/professordoye/

It's Friday, October 2nd. I'm Akilah Hughes, and this is What A Day, where we are currently processing Trump's October surprise. On today's show, the current state of the COVID economy and how tech companies are preparing for the election, then some headlines. But first, the latest. And it's really the latest. We had to re-record the top of the show because of some breaking news overnight. So we'll get into the rest of the show in a moment. But our lead story, of course, is that early this morning around 1 a.m. Eastern, President Trump tweeted that he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus. The news came after a close White House aide, Hope Hicks, who had been experiencing symptoms, tested positive. Hicks

had been traveling with the president in recent days, including to the debate on Tuesday. In his tweet, Trump said that he and Melania would begin a quarantine immediately. The Trump's physician put out a statement confirming and saying Trump was, quote, well, but the statement did not say anything about whether he was experiencing symptoms. And this news comes after the president has spent months downplaying the pandemic, which has killed over 200,000 Americans and infected at least 7 million, as well as sowing mistrust and spreading disinformation that has Americans questioning his credibility on the matter. It's unclear as of now who else may have contracted the virus while traveling or working or meeting with the president.

It's also unclear what impact this will have on the presidential campaigns. Needless to say, we'll have more information as we get it in the coming days. But in other news, and back to the rest of the show, relief bill chatter between the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reinvigorated this week. And just like every other part of 2020, it kind of fell apart, at least as of yesterday. Last night, before all of this went down with the president, House Dems passed a new $2.2 trillion package that is essentially a slimmed down version of the HEROES Act that they passed back in May. It's now October, just in case anyone wants to get angry about how much time has gone by. Anyway, Republicans

complained back then that the bill was too expensive, and even now they're saying the same thing. So yikes. Earlier in the day yesterday, after covering for Donald Trump's white supremacy, Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that the Trump administration had offered a $1.6 trillion package that Republicans in Congress have already called too expensive, but Pelosi similarly wasn't interested. And this matters because one, people are hurting while they're all, you know, figuring this out. But two, both the Republicans and the Democrats would benefit from some legislation passing before election day. Moderate Democrats up for reelection need something tangible to bring back to their constituents ahead of the election. And Donald Trump's best chance for reelection is the stimulus money helping the sluggish economy along before

November 3rd. Right. Okay. So to be continued on all of this, and speaking of our hurting economy, mass layoffs continue to happen across industries. So what is the latest that's happening there? Yeah. So we told you yesterday about Disney cutting 28,000 workers across theme parks, and now airlines are saying they'll be furloughing employees since no relief bill has been passed. American Airlines was the first to announce its plan, saying it would begin furloughing 19,000 employees. Shortly thereafter, United said it will be forced to furlough roughly 13,000 employees immediately. Back in March, with the airlines completely stifled by the public health crisis, Congress passed a $25 billion program to help cover their payroll costs on the condition that workers not be laid off or have their pay cut before October 1st. Well, now it's the second. Airline leaders say the job

cuts are unavoidable since so few people are traveling and they're still burning through $5 billion a month while the nation is still beset by a virus that lawmakers expected would largely be under control by now. It's almost like if you want to fix the economy, you got to fix the virus. Right. And staying on the economy for a moment, a lot of people have pointed to the stock market as proof that the economy is doing fine, but we still have record unemployment. So what's actually going on? Yeah. So economic reports keep showing that the rate of recovery is slowing down. Here are a few of the latest data points. One, consumer spending grew just 1% in August, which is the weakest growth since May. Two, Americans' personal income fell

in August. Again, no surprise there. That's after federal unemployment expired at the end of July. And three, more than 800,000 people filed for unemployment last week. That's slightly better than the week before, but hundreds of thousands more unemployed people isn't cause for celebration. Big picture. Without additional government aid and with the threat of the virus still looming large, the recovery is slowing down. And it's slowing down at the halfway point. About half of the jobs that were lost between February and April still haven't returned. And the recession and recovery are going even worse for certain demographic groups, including mothers of school-age children, black men and women, Hispanic men, Asian Americans, young people, and people without college degrees.

The next big data point comes out this morning, and that's the monthly jobs report from September. Economists are expecting it to show a slight improvement from the previous month, but the emphasis has to be on the word slight. All right, let's move on to our next story. So last week, we talked about public and political pressure on major tech companies having to do with how they regulate content that's posted on their platforms, as well as various ongoing antitrust investigations. Well, yesterday, the Senate officially subpoenaed the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter for a hearing. So let's talk about what comes next. Yeah, so this is coming from the Senate Commerce Committee, and it's not totally clear yet, according to the reporting that's out there, when exactly a hearing would happen. But according to

a report that was in Politico, Democrats on the committee were worried that moving forward too fast, like Republican Chair Roger Wicker wants to do, isn't a great idea right now. Their worry is that tough questioning from Republicans in the hearing might push CEOs to ease up on moderating content with just weeks until the election. The other big piece of this is that the parties just have different intents with this hearing. On the Republican side, much of the conversation about social media content moderation, as we've talked about before, has to do with these unfounded concerns about conservative voices being silenced. For Democrats, apparently they ended up being okay with the subpoenas overall because other issues were added, including data privacy. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is on the committee, also mentioned that it would be good to discuss media consolidation, antitrust, and more.

So now the interesting question is going to be when this actually takes place. Some of these Democrats have voiced a desire to have the hearings occur after the election so as to avoid, as Senator Brian Schatz put it, And these refs are under the gun because they've done such a historically bad job at moderating content, particularly in and around elections. So what has Facebook, for instance, said that they're doing now? Well, they say that they are adding additional restrictions to political ads that would apply to content on both Facebook and Instagram effective immediately. Specifically, as Trump

continues to lie about the process of mail voting, Facebook says it is now banning ads that include, quote, calling a method of voting inherently fraudulent or corrupt or using isolated incidents of voter fraud to delegitimize the result of an election. They are also banning any ad that advises users not to participate in the census or not to vote, any ad that seeks to call the election fraudulent if it can't be called on November 3rd, which is a likely scenario, plus an earlier ban on ads that declare victory prematurely. And this comes after the company said that it would ban new political ads leading up to election day. It also said it would put a voting information center at the top of its news feed to show when and where to register to vote. And according to a report from The New York Times from last month,

Facebook is trying to figure out what to do about information that gets shared in private channels, which is infinitely harder to regulate. One thing they imposed was limiting the number of people that users could forward messages to in Messenger from more than 150 to just five. This doesn't absolve the company. There's still a lot of misinformation on the platform, to say the very least. And there are many people that are still concerned that Facebook isn't ready for the next few weeks and the crucial ones that will follow actual election day. We will certainly keep track of that. Yeah. Separately, there was another announcement from Google in the past day that it's going to spend $1 billion on licensing news content.

This seems like it's intended to address some concerns, particularly in the news industry. So what's your take? Yeah, this is very interesting. So Google said they're going to spend that money to license content from a bunch of international news organizations. It's going to be part of a new product called News Showcase that is supposedly going to show readers news from around the world. And Google is then going to pay the publishers to basically curate what will show up there. It's already available in Germany and Brazil, and the company said that they've signed partnerships with almost 200 publications so far. So Google and Facebook have effectively wrecked media revenue by gobbling up these advertising dollars that used to flow to the actual publishers. That's wreaked havoc on news outlets' finances and made it harder for them to do crucial reporting.

For years, publishers have been pushing the tech companies to pay for their content. There's actually been a recent ongoing fight in Australia where new regulations might force the companies to pay local publishers, resulting in a threat from Facebook that they might just block Australian news content instead. Jeez. Yeah, it's unclear where this will all go, but for now, groups like the European Publishers Council are skeptical of the announcement, saying that Google is giving itself away to, quote, undermine legislation while dictating the terms and conditions of these agreements. A lot to keep track of here, but we will keep following it. And that is the latest for now. It's Friday, WOD Squad, and for today's Tim Check,

we're talking about an important holiday that started on Wednesday and continues through next Tuesday. It is Fat Bear Week, where the internet can decide who is the number one fat bear in southwest Alaska's Katmai National Park and Reserve. These bears are currently bulking up for winter hibernation and can hit numbers over a thousand pounds. The returning champ this year is Holly, but don't count out a bear named 747, who is also very big and brown. You can vote every day on explore.org. So Giddy, we adore these large bears and we love the National Park Service. Do you have a favorite park you'd like to shout out here and now on our show what a day so thank you for naming

the show i appreciate it just in case you didn't know what we were doing yeah um i thought we were just calling each other uh i yosemite is like an easy one to you know because it's just like it's it's the showy one right like you get there and you're like oh yosemite wow but it's just like, it's the showy one, right? Like you get there and you're like, oh, Yosemite, wow. But it's true. It's really good. But on a local tip that's more of like a park that you would just be around in a neighborhood that you wouldn't drive thousands of miles to,

Mount Storm in Cincinnati, for our local listeners over there, is a really nice place. It has like a, if I remember correctly, like a little gazebo type thing that's on the top of this hill. It's right near Ludlow and Clifton. You know, you grab some Skyline, hit up a movie, and head over to Mount Storm.

Maybe, you know, you're doing like some underage drinking there. I would not sign off on that, but it could be something that comes up. Honestly, I love that you're pandering to Cincinnati in particular. You had to hit every note about what you could do. Honestly, are you being paid by like the Cincinnati Tourism Board? I can't disclose, you know, any sort of sponsorships or deals that I have at this time, but maybe at a later date, the lawyers will sign off on something. Very cool. Same question, though, for you, Akilah. What parks are your favorites in this beautiful world of ours? All right.

Well, I obviously like the idea of the Grand Canyon. I've never been there, but I think a big hole in the ground is exactly where I want to be right now. So, like, shout out to giant holes. I like my favorite park that I've been to before is a state park in Kentucky called Big Bone Lick for several reasons. It's mostly famous because the name is crazy. Like you could get a shirt that says Big Bone Lick and it's completely serious. But you stay for like the live buffalo that live there. And like they have really cool sort of like I'm going to mess up this word like paleontology stuff where you can see really old bones. It's cool.

Basically, it's this hub of like North America's sort of prehistoric time. And so there's a lot of like mammoth bones and like weird stuff that you just don't get in other parts of the country. So if you want to see some like imposing bones, it's another place to see them at Big Bone Lick. Head on down to Big Bone Lick. Yeah, that sounds like both a type of like barbecue restaurant that you could go to and a gas station shirt. Well, perfect. Just like that.

We have checked our temps. Stay safe. Become a really fat bear. And we'll be back with another Tim Check next week. let's wrap up with some headlines headlines so we've got a special guest with us today comedian and writer yedoya travis welcome to the madness hey it's me's me. Good to be here. How are you doing? It is you. Yeah. All right. Well, let's let's jump into it. When Trump and his shaggy haired AG William Barr put together their task force on policing earlier this year,

they knew exactly who to pick. So they'd get a balanced view of the issues. 112 cops and law enforcement officers and only five other people. Now that choice has come back to bite them after a federal judge ordered the commission to stop their work and not release any of their findings because they failed to represent varied points of view. A better commission would have included civil rights activists, defense attorneys, and mental health professionals. With this group,

their recommendations would probably be every officer should have tank and bigger flat screens in the police station. On top of the group's composition, they never filed a charter, never posted a public notice of meetings and didn't open their meetings to the public all of which they're required by law to do so i'm taking it upon myself to carry out the citizens arrest bar may still be able to release a report from the group if they add more diverse members and incorporate their input okay up next we got one man holds the keys to music industry success

and he's skateboarding down the road right now mainlining cranberry juice right in his veins pump that shit oh can i curse yeah oh yeah oh great uh nathan apodaca who goes by at 420 dog face 208 shout out dog gang uh on tiktok was seen by millions enjoying an ocean spray from the bottle and singing along to dreams by fleetwood mac a classic is a hit since then streams of that song have ballooned with spotify reporting a 242 increase in first-time listeners and apple reporting a i don't even it's like a hard number to even say 1137 increase in shazams i didn't know that was a metric they even measured but they do apparently um by the way before i finished this story one time i was at an anderson pat

concert and he's a very famous person and i saw somebody like in the front row shazaming his songs no how best festival they were just. Best concert I've ever been to. Didn't they buy tickets to see him? Like, wouldn't they know? Yeah, it just felt so much better. As much money as I spent knowing somebody just wasted all that money. Anyway, Apodaca says he received $10,000 in donations after the clip, which he plans to share with his mom and spend on his RV.

Found out he's homeless right after all this happened. Shout out to Dogface. I hope you're doing well. No word on how the clip affected cranberry juice sales, though. But either way, I hope the story reaches the bog where my friends in big rubber overalls are doing God's work. The bogs might be far away, but you all are extremely close to our hearts yeah that's actually where i met you doy we were both in a cranberry

bog just bogging just bogging bogging among the berries yeah that was our that was what our old sitcom was called right yeah yeah we were actually really successful. Yeah, we were doing very well. Well, we learned more yesterday about the sweet white lady from church who wants to take away our rights. So Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett once supported an extreme anti-choice group which says that life begins at fertilization. This position makes in vitro fertilization off limits because that process often requires fertilized embryos to be discarded. Most anti-abortion groups stop short of opposing in vitro fertilization off limits because that process often requires fertilized embryos to be discarded. Most anti-abortion groups stop short of opposing in vitro fertilization because it's popular. But remember that Barrett is a high achiever who's never been afraid to push it to the

limit. Is she opposed to men free ejaculating into socks? We will have to wait until the hearings to find out. Well, in 2006, Barrett signed her name to an ad in a South Bend newspaper pledging to, quote, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death. No word on unnatural death. Maybe she's opposed to, like, tragedies. I don't know. Yesterday, the White House sought to allay fears that she'd impose her own pro-life views on the court by pointing out that she recently ruled in support of a convicted killer's execution love when someone points at a dead man to say see don't worry love that stuff oh man oh things are going well yeah you know when i look at the world i just think to myself everything everything is just as it should be all in it's right place it's like it couldn't

be more ideal right now and I just really hope everyone else can see that okay well we also felt the need to update you guys about a story we've been following with spotlight level intensity a group of disgusting swearing birds

have returned to have returned to a public exhibition at a zoo in england after taking a couple days off to think about their bad language the five parrots spent their time out with more polite teacher's pet, you might call them snitch-ass birds, who were supposed to influence their behavior. These herb birds. So now instead of swearing, they

will ruin the park by snitching to everybody who walks by and talking about how they want extra homework. Oh man, these are some some nerd birds while the swearing birds were kept in the back visitors to the zoo uh took to swearing at random normal birds in attempts to find them as though they have not seen planet of the apes and they don't know that birds will eventually turn on you know crows remember faces and they will eventually flip the script and put us in cages i don't think you guys understand the way the world works

you see they said crows can uh think about their thoughts yeah i don't like that i don't want the considering stuff that's some scary shit one time out here in la because there's really giant crows i was at a stop sign and one landed on the stop sign and i stopped like put on my flashers to take a picture of it and it did not like that and i wonder what it was thinking about oh no they're like what the fuck is that and also what the fuck does what the fuck does that mean? Why do I speak English? Well, government officials in Madrid announced yesterday that they will be complying with Spain's new national lockdown restrictions. This comes after the regional government refused to follow national shutdown orders with officials claiming they weren't legally enforceable. Spain's national health minister pointed out that Madrid is currently a COVID-19 hotspot,

with the city accounting for 43% of the country's daily caseload. Before these new rules were introduced, their local government had its own regional restrictions, which critics claimed only targeted the poorest parts of the city. Classic. Madrid's president says the city will abide by the national government's lockdown, but that her administration will be launching a legal challenge very soon. Woof. Yo, I'm just confused about people's attitudes about this. It's a fucking it's a virus, man. Just go inside. I don't know what the argument for is, but you are just a dream. Thank you for

being on the show. Before we go, where can our listeners follow you and all your work um i am on on i'm on the internet you can search there um on instagram at professor doye professor d-o-y-e and then twitter at yedoye y-e-d-o-y-e-o-t um and if you live in philly i'm gonna be at the punchline for four shows october 23rd and 24th. So come through. I'm going to do some stand-up and some jokes. Those are the same thing, but you get it. Well, do one or the other.

One or the other. You can get stand-up or you can get jokes, but I don't do that shit together. No. It would be uncalled for. Yeah, that would be weird. Just not my style. Well, thank you so much for doing the show. And those are the headlines. It would be uncalled for. Yeah, that would be weird. Just not my style. Well, thank you so much for doing the show.

And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like this show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Don't yell bird swears at us and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just letters you've received from your friends at the cranberry bog like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick.

And vote Holly for fattest bear. She has been working really hard and I just think she deserves it. Thick with five C's, my friend. What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tan is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our executive producers are Katie Long,

Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.