Al Franken Interview with Christiane Amanpour (Sept. 16, 2020)

now president trump was also on stage last night in a televised town hall with undecided voters in the battleground state of pennsylvania he contradicted his own self on whether he played the coronavirus up or down and he was asked whether make america great again was ever real for african americans leading a key republican strategist to say that this town hall perhaps did not go well for a president fighting for reelection my next guest is al franken the former democratic senator from minnesota which is another crucial swing state and he's joining me now welcome to the program senator franken thank you christian thanks for having me so i want to ask you leading from my conversation with kwame kwei arma before you were a politician you were in the business of theater and definitely satire and i just want to ask you because so many people have tried to figure out how to reckon with this very by his own uh his own admission disruptive president who's been about busting norms for the last uh nearly four years uh you know we we've seen satire throughout history you know deal with leaders of all stripes tell me about how you think given your past work feel that he should be dealt with by the public well uh satirists are really actually quite important now and that's what i did i and i still do a little bit after i left the senate i said i continue to make my voice heard i do satire every once while on my podcast although i do a lot of mainly very very serious stuff which we'll get into about the threats uh to truth and science uh but no uh it's it's it's very important you know i used to uh when i'd be on david letterman i'd clarify to him that that i was a satirist and he was a clown and uh the role of satiris is very important well yeah i mean you know obviously you know george orwell mark twain i mean milan kundera so many people armando iannucci and before you know around world war ii you had charlie chaplin who did a takedown of hitler obviously in what was it called uh the great dictator um in the soviet union there was so much satire about those you know leaders that was passed around in underground pamphlets what what sort of satire can you see happening right now and i guess what i'm trying to figure out is what is an effective way to analyze discuss donald trump and this particular moment of leadership in the united states other than you know you know just going crazy as so many people do who who oppose him obviously not his own supporters it's an extremely dark time and it's very a serious extremely dark time but i try to do that in my podcast i you know i combine that with for example i just did a podcast uh with lori garrett and andy slavitt lori is a pulitzer prize winning writer on uh pandemics on on infectious diseases and annie slavitt was the head of cms and the focus is on the uh vaccine uh but we went into it got quite disturbing because we were talking really about the subject we were going to talk are talking about today is sort of the uh trust the the the war against science and uh lori was basically talking about uh there is no baseline to truth anymore and this is you know as a satirist uh i wrote a book called rush limbaugh's a big fat idiot and other observations and then i wrote a book called uh lies and lying liars who tell them a fair and balanced look at the right and that was about fox the first obviously about rush and at the time people well you can't call people liars and i'd say well except they're lying and what's happened is is that there's a reason rush limbaugh got the congressional uh the presidential medal of freedom is because he started this without rush limbaugh there'd be no donald trump and then you had fox and then with the internet you started having the breitbarts and and that uh stuff and now facebook people are getting channeled this misinformation and uh you know when kellyanne conway the first day of the presidency said well there's going to be alternative facts she was telling us something you know you know um go ahead go ahead chris well you were mentioning the science because it's it's obviously very important and we're seeing it right now i mean if we needed any reminder we've got the fires we've got climate sciences being denied we've got covid we've got medical science that's being manipulated i mean you know to your point about lies and lies etc some 20 000 um lies and distortions have been counted by fact checkers i mean for the first time in its i think 75 or 175 year history scientific america has come out and now yes endorsed joe biden for presidents the first time they say the evidence and the science show that donald trump has badly damaged the united states and its people because he rejects evidence and science the most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the kovit 19 pandemic he has also attacked environmental protections medical care and the researchers and public science agencies that helped this country prepare for its greatest challenges i guess you look at it a lot and so do many and america is known for its brilliant science and all its innovations and technology technological achievements what do you see in in i mean the the the fear i guess that you must have of this denial of science well this is exactly what laurie garrett and andy slava and i were talking about which is the focus was on the vaccine and the question was is this president going to announce a vaccine at the end of october for election purposes and probably a chance they're very good at that and i asked lori would you be poked with that vaccine and she said no and then we thought if biden wins what's that going to look like and it's not going to be pretty because we have kind of two sets of truth here you know it used to be we had evidence we had evidence the earth is round the gravity works this way we got to a space program we sent a man to the moon but now this president is saying that the deep state has infiltrated the fda they have undermined the authority of scientists these career scientists work for the cdc nih hhs uh fda and they're undermining them so during covet we've we have he basically was telling people it'll go away it's a ho he said it was a hoax after telling woodward this is really serious uh but i i and you wonder okay now how can he be at still in the race and it's because people say oh scientists are lying there's no climate change i remember rush limbaugh in like 93 or four or something said that well you know sea level if if you have an ice cube in a glass of water and it melts it stays at the same level well yeah but antarctica is not an ice cube it's a continent greenland is a body of land that's why it's called green land and this so there he's going out there and say it's gonna get cooler um meaning it's we're gonna have winter soon i guess and it's also gonna get darker tonight uh it's uh it's very very frightening so what they concluded was biden wins you know this forty percent of america a lot of whom are bachelors anyway won't take that and andy uh silent was saying look if you have if you have a vaccine is a hundred 100 effective and only 30 of the people take it then you'll have 30 percent of the people inoculated if it's 30 effective 100 percent take it you'll have the same thing this trust is extremely important in fighting covet and there's no trucks well you just had to be thrown away by this guy well i was going to ask you in terms of i'll ask you that in a second i want to play a little bit about the vaccine and about the you know it will go away uh the donald trump said to george stephanopoulos on that stage last night of course today we're hearing from the cdc that there won't be a vaccine for the for the for the people for the wide uh population at the very least until practically this time next year but this is what president trump said uh you know on stage last night it would go away without the vaccine george but it's going to go away a lot faster will go away without the vaccine sure over a period of time sure with time because many deaths and you'll develop you'll develop hurt like a herd mentality it's going to be it's going to be heard developed and that's going to happen that will all happen so i'm sure he meant herd immunity but i just want to know what do you think people you used to have constituents what do you what do you think people get from this kind of of conversation when it means you know the difference between life and death it's tragic it's tragic and infuriating and he did mean whether he meant it or not heard mentality because that's what it is there's a herd mentality which is i'm going to believe what any of this what this guy says and what i'm reading on uh on facebook from other right-wing people believe right-wing stuff when i read from bite bar and get on uh aon and fox that's that's unfortunately where we are today so it doesn't end on uh november 3rd hopefully it changes because if it if it goes the other way on november 3rd if it goes toward trump um you know it's it's more of this by the government of the united states which we really really don't obviously need but this guy it will go away yeah the sun will go away in i think it's uh four billion years it'll it will go away it'll uh consume all the hydrogen and it'll burst into a become a red star and envelop the first three planets and at that point covet if it's still here will go away because we'll be involved by a red star i wonder whether you can just really sick cast your mind back or your your time back to when you were in the senate and you had colleagues there republicans democrats and i'm just trying to figure out these gentlemen and women um may have known what president trump was you know saying you know you know i mean they they knew that he thought it was dangerous i guess covid his own people in the white house must have known what he thought about it he didn't just tell bob woodward presumably he may have told the public something but presumably high level officials knew and yet didn't stand up and say well let's actually you know do something about it what is what are your colleagues in the senate thinking when it comes to this kind of of blind support well uh when you said gentlemen and women there are certainly men and women my republican colleagues are scared they are scared of losing a primary they are scared of the koch brothers if you there were republicans john mccain lindsey graham others who believed in climate change because climate we have science and they told us the climate was changing but when citizens united uh was passed and uh and became law or when it when the supreme court decided citizens united i'm sorry it's been a while um then that unleashed all this money and the koch brothers could tell any republican senator we're going to dump 10 million dollars against you in a second and if it takes more well another 10 million dollars so you are now you don't believe in climate change i was on the energy committee the republican senators on the energy committee wouldn't acknowledge that the climate was changing lisa murkowski from alaska who's a chairman chairwoman she would every once well because villages in alaska are disappearing they have to move entire villages that are sinking into the ocean because the permafrost is melting everything's melting but this is about that 5-4 decision the supreme court that's why we the the garland nomination and what mitch mcconnell did on that was so disastrous this has been a pretty ugly time and uh my former republican colleagues and the new republicans that are there have been a huge part of that well we will continue to follow this and we will follow this as the election campaign and the election comes up senator al franken thank you very much for joining us tonight

Channel: Al Franken

Views: 65,517

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Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020