Kathy Griffin joins Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson for a special episode of The New Abnormal recorded right after the vice presidential debate. The gang thought Kamala Harris was the clear winner but they couldn’t stop looking at the vice president’s eye. “The closeup shots of Mike Pence’s bleeding eyeball were like watching an eighties horror movie. I expected some sort of snake to come running out of it at any minute,” said Rick. And that was before the fly stuck to his head. “It's almost like it gets inflamed during the debate. And the fly was doing some triage,” said Griffin.



Pence came into the debate needing to try and help Trump win back the women voters who have deserted him since 2016, but that was a total fail.“Maybe I'm biased because I hate Mike Pence with passion and burning fire of a thousand suns,” said Molly. “But I just saw a guy who doesn’t give a shit about women and who doesn’t respect women and who talked over [the moderator] Susan Page and talked over Kamala.”



Rick agreed: “He comes across as a guy, who’s saying, ‘Well, hey little lady, what can I do to get you into this beautiful ‘89 Camry today?’ Just there’s a little creepiness about him.”

“I will say, as a female watching, I did feel like Pence was doing a very classic gaslighting, the woman,” said Griffin. Pence also failed to commit to President Trump accepting the result of the election and agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power. “Mike Pence will be in a Nuremberg trial someday,” said Rick.



Griffin said it was tragic as Pence had once been seen as a mainstream Republican. “It’s shocking to watch him get indoctrinated like a freaking member of right-wing ISIS, go on his degenerate journey to becoming nothing but the crap under Trump’s shoe,” she said. “And it’s disheartening watching him tonight… just parroting, conspiracy theories that seem to get crazier. As the night went on, I just looked at him and I went, f**k that fly—that guy.”

Trump is like a fading Soviet leader

But I saw something else. I had a flashback to my early career studying the old Soviet Union, and in Trump I saw the fading Soviet leaders who climbed to the top of Lenin’s tomb, gamely waving and putting on a brave face as their health and grip on power slipped away from them. Trump was Leonid Brezhnev or Konstantin Chernenko, but this time struggling to take in the muggy night breeze in Washington instead of the frigid and polluted air of Moscow.

And this Washington version of the old Kremlin is the pathetic station to which the United States has been reduced in the waning days of Trump’s misrule. We have a paranoid leader who will do anything to hold on to power, including squashing any talk of allowing his second in command to act in his stead even for a day. (Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush allowed such temporary transfers for health reasons.) The White House is now a bunker, administered by a cult of personality whose disciples treat the boss’ health as a secret, while the favored television networks of the state air cheery obfuscations about the president’s strength and selfless devotion to country.

Meanwhile, the president’s medical team sounds like the doctors from the Soviet Ministry of Health. They are all very honored, they made sure to tell us, to be on the great leader’s medical team. The president is a “phenomenal patient,” and we must all do our part to keep up the happy talk. You could hear the echoes of the old USSR as Physician to the President Sean Conley gave his reports under the watchful eye of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Comrades. The president is a strong man, and he has a slight flu, as many of us do here in Moscow. The Central Clinical Hospital here in the Kremlin has the best care in our nation, and he is receiving drugs developed by our scientists that are available nowhere else in the world. His fever and the condition of his lungs are, as I am sure you understand, a matter of state security, and we will not be discussing them. The president is attending to matters of state even in his suite, and indeed, we have cautioned his aide, Comrade Meadows, to stop trying to give him yet more work!”

Breaking: "In an unprecedented move," the New England Journal of Medicine has published an editorial "condemning the Trump admin for its response to the Covid-19 pandemic – and calling for the current leadership in the US to be voted out of office."

The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized,3 appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government,4 causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.

Let’s be clear about the cost of not taking even simple measures. An outbreak that has disproportionately affected communities of color has exacerbated the tensions associated with inequality. Many of our children are missing school at critical times in their social and intellectual development. The hard work of health care professionals, who have put their lives on the line, has not been used wisely. Our current leadership takes pride in the economy, but while most of the world has opened up to some extent, the United States still suffers from disease rates that have prevented many businesses from reopening, with a resultant loss of hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of jobs. And more than 200,000 Americans have died. Some deaths from Covid-19 were unavoidable. But, although it is impossible to project the precise number of additional American lives lost because of weak and inappropriate government policies, it is at least in the tens of thousands in a pandemic that has already killed more Americans than any conflict since World War II.

Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.