Jon Karl’s Crazy Reveals. Dennis Prager’s Clueless Take. | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

Jonathan Karl has seen photos of Mike Pence in hiding on January 6, but he wasn’t permitted to publish them in his upcoming book.

Karl is a remarkably talented writer. This is best evidenced in The Atlantic’s just-published excerpt of the book, a behind-the-scenes account of the final days of the Trump White House titled Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, set for release next week.

The excerpt focuses on a surprising and heretofore, largely unknown player in the Trump administration: Johnny McEntee. Karl goes into painstaking detail in describing the almost shockingly powerful role this 29-year-old former college football quarterback played within the White House. In the end, McEntee’s powers were so great that one unnamed source described him as “deputy president.”

This excerpt alone is equal parts absurd and frightening, but there’s more. For example, Karl has seen photos of Mike Pence while in hiding on January 6, but he wasn’t permitted to publish them.

In a preview released by CBS, Karl told Colbert he learned there was “an official White House photographer” with the then-vice president while he was in hiding during the Capitol riots and they took several photos.

“I got ahold of the photographer, I actually saw all of the photographs,” Karl told Stephen Colbert last night. “This is the vice president of the United States, and he’s like holed up in a basement.”

But Pence’s team, he said, “refused to let me publish the photographs.”

The interest in this crazy tell-all can only be enhanced by the fact that Donald Trump has lashed out at Karl over it, after praising his previous book.

New news, a big splash, and a Trump un-endorsement. You can hardly ask for more.

Dennis Prager made an eyebrow-raising comment on Monday comparing the Covid-19 pandemic to the AIDS crisis.

Prager was on Newsmax talking to Chris Salcedo when he said of the Biden administration so far, “If we survive this as a free country, historians will just ask how did this happen? How did people get governed by irrational fears?”

One of those “irrational” fears he cited was the millions of unvaccinated Americans. Prager, who recently said he deliberately got covid-19 so he could have natural immunity (as opposed to getting the vaccine), said unvaccinated Americans are “the pariahs of America as I have not seen in my lifetime.”

And then he made this comparison:

“During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of the people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable. And it should have been inconceivable! They should not have been made pariahs. But this is kosher, this is okay.”

There was in fact a lot of stigma towards the gay community during the AIDS crisis. It was a major national topic, something many pointed out on Twitter in response, rejecting his comparison. TPM’s Josh Marshall noted an important difference is that gay men in the 80s were “pleading for medical care not avoiding it.”

“In Prager’s imaginary 1980s, gay men and heroin users weren’t pariahs. I remember a very different ’80s. And ’90s for that matter. 2000s, too,” wrote SiriusXM host Bob Cesca.

Historical ignorance has been a frequent topic of late across the country. To display it blatantly (and coldly) as part of an ongoing battle against public health? Terrible.