The president’s claim with no evidence about the virus was his latest attempt to minimize the threat of the coronavirus, as it plagues the United States with increasing cases across the country, and as an increasing number of senior Republican officials from governors from the nation to members of Congress pleads with Americans to redouble their efforts to stem the spread of the virus, warning of the dangerous consequences if current trends continue.
Seeking to distract the nation from the gruesome increase in Covid-19 cases and the sinister death toll of the United States, as it surpassed 129,000 people, Trump has plunged deeper into a racially charged strategy aimed at bolstering his support among White Americans who feel threatened by radical cultural change. United States after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
“American heroes defeated the Nazis, dethroned the fascists, overthrew the communists, saved American values, defended American principles, and pursued terrorists to the ends of the earth,” Trump said Saturday night on the White House. “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and the people who, in many cases, have absolutely no idea what they are doing.”
Deceive the virus
It was in that same speech that he made his latest puzzling claim about the virus, as he described the administration’s flawed and lagging response to the pandemic as a great American success story and falsely suggested, once again, that the increase in cases in The US is due to increased testing.
“We have now tested it, almost 40 million people. In doing so, we show cases, 99% of which are completely harmless, results that no other country can show because no other country has evidence that we have,” Trump said. “Not in terms of numbers, or in terms of quality.”
With frontline medical workers in the audience, Trump also touted the nation’s moves to make more personal protective equipment and ventilators so desperately needed at the start of the outbreak. He said the United States “will probably have a therapeutic or vaccine solution, well before the end of the year.”
He again blamed the spread of the virus to China: “China’s secrecy, deceit and cover-up allowed it to spread throughout the world, 189 countries. And China must be held fully responsible,” Trump said. China has repeatedly denied these claims.
Trump’s refusal to confront the magnitude of the health crisis facing the United States has few parallels among other presidents in recent history. Historian Douglas Brinkley noted on CNN Saturday night that President Woodrow Wilson attempted to minimize the Spanish flu pandemic because the United States was involved in a war.
But Wilson’s effort was “nothing like what Donald Trump is doing here, which is trying to turn July 4 into his own private leonization,” Brinkley said, noting Trump’s recent visits to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. , Tulsa, Oklahoma. and Arizona, “without worrying about social distancing, without wearing a mask.”
“Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt in the midst of World War II without invoking the spirit of World War II?” Brinkley said on CNN’s “Newsroom”, describing Roosevelt’s effort to reunite Americans in a time of national crisis. “At least Donald Trump should give a speech on this Room saying that we have new heroes, medical workers in the United States, nurses, and doctors and technicians that we can now be proud of and someday there will be hospitals and memorials.” named after them. ”
Sabotaging your own public health experts
Trump has resisted the masks even when a long list of Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, as well as his own Surgeon General and public health officials, have pleaded with the public. cover your face.
In an abrupt change Thursday, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott made face-wraps mandatory for most residents of the entire Lone Star state. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, another Trump ally, He wore a mask at various events last week, including with Vice President Mike Pence, who has followed a careful line, wearing one in numerous recent public appearances and saying the decision should be up to local officials and individuals.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, also a Republican, toured his state last week urging Georgians to wear masks. And even Trump movers like Steve Doocy, co-host of “Fox & Friends,” said this week that if the president wore a mask, he would be “a good example” and a “good role model.”
Doocy noted that his friends in New Jersey and New York wear masks all the time and keep telling him that if the president wore a mask “it would appear that he is taking it seriously and listening to the CDC.”
But Trump ignored that advice at none of the events this weekend, allowing his spectacular July 4 show to unfold like any other year. But in Washington, DC, at least, many of the regular viewers who would attend the display of military might and fireworks did not do so this year. The crowd was thin, a sign that many Americans are now paying more attention to the guidance of medical experts than to the example of their president.
CNN’s Maggie Fox and Jamie Gumbrecht contributed to this report.
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