White House surrogates and Republican lawmakers struggled on Sunday to defend President Trump after spending the holiday weekend of July 4 denigrating the racial justice movement fueled by the assassination of George Floyd and downplaying a deadly pandemic by claiming that 99% of coronavirus cases are “completely harmless.”
In a couple of divisive speeches delivered against backdrops meant to invoke traditional images of patriotism and national pride: the huge presidential monument on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota on Friday and a fireworks celebration and flyby in the nation’s capital the next day: Trump heard a message directed at his hard-line base, with little in the way of the country as a whole.
Even some Trump strategists acknowledge that it’s a risky tactic.
At a time when multiple opinion polls show the president is following his alleged Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, by double-digit margins, Trump is increasingly diverging sharply from voters’ views on race , justice and history, as well as how to deal with a raging pandemic
However, among those who work for Trump or hope to put on his electoral suits, avoiding criticism of him even in the face of false or ahistorical statements remains an apparently mandatory practice.
On Sunday, for example, the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn repeatedly refused to contradict the President’s claim that 99% of coronavirus cases are “completely harmless.”
Infectious disease specialists say that about a third of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic. But for many others who get it, the effects can be severe or catastrophic. Even those who survive the disease often face dangerous long-term health problems.
Hahn, a doctor who is part of the White House coronavirus task force, faced repeated questions about Trump’s claim during Sunday television interviews. He avoided direct responses.
“I am not going to go into who is right and who is wrong,” Hahn said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He acknowledged that “cases are emerging in the country” and urged Americans to follow CDC guidelines on the use of masks, physical distancing and hand washing.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Hahn deviated when asked how many cases he believed to be harmless, and replied, “In any case, we don’t want to have … and any death, any case is tragic.”
Hahn also declined to address Trump’s often-repeated statement, echoed last week in a Fox interview, that the virus “would go away, I hope.”
Those with similar credentials, but no commitment to Trump, were more direct.
Hahn’s predecessor at the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, who ran the agency for the first two years of Trump’s term, said he did not know where Trump had obtained the 99% statistic, but that it was incorrect.
“Certainly more than 1% of people get a serious illness from this,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Gottlieb said the current surge in new infections would soon begin to lead to more deaths despite the fact that younger people accounted for a higher proportion of newly discovered cases and that treatments had improved.
“We are going to see deaths on the rise,” he said on CBS. “You are going to have more deaths, tragically.”
Trump has consistently touted his own performance in facing the pandemic, and Republican lawmakers, especially those who will be re-elected this year, increasingly put themselves in place as to whether they agree.
On CNN’s “State of the Union”, one of the Republican incumbents facing a tight race, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, was asked if Trump was exhibiting “failed leadership” in the coronavirus crisis.
“No,” she said. “I think the president is taking a step forward.”
Trump’s speech Friday at Mt. Rushmore, and his comments on July 4 the following day in Washington, appeared to aim to stoke the culture wars stemming from the George Floyd protests, including the attempt to tear down statues of Confederate-era figures.
In his speech in Washington, the president stated that the largely peaceful protesters who marched for weeks in cities across the United States “were not interested in justice or healing.”
“We will never allow an angry crowd to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our liberties,” Trump said.
Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a possible Democratic vice presidential candidate, said the president’s conclusions in weeks of protests were overturned by broad public support for the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement and a reevaluation of public monuments to the Confederacy.
Duckworth, a military veteran who lost both legs while serving in Iraq, said Trump’s emphasis was particularly jarring in the context of the pandemic and the White House’s inaction in the face of intelligence evaluations that Russia offered rewards to militants in Afghanistan for killing US troops.
“He spent more time worrying about honoring dead Confederates than talking about the lives of our Americans, 130,000 Americans, who lost their lives to COVID-19, or warning Russia of the reward they are putting on the heads of Americans, “Duckworth said about” State of the Union. “
“I mean, his priorities are all wrong here.”
Even some Republicans seemed to be pulling away from Trump in defending the honors for those military figures who took up arms against the United States to defend slavery.
Ernst, also a military veteran, was asked about the president’s threat to veto a military spending bill if it includes a proposal for a process to weigh the name change for US military bases named after Confederate generals.
She said she thought he should sign the measure.
