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Friday, September 11, 2020
A few weeks before the US presidential election, incumbent Trump is compiling statements from the spring. Have you downplayed the danger posed by the coronavirus and put the lives of tens of thousands at risk? The head of state needs an explanation and makes use of historical comparisons.
US President Donald Trump has drawn a parallel between his appeasement in the crown pandemic and the behavior of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II. “When Hitler bombed London, Churchill, a great leader, would often stand on a roof in London and speak,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan. “And he always spoke calmly. He said we have to show calmness. No, we did it well, and we did a job like nobody else.”
Trump was under pressure almost two months before the US election because he said in interviews with investigative journalist Bob Woodward in March that he had deliberately downplayed the danger posed by the virus. The US media published passages and corresponding recordings on Wednesday. Trump later said in his defense that he did not want to panic.
Trump on Thursday (local time) referred to the advice of the London government to the British during World War II: “Keep calm and carry on” (more or less: keep calm and carry on). “That ‘s what I did.” Churchill is said to have observed the Nazi bombings in London from a rooftop, but did not deliver a speech. In June 1945, after the end of the war, he spoke during the election campaign in a canopy, as captured in the photos.
“I did not lie”
At a press conference at the White House, Trump also denied lying to Americans about the danger posed by the corona virus. When asked by a journalist, he called it “a shame.” “He wasn’t lying,” Trump said. “I said we have to stay calm, we must not panic.” Trump’s challenger in the White House race, Democrat Joe Biden, on Wednesday accused the Republican of lying to the American people and being responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of American citizens.
Trump now argued that if Woodward had thought his statements problematic, he should have made them public immediately rather than waiting months. In Freeland, he called Pulitzer Prize winner Woodward a “maniac” in front of cheering fans. Once again, he praised his government’s crisis management, which most Americans have been judging negatively in polls for months. Trump said: “I think we probably did the best job of any country on the pandemic, certainly any major country in the world.”
At the White House, Trump presented the situation in the United States in the corona pandemic as better than in Europe. “If you look at the European Union right now, they have outbreaks like I’ve never seen them before and, frankly, their numbers are at much worse levels than the numbers here,” he said. He cited Italy, France and Spain as examples. Although the number of infections has risen again there, they are still at a high level in the US However, Trump was confident that the US would soon overcome the crisis. He ruled out another closure. He accused Biden of using the pandemic for political purposes.
Since the pandemic began, more than 191,000 people in the United States have died after being infected by the coronavirus. The number of new infections each day was more than 34,000 on Wednesday. In absolute numbers, the US has the highest number of corona deaths in the world, but not relative to population. The United States ranks seventh in this category. In the EU, only Spain has more deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.
