President Donald Trump refused to believe that the United States has one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the world and dismissed the rising death toll from the pandemic during a combative and controversial Sunday interview with Fox News presenter Chris Wallace.
In his first interview with the veteran newscaster in nearly two years, the president was immediately enraged when Wallace pressured him about the rise in coronavirus and hospitalization cases, something Trump has insisted is due only to “burning coals” and increased testing.
“That is because we have excellent tests, because we have the best tests in the world. If we didn’t do the test, it couldn’t show that graph, “Trump complained. “If we tried half, those numbers would be low.”
Wallace, meanwhile, noted that this “is not burning coals” but rather as a “forest fire,” prompting Trump to reply that he “will put out the flames” of those “coals” before complaining that other countries too dealing with cases on the rise.
“Why don’t they talk about Mexico?” Trump bellowed. “What is not helping us. And all I can say is thank God I built most of the wall because if I didn’t have a wall they would have a much bigger problem with Mexico. “
The Fox presenter, highlighting the numbers from Johns Hopkins University, responded that the United States currently has the “seventh highest death rate in the world” and that the European Union currently prohibits American travelers.
However, Trump falsely claimed that the United States has one of the lowest death rates, and asked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to bring him a document to prove he was right. He also accused Wallace of being “fake news.” Wallace, for his part, inserted a separate reporting segment at that point in the interview, informing viewers that the White House used a misleading table to present the Trump case.
The President would go on to claim that the only reason American cases are increasing is because of increased evidence, prompting Wallace to respond that while evidence has increased by 37 percent, cases have increased by 194 percent. percent and the positivity rate has increased in recent weeks.
After the president claimed that the vast majority of cases were just young people “with the cold,” Wallace said he was going to do Trump a “favor” by allowing him to convince the audience that he was not downplaying the virus.
“I can tell you that the death list is 1,000 cases per day,” added Wallace when the president insisted that he was taking the pandemic seriously.
“Excuse me, it’s too much, it shouldn’t be a case,” Trump replied. “It came from China, they should never have let it out, they should never have let it out, but it is what it is.”
Wallace also pressured Trump over his administration’s attempts to discredit the leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Trump blamed solely on a single White House official who went rogue. At the same time, Trump made sure to say that Fauci is an “alarmist” and that he has been “wrong” in the pandemic many times.
The Fox presenter told Trump that he had been wrong about the virus multiple times, playing him a series of videos showing Trump predicting the disease would go away quickly and cases would soon drop to zero.
“I will be right eventually,” he said confidently. “I said it was going to disappear, I will say it again … and I will be right.”
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