President Donald Trump on Monday claimed that he would not have called on former President Barack Obama to resign over the coronavirus pandemic, which has so far killed more than 160,000 people in the US. But Trump earlier demanded his dismissal of his predecessor for much less.
Trump insists he would not have called on Obama to resign when a reporter asked what his reaction would have been if “160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch.”
Given that Trump has repeatedly harangued over his Ebola response, the remark drew skepticism. Trump demanded that Obama “demand the American people & dismissal” in the fall of 2014 for allowing an individual who tested positive for Ebola to enter the country.
“If Obama emerges NOW, and thereby does a great service to the country – I will give him a free wave of life,” Trump tweeted weeks later. (Trump falsely claimed he played less golf than Obama during his 276th golf course as president last month.)
The West African Ebola epidemic, which lasted from 2014 to 2016, was the largest outbreak of the virus in history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only two people who contracted Ebola in Africa died from the virus in the US
Trump defends his response to the new coronavirus pandemic because the US has the worst outbreak in the world.
“I think it’s great what we have been able to do,” Trump said Monday. “If we did not close our country, we would have killed 1.5 or 2 million people already. We have just mentioned it. Now we do not have to close it. We understand the disease.”
REPORTER: If 160,000 people had died on Obama's watch, would you have called for his resignation?
TRUMP: No
[Trump called for Obama to resign over ebola, which didn't kill anyone in the US!] pic.twitter.com/mkJ3T4r1vr— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2020
Trump’s claim that 2 million people would have died were based on early projections formed from an “unlikely” scenario with no mitigating factors. The president has “obviously not closed our country.” Instead, he let states make their own decisions about restrictions.
“Nobody understood it because nobody ever saw anything like it,” Trump continued in Monday’s newsletter. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say. Sure. The big one – the big pandemic was really a terrible thing, where they lost 50 to 100 million people everywhere, probably ended World War II. All the soldiers were sick.”
This is false on more than one count. The so-called Spanish flu pandemic, which actually began in 1918, certainly did not end World War II, which began in 1939. It did not end with the First World War.
“Our people have done a fantastic job – our consultants and our doctors,” Trump continued. “They have a – really did an extraordinary job. They will never get the credit – and I’m not talking about me. The people who have worked this so hard will never get the credit.”
Despite Trump’s efforts to reduce the devastation, the pandemic in the US – which is singular among rich nations – has increasingly alerted its “doctors” to the current situation.
“What we see today is different from March and April,” Drs. Deborah Birx, the White House task force coordinator, told CNN earlier this month. “It’s extremely widespread.”
The remark drew a public dismissal of Trump, who accused Birx of attempting to administer it. In addition, he called her remarks “pathetic.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top-notch infectious disease expert who has to provide security for his family amid several Trump administration public attacks, said in a recent interview that the country’s outbreak was the ‘worst’ in the country. the world was.
“Quantitatively, if you look at it, it is. I mean, the numbers don’t lie,” Fauci said. “I mean, when you look at the number of infections and the number of deaths, it really matters a lot.”
