President Trump again declined to promise to accept the results of the November presidential election and dismissed public opinion polls showing his position with voters plummeting on his handling of the worsening coronavirus outbreak.
In an interview broadcast Sunday on Fox News, the president also inaccurately boasted that the United States had the “best” death rate from coronavirus, asserted that the economy was recovering rapidly, and denigrated the government’s leading infectious disease specialist. Dr. Anthony Fauci, as substitutes for the President have done in recent days.
And as he did in 2016, Trump declined to guarantee that he would accept the election result, saying it was too soon.
“I have to see,” Chris Wallace told the interviewer. “I’m not going to just say ‘yes’. I’m not going to say ‘no’, and not the last time either.”
Repeating a statement he has made often in recent weeks, the president said he believed that voting by mail would “manipulate the election.” Critics have said Trump is trying to delegitimize early voting, fearing a loss, especially if the pandemic means that voting by mail is used more than usual.
Trump’s alleged opponent, Joe Biden, often shrugs off the president’s sides, but Biden’s aides offered a scathing response to Trump’s suggestion that he could not voluntarily leave office if voters reject him.
“The American people will decide these elections,” the Biden campaign said in a statement. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting intruders outside the White House.”
Trump ruled out the numerous national polls that show a big advantage for Biden.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday indicates the former vice president has a double-digit lead over Trump, taking it from 55% to 40% among registered voters. Wallace told Trump during the previous interview that a new Fox News poll also gave Biden the lead, showing a somewhat tighter, but still significant lead, from 49% to 41%.
Surveys of major battlefield states have shown a similar picture, with Biden leading the way in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida and Arizona.
“I am not losing, because those are false surveys,” Trump said, referring to the Washington Post and Fox polls. At another time, he said: “I am not a good loser. I do not like lose “.
Amid the growing coronavirus outbreak, which has claimed more than 140,000 American lives, with the rate of new cases at one point last week reaching 75,000 in a single day, Trump praised his own performance, claiming that the United States has the “best mortality rate.”
Total US confirmed deaths from COVID-19 is the highest recorded in any country in the world, and the US has the seventh highest death rate for the size of its population, Wallace told him, citing widely used figures from Johns Hopkins University.
When asked about the recurrence of the pandemic, including his prediction that the coronavirus would one day “just go away,” Trump declined to back down on his forecast.
“I will be right eventually,” he said. “You know I said, ‘It’s going to go away.’ I will say it again … It will disappear And I will be right.
When asked if he was being proven wrong in real time, with the count of cases increasing in 35 states, Trump replied, “I don’t think so.”
Public health experts, by contrast, offered grim new evaluations on Sunday. Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, interviewed on CBS ‘”Face the Nation,” said states as affected as California, Texas, Arizona and Florida could be two to three weeks away from their peaks and then they could face a “long” plateau. “
Gottlieb also predicted new hot spots could emerge, pointing to troubling signs in Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, among other states. He predicted “more trouble for fall and winter,” when many experts warned that a fierce second wave of the coronavirus could coincide with seasonal flu infections.
Amid a protest by the medical and scientific community over derogatory comments about Fauci made by members of his administration, the president described the infectious disease specialist as “a bit of an alarmist.”
Trump’s surrogates, including his business adviser, Peter Navarro, have spoken scathingly about Fauci for the past week. Navarro wrote an opinion piece a week ago in which he said that the main scientist had been wrong about “everything”.
The White House also circulated a list of topics for conversation criticizing the 79-year-old head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, White House officials denied a report in the Los Angeles Times that Navarro had acted with Trump’s approval.
In the Fox interview, Trump also pushed again for a full, in-person resumption of classroom instruction in a matter of weeks, and again hinted that positive cases among youth are not a problem, despite an asymptomatic infected person It can transmit the virus to many more vulnerable people.
“Many of those cases are young people who would heal in one day,” Trump said.
Trump has consistently downplayed the increase in cases across the country, attributing it to increased evidence, which even many of his Republican allies have dismissed as false. It has also ignored the rapid increase in deaths in Arizona, Texas and other affected states.
It has paid a high political price: in both the Washington Post and Fox polls, voters increasingly disapproved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. In the Post poll, voters disapproved of 60% to 38%, and the part that approved of Trump’s approach has dropped dramatically since spring.
Republican and Democratic governors said Sunday that the rapidly growing workload signaled difficult times on the short-term horizon.
“We could become Florida,” Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to an outbreak in the Sunshine State.
Despite the fact that some Republican governors walked away from Trump on the issue of facial coatings, for example, in Arkansas, Governor Asa Hutchinson backed down and issued a masking mandate that will take effect on Monday, Trump, who used a mask in public only for the first time Eight days ago, he again sent mixed messages in the Fox interview.
He discarded a national mandate and said: “I want people to have some freedom.” But almost at the same time, Trump stated, “I believe in masks, I believe that masks are good.”
Trump, whose erratic public statements about the pandemic and other issues have prompted some critics to question his mental fitness, recently bragged about “doing” a cognitive function test. In the Fox interview, he was irritated when Wallace cited examples of questions on that test that a young child could easily answer.
“They have a picture and it says, ‘What is that?’ and it’s an elephant, “Wallace said.
“That’s all misrepresentation,” Trump replied.
