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Donald Trump has used an interview with Fox News ally Sean Hannity to attempt to pin the blame for the resurgent coronavirus on Dr Anthony Fauci, who he said is “a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes”, although it was the president himself who disregarded medical advice to push for the early reopening of the states.
Asked about the fresh wave of outbreaks in the Sun Belt states, Trump responded: “First of all, the mortality rate, and Dr Fauci is a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes… A lot of them [medical advisers] said ‘Don’t wear a mask, don’t wear a mask.’ Now they are saying ‘wear a mask.’ A lot of mistakes were made, a lot of mistakes. Let me just make one statement, we do testing like nobody’s ever done testing. And when we test, the more you test, the more cases you find.”
“Other countries, you know when they test?” he continued, making excuses for presiding over the nation with the most cases and deaths in the world.
“They have tests that are very limited. We have massive, 45m people have been tested. At the record, and our tests are the best. We have cases all over the place. Most of the cases immediately get better, they are people, young people, they have sniffles and two days later they are fine and they are not sick to start off with. They are asymptomatic. A lot of things happen and what we are doing as with all of these tests that we are doing all over the country, test everybody, pull-up parking lots, everything else, what we’ve done is we’ve created a tremendous number of cases. Everybody else, can you imagine if China tested like we test? They don’t.”
Dr Fauci himself, incidentally, said yesterday on FiveThirtyEight’s Podcast 19 that partisanship in the US was hampering the recovery effort.
“You have to be having blindfolders on and covering your ears to think that we don’t live in a very divisive society now, from a political standpoint,” the country’s top infectious diseases expert commented.
“I mean, it’s just unfortunate, but it is what it is. And you know, from experience historically, that when you don’t have unanimity in an approach to something, you’re not as effective in how you handle it. So I think you’d have to make the assumption that if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have a more coordinated approach.”
Dr. Fauci: “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.” https://t.co/70nvNjFxwF
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) July 10, 2020
Back to Trump, whose latest bout of grievance airing also saw him accuse presidential opponent Joe Biden of being “brainwashed” by the “radical left” wing of the party.
“They brainwashed him, he doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what he’s doing and our country will suffer. Our stock markets will crash, bad things will happen,” he said.
The president also signalled his intention to wear a mask when he visited veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Maryland on Saturday and bashed New York City mayor Bill de Blasio for joining in as Black Lives Matter activists painted a mural outside of Trump Tower in Manhattan: “All the merchants along Fifth Avenue are furious…The whole city is furious. A city that’s enraged.”
Best of all, Trump bragged about “acing” a cognitive test, which really isn’t the achievement he appears to think it is.
The test that Trump is on national television bragging about “acing” includes identifying a lion, a rhino, and a camel. https://t.co/dKFpCXQJY7
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 10, 2020
