Donald Trump continues his effort to downplay coronavirus but in a dangerous way. It’s one thing to quell panic, but that is not what the president is doing here. Instead, he is delivering misinformation. Last night he was spinning and lying about the virus on Fox News. Politico said, he “spun a web of theories minimizing the coronavirus’ threat to Americans, accusing the World Health Organization of dispensing inaccurate facts about the outbreak and suggesting that those with the disease would be safe going to work.”
CNN’s media analyst Brian Stelter writes:
“I hesitate to even print the United States president’s words here, because they’re so at odds with what health experts are saying. But the president’s statements to Sean Hannity are significant because millions of people were watching live.“
Trump actually admitted some of his thoughts were based on a “hunch,” even when contradicting the World Health Organization.
And while some companies are telling employees to work from home, Trump countered that saying:
“If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better, and then when you do have a death, like you’ve had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York.”
As Stelter points out, “No deaths have been reported in New York.”
CNN’s John Harwood writes:
“Responding to coronavirus, Trump has indulged his penchant for blaming others, from Democrats to the media to the Fed. Insistent on defending his performance as he seeks a second term, he has delivered over-optimistic assessments disproven by subsequent developments.”
He goes on to say
“Trump’s aversion to facts and expertise make him ‘totally incompetent’ for the coronavirus challenge, declared Max Skidmore, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Skidmore reviewed the history of White House responses in his book ‘Presidents, Pandemics and Politics.’”
As Dan Rather said, “In a crisis, one of the most precious commodities for a government is credibility.”