In a truly bonkers interview on Fox News Sunday, Donald Trump sat down with host Chris Wallace to talk about the upcoming presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden, the toppling of Confederate statues, and of course, the novel coronavirus pandemic. This Sunday’s interview features some actual fact-checking from Wallace when it came to coronavirus case numbers and mortality rates associated with COVID-19. How did Trump react? He ran the usual gauntlet, including bringing up the border wall, fake news, and blaming governors.
When speaking to Wallace, Trump claimed that the United States has one of the lowest coronavirus mortality rates in the world. This is patently untrue. Trump also tried to spin our rising confirmed case numbers by saying that case numbers are rising only because the country is testing more now than it had been in, say, April. “We have the best testing in the world,” Trump stated. “If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down.”
Trump, incredulously, also brought up the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. “All I can say,” he slipped in, “is thank God I built most of the wall. Because if I didn’t have the wall up, we would have a much bigger problem with Mexico.”
Then, in terms of mortality rate, Wallace referenced numbers from the Johns Hopkins University, which places the U.S. as seventh on a list of the top twenty. Trump called off-screen to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, prompting her to bring a chart with statistics from the European CDC. This chart, however, did not include countries with lower (ie: better) rates than the U.S.
“I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates,” Trump stated, and after McEnany brought him some papers, passed them to Wallace, and said, “This shows what fake news is all about.”
Wallace pointed out that there has been no national, federal guidance on lockdowns. He asked if Trump took responsibility for that, to which Trump replied, “I take responsibility always, for everything,” before noting that “some governors had done poorly.”
And rounding out this five-minute clip, Wallace reiterated points about our surging case numbers. Trump countered this point by asserting that “Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day. They have the sniffles,” he continued, “and we put it down as a test.” He added: “In many cases, people are going to get better very quickly.” Mind you, as Daily Kos has covered, young people are certainly not immune from the virus, nor from long-term or fatal complications. Physicians and researchers are also still learning about the possible long-term effects of the virus even for people who do recover.
Here is the clip.