In an attempt to sway the news cycle away from a number of ongoing and erupting scandals engulfing his administration and swamping his reelection efforts, an unusually subdued and sedate President Trump announced 20 people he said he would add to his list of potential candidates for any Supreme Court seat that may open up during his term.
The list includes Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Senator Ted Cruz and former Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Trump called on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to release a similar list.
Taking questions from the few assembled members of the media, Trump was asked about his statements to Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward about downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus. On the day when the United States passed 190,000 fatalities from COVID-19, Trump again touted his incorrect claim that “we’re leading the world” in the response to the virus.
“We don’t want to instill panic,” Trump said. “We don’t want to jump up and down and say we have a problem, a tremendous problem and scare everybody.”
Asked how he can reassure the American people that they can trust what he says, given that he’s on tape saying that he misled the public, Trump nonsensically said, “I think that’s a big part of trust. We have to have leadership. We have to show leadership and the last thing you want to do is create a panic in the country. This was a horrible thing. It was sent to us by China. [Fact check: the coronavirus strain that started the epidemic came in from Europe.] Should not have happened. Should never have happened. This is a disgusting, terrible situation that was foisted upon us. And we have to show, we just don’t want to use, the best word is panic. We don’t want to have to show panic. We not going to show panic. And that’s exactly what I did, and I was was very open, whether it was to Woodward or anyone else. [Fact check: Woodward’s recordings document that Trump knowingly lied and was not “open” to everyone.] It’s just another political hit job. But whether it was Woodward or anyone else, you cannot show a sense of panic or you’re going to have bigger problems than you ever had before.”
Trump was then asked if he was “more forthright with the American people, more lives could’ve been saved. Do you take any responsibility for the 200,000 deaths that we’ve had?”
Trump responded, “So I think if we didn’t do what we did, we would have had millions of people die. We closed up our country. We closed it up very, very quickly, very effectively. [Fact check: Trump issued a travel ban for people from China ten days after the first coronavirus case was identified in the US; 40,000 came into the country from China after his announced travel ban. He issued a travel ban from Europe about one month later–after the pandemic had started spreading across the nation. The US now has the most cases and the most fatalities in the world.] We, uh, did a job, we learned about this horrible disease along with the rest of the world which had to learn about it, and then we opened it up and now we know the vulnerable, we know who it attacks, who it’s so vicious against, and I think we’ve done from every standpoint a wonderful job. [Fact check: The US leads the world in coronavirus cases and deaths. The nation is seeing a steady increase in cases. The US has is in the top 10 of nations (with populations over 100,000) in fatalities per capita, and it’s in the bottom half of all nations for case fatality rate. By those metrics, it was not “a wonderful job.”]
“We should have lost anybody. Nobody should have lost– China released something that they shouldn’t have been allowed to rele– they should not have released. [Fact Check: China didn’t “release” anything. This is a naturally occuring virus. It was not a biological weapon as conspiracy theorists posit.] It came out of China. It went to Europe. It went all over the world. It should have never happened. They could’ve stopped it. They stopped it from going into the remainder of China. It started in Wuhan and they stopped it. [Fact Check: China did stop a widespread outbreak of the virus by implementing national public health regulations that the Trump Administration scoffed at, leaving the handling of a national outbreak to the various state governors.]
“But they didn’t stop it from coming to our country. Now, we had to show calm. We had to show, y’know… if it was up to you, or whoever, I have no idea what he said in the book, and again, ahhhh, it’s a book that I gave him some quotes, and frankly, we’ll see how the book turned out. I have no idea, you’re asking me questions for the first time. But again, the last thing we can show is panic, or excitement, or fear, or anything else. We had to take care of the, we had to take care of the situation we were given. [Fact check: The Trump Administration created the situation by not implementing a single domestic policy to contain the coronavirus. And one thing that they needed to show was competence; they didn’t.]
“Now, long before anyone else wanted to do it, I closed our borders to a very heavily infected China. [Fact check: Trump just claimed the Chinese government controlled the spread of the coronavirus.] If I didn’t do that, we would have had hundreds of thousands more people die. Dr. Fauci said it. Many people said it. It was a decision I made and I had to make. It was a decision that a lot of people thought I was wrong. Nancy Pelosi said I was wrong. Joe Biden said I was wrong. They all came back and said it was the right decision. {Fact Check: No, they didn’t.] And I was way early. That was in January, the end of January. [Fact Check: Trump issued the travel ban from China on January 31st. The European travel ban wasn’t issued until March 11th.]
“So that was a very good thing we did, otherwise we would’ve had hundreds of thousands more, but if we didn’t close the country, we would’ve been talking about millions of people instead of the numbers that we have right now. [Editor’s Note: Trump says this like 190,000 fatalities are acceptable.]
A reporter asked, if he knew that the virus was spread in the air in February, as is proven by the Woodward recordings, why did he wait to March to implement “Project Airbridge,” the program to supply PPE and other vital equipment to front line medical workers.
Trump: “Well, you didn’t, you didn’t really think it was going to be to the point where it was. All of a sudden, the world was infected. The entire world was infected. Everyone was scrambling around where to buy face masks and all of the other things. We’ve opened up factories. [Fact Check: We still have a shortage of PPE.] We’ve had tremendous success with face masks and with shields and with the ventilators, we’re now supplying the rest of the world. We have all the ventilators we can use. And remember this: the ventilators were very important. Not one person that needed a ventilator didn’t get it. [Fact Check: Hospitals had to jerry-rig ventilators to assist more than one patient at a time because of ventilator shortages.] And these are very complex, expensive machines to make. We opened up something like hadn’t been done since the Second World War. We honestly, we’ve done an incredible job. But we don’t want to run around screaming, shouting ‘Oh look at this. Look at this!’ We have to show…leadership. And leadership is all about confidence. And confidence is confidence in our country. And our people have been great. [Fact Check: As the Woodward recordings show, Trump didn’t have enough confidence in our country to be honest with the people of our country.]
“We’ve been put through a lot by China by releasing this, by having this come here. We were put through a lot. They could have done something about it and they chose not to.”
Editor’s note: Trump didn’t take responsibility for any defect in his administration’s response to the coronavirus, nor did he even acknowledge that he misled the American public on the dangers surrounding the coronavirus.