What The President Said (About The Plague) Jan 22- April 29, 2020
Paul Nudd illustration for Quarantine Times
Reposted for prosperity from Counterpunch.org
Part one - Part two - Part Three
Rather than place Trump’s statements in strict chronological order, I have sometimes put 2 or more of statements from different days together, to highlight Trump’s contradictions and subsequent deviations– these are prefaced by an asterisk. I have retained Trump’s numerous linguistic infelicities. It should be noted that Trump sometimes refers to himself in the third person:
Jan 22 –- “We have it totally under control. It is one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
Jan 22– “No, the coronavirus won’t become a pandemic. Not at all.”
*March 17 -– “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
Jan 24 -– “It will all work out well.”
Jan 30 –- “We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at the moment – five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”
Feb 10 –- “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
*April 3— “ “I didn’t say a date. … I said it’s going away, and it is going away.”
Feb 19 –- “I think the numbers are getting progressively better as we go.”
Feb 20 –- “…within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.”
Feb 22 -– “We have it very much under control in this country.”
Feb 24— “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock market starting to look very good to me.”
Feb 25 -– “…the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus… they tried the impeachment hoax … and this is their new hoax.” (to Sean Hannity)
Feb 26 – “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for and we will essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”
*Feb 29 -– “Everything is really under control.” (The vaccine will be available) “very rapidly.”
*March 2 -– “You take a solid flu vaccine — you don’t think that would have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?” [“No,” Dr Schleifer replied.]
Feb 26 -– “We’re going down, not up.”
Feb 26 -– “But with Ebola — we were talking about it before — you disintegrated. If you got Ebola, that was it. This one is different. Much different. This is a flu. This is like a flu. And this is a much different situation than Ebola. … We can now treat Ebola. In that — at that time, it was infectious and you couldn’t treat it. Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody had ever heard of anything like this. So it’s a much different situation”.
March 2 -– “It’s very mild.”
March 3– (saying he doesn’t want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because the number of coronavirus cases in the country would go up) “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”
March 4 –- (on the WHO saying the coronavirus death rate is 3.4%) “I think the 3.4% number is really a false number. Now this is just my hunch, but based on a lot of conversations … personally, I’d say the number is way under 1%.”
March 4– “…we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.”
March 4– “So if, you know, 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”.
*March 5—“I never said that people who were feeling sick should go to work”.
March 4– “I think that Easter Sunday and you’ll have packed churches all over this country, I think that this will be a beautiful time.”
*March 29 –” “Social distancing rules will be extended to 30 April. My open for Easter plans were only aspirational.”
*April 4— “We’re not going to churches on Palm Sunday. But think of next Sunday: Easter. And I brought it up before, I said, maybe we could allow a special for churches. Maybe we could talk about it. Maybe we could allow them with great separation outside on Easter Sunday.”
March 6 -– (visiting the CDC) “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘how do you know so much about this?’ maybe I have a natural ability.’ Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6– “Anybody that needs a test gets a test. We –- they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful”.
March 6—(at Fox News Town Hall) Well, actually, we were giving — I think really given tremendous marks — if you look at Gallup poll, you look at other polls — for the way we’ve handled it.…
[W]e’ve been given rave reviews….
So we were really given tremendous marks…
Again, we’ve gotten the highest poll numbers of anybody for this kind of a thing. …
We’ve been given A-pluses for that….
Well, I think people are viewing us as having done a very good job.
March 7– “I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.”
*March 30– “If we could hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, that’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000 — so we have between 100- and 200,000 — we altogether have done a very good job.”
*March 31– “I want every American to be prepared for the tough days ahead. This is going to be a very, very painful two weeks.” [As American fatalities surpass those in China.]
March 30– “We’ve tested more now than any nation in the world. We’ve got these great tests…. I haven’t heard about testing being a problem.” [South Korea, which reported its first COVID-19 test the same day as the United States’ first, has tested 40 times more people than the US on a per-capita basis.]
*April 2– “We’ve tested more than any other country in the world both in terms of the raw number, and also on a per capita basis, the most.” [The reality regarding testing per capita– Germany: 1 in 90 people, South Korea: 1 in 119 people, US: 1 in 273 people]
March 10 -– “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
March 10– “I’ve been briefed on every contingency you could possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of positive. Different numbers, all different numbers. Very large numbers. And some small numbers, too, by the way.”
* March 30—””You know, I see things — I see numbers. They don’t matter to me.”
March 18—“We have tremendous numbers of ventilators, but there’s never been an instance like this where no matter what you have, it’s not enough.”
*March 26– “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they’ll have two ventilators.”
*March 30—”Many of the states are stocked up. Some of them don’t admit it, but they have — we have sent just so much — so many things to them and — including ventilators.”
*April 1– “We have, as you know, almost 10,000 ventilators which we need for flexibility. It’s sounds like a lot but it’s not.”
*April 3– “We are doing the best we can… We happen to think [Governor Andrew Cuomo] is well served with ventilators. We are going to find out.” (As China is sending thousands of ventilators to New York]
March 13– “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
March 16 –-(asked to rate his own performance) “I’d rate it a ten.”
March 17 –-“The only thing we haven’t done well is to get good press. We’ve done a fantastic job but it hasn’t been appreciated. Even the closing down of the borders, which had never been done, and not only did we close them but we closed it early. The press doesn’t like writing about it.”
March 19— “Other countries are following what I did”.
March 20—(touting an untested malaria drug as a possible cure for COVID-19) “I will say that I am a man that comes from a very positive school when it comes to in particular one of these drugs, and we’ll see how it works out… I’m not saying it will, but I think people may be surprised. By the way, that would be a game-changer.”
March 25– “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success.”
March 27– “22 days ago we had the greatest economy in the world, everything was going beautifully, the stock market hit an all-time high”. [On March 5, 22 days before Trump’s statement, the Dow dropped 3.6% or 970 points, then its fifth-worst single-day point drop on record.]
March 28– “We’ve had a big problem with the young, a woman governor from, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan. So we can’t, you know, we don’t like to see the complaints.”
*March 30– “I get on a lot of the governor calls where we’ll have all 50 governors… And I’ll tell you what, if you could listen to those calls, you’d never hear a complaint.”
March 29– “It’s a New York hospital. How do you go from 10 to 20 [thousand masks per week] to 300,000? Ten [thousand] to 20,000 masks, to 300,000 – something is going on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Are they going out the back door?”
March 29– “President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise…”
March 30– (on Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of his handling of the virus crisis) “She’s a sick puppy in my opinion. She really is. She’s got a lot of problems… My poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been because of her.”
March 30– “I don’t have to call because I’m probably better off not, because we don’t get — he’s a failed presidential candidate. He’s a nasty person. I don’t like the governor of Washington [Jay Inslee].”
March 30– “It’s almost a miracle the way it’s all come together…”
March 30– “So we have more cases than anybody, but we’re doing really well, and we also have a very low — relative to other countries — very low mortality rate. And there are reasons for that.” [It’s too early to know actual death rates from COVID-19 in any country.]
March 30– “I know South Korea better than anybody. It’s very tight. Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people. That’s bigger than anything we have.” [The population of Seoul is less than 10m. South Korea’s population is 51 million.]
March 30– “We inherited a broken test.” [There could be no test for COVID-19 until it emerged.]
March 30— “I stopped some very, very infected, very, very sick people, thousands coming in from China long earlier than anybody thought, including the experts. Nobody thought we should do it except me. And I stopped everybody. We stopped it cold.” [The travel ban was a consensus recommendation from Trump’s public-health task force.]
March 30– “Unfortunately, the enemy is death. It’s death. A lot of people are dying, so it’s very unpleasant. It’s a very unpleasant thing to go through.”
*April 4—“… there will be a lot of death, unfortunately.”
March 30— “I didn’t say that.”
March 30— “This is really easy to be negative about. But I want to give people hope too. You know I’m a cheerleader for the country — we are going through the worst thing that the country has probably ever seen.”
March 31—(on his daily press briefings) “I’m sure people are enjoying it. I will say this: It’s an incredibly dark topic, an incredibly horrible topic, and it’s incredibly interesting. That’s why everybody is going crazy, they’re going crazy, they can’t get enough of it.”
April 1– “I have hundreds of millions of people. Number one on Facebook … Did you know? I just found out.”
April 1– “He [Dr Fauci] was a great basketball player, did anybody know that? He was a little on the short side for the NBA but he was talented.”
April 1– (When a Fox News reporter asked him a tough question) “What are you, working for CNN?”
April 2– “Massive amounts of medical supplies, even hospitals and medical centers, are being delivered directly to states and hospitals by the Federal Government. Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?). Remember, we are a backup for them. The complainers should…”
April 2– (when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the appointment of a bipartisan House committee to investigate the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic) “This is not the time for politics. Endless partisan investigations –- here we go again – have already done extraordinary damage to our country in recent years. You see what happens. It’s witch-hunt after witch-hunt after witch-hunt and, in the end, the people doing the witch-hunt have been losing, and they’ve been losing by a lot. It’s not any time for witch-hunts.”
April 2— “By the way, the states should have been building their stockpiles. We’re a backup, we’re not an ordering clerk. Whoever heard of a governor calling up the federal government and saying, ‘Sir, we need a hospital?’”
April 2– “I will always protect your Social Security, your Medicare and your Medicaid” [Trump has always supported cuts to these in the past.]
April 3– (When asked why the US failed to stockpile enough medical supplies for the current emergency) “Speak to the people from the previous administration. The shelves were empty.” [Trump has been president since 2017, and ignored early warnings of a forthcoming pandemic, including from his own HHS secretary. Three months before the first COVID-19 cases began spreading through China, Trump’s administration ended a $200m early warning programme intended to alert it to potential pandemics.]
April 3— (When asked by a reporter for clarification on Jared Kushner’s statement about the federal stockpile of medical supplies being “ours”) “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself for asking that question.”
April 3– “The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die and you know what I want to do? I want to come way under the model. The professionals did the models and I was never involved in a model. At least this kind of a model.”
April 4– “”caranavirus” [mispronunciation]
April 4—“ “So I want to keep them out of ventilators, I want to keep them — if this drug works, it will be not a game changer because that’s not a nice enough term. It will be wonderful, it’ll be so beautiful, it’ll be a gift from heaven if it works, because when people go into those ventilators, you know the answers, and I’m glad you don’t write about it.”
////
In a previous piece in CounterPunch I compiled Donald Trump’s statements on the COVID-19 pandemic up to April 4th. Here is a continuation of that list.
Rather than place Trump’s statements in strict chronological order, I have sometimes put 2 or more of statements from different days together, to highlight Trump’s contradictions and subsequent deviations– these are prefaced by an asterisk. I have retained Trump’s numerous linguistic infelicities. It should be noted that Trump sometimes refers to himself in the third person:–
April 5– “We are very far down the line on vaccines, we’ll see how that all works. Johnson and Johnson’s doing a great job and working very hard, a vaccine would be great therapy. We’ll see what happens.”
April 5—(after promoting an untested malaria drug as a possible cure for coronavirus): “What do I know? I’m not a doctor.”
April 5—(again after promoting the untested malaria drug as a possible cure for coronavirus) “What do they have to lose? We don’t have time to take a couple years to test it out.”
April 5—(asked by an AP reporter about the efficacy of the untested malaria drug as a possible cure for coronavirus) “You should be thanking them, not always asking wise guy questions.”
April 5– “We see the light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future we will be proud of the job we all did”.
April 5– (about the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who has been critical of Trump) “The governor, he has not performed well.”
April 5– (about Boris Johnson, who was admitted to hospital after previously being diagnosed with coronavirus) “I want to express our nation’s well wishes to Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he wages his own personal fight with the virus. All Americans are praying for him. He’s a friend of mine, he’s a great gentleman and a great leader, and as you know he went to the hospital today but I’m hopeful and sure that he’s going to be fine. He’s a strong man, a strong person.”
April 5– “I would wear a mask if I thought it was important.”
April 6— (regarding an inspector general report finding “severe” shortages of supplies at hospitals to fight the novel coronavirus) “It’s just wrong.”
April 6— (when asked by a reporter about an inspector general report finding “severe” shortages of supplies at hospitals to fight the novel coronavirus) “You’re a third-rate reporter. And what you just said was a disgrace. You will never make it.”
April 6—(when asked by a reporter whether testing for the virus has been a success) “You should say congratulations, great job, instead of being so horrid.”
April 6— (when asked by a reporter about problems with the Paycheck Protection Program) “You ask it in such an unfair way.”
April 7—(on an inspector general report finding “severe” shortages of supplies at hospitals to fight the novel coronavirus) “Another Fake Dossier.”
April 7—“America continues to perform more tests than any other nation in the world, and I think that’s probably why we have more cases.” [The latest figures regarding testing per capita– South Korea: 1 in 106 people, US: 1 in 174 people]
*April 8– “We’re testing more than anybody” [The latest figures regarding testing per capita– Germany: 1 in 90 people, South Korea: 1 in 113 people, US: 1 in 168 people]
*April 9—(about extensive COVID-19 testing) “Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes… We’re talking about 325 million people, and that’s not going to happen, [it] would never happen with anyone else, either.”
April 7– (on memos sent to him by one of his top trade advisers warning in January of the consequences of a potential pandemic) “I didn’t see the memo”.
April 8– “People were shocked I acted so quickly. And everybody thought I was wrong because I did act so quickly as you know with respect to closing the borders.” [It was almost 6 weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the US that the Trump administration moved to step-up coronavirus testing]
April 8– “It looks like we’re in great shape from the bed standpoint. It looks like we’re in great shape from the ventilators standpoint.” [New England Journal of Medicine on March 25: “The national strategic reserve of ventilators is small and far from sufficient for the projected gap. No matter which estimate we use, there are not enough ventilators for patients with Covid-19 in the upcoming months.”]
April 8– “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!”
April 8—(on the World Health Organization) “In many ways, they were wrong. They also minimized the threat very strongly.” [The WHO declared a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, a day before Trump banned non-American residents who had been to China from entering the US.]
April 9– “Well I think the economy is going to do very well. Now that’s just my feeling. It’s a strong feeling. I’ve had good, proper feelings about a lot of things over the years.”
April 9— “Because the “Ratings” of my News Conferences etc. are so high, “Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers” according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. “Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.” said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!—–”
April 10— “I wish the world a happy Good Friday.”
April 10– (on projected coronavirus deaths) “”The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number. Hard to believe that if you had 60,000 [deaths] — you can never be happy. But that is a lot fewer than what we were originally told and thinking.”
April 10— “You have to go back to the 1950’s where they had the big large dollar bills. Remember?” [journalists were puzzled by this remark.]
April 10– “I am very good at reading language.”
April 10– “We’re in great shape in every way. We’re in great shape with ventilators; we’re in great shape with protective clothing … we’re not getting any calls from governors at this moment.”
April 10– “We’ve done well and I guess the market thinks we’ve done well because we hit the biggest stock market increase…”
April 10— (unaware that the COVID-19 is not a germ and therefore will not be affected by antibiotics) “The germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it … there’s a whole genius to it … not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart.”
April 10— “I want to get [the economy] open as soon as we can. We have to get our country open.” [asked by a reporter what criteria he’ll use to decide when that’s appropriate, he points to his head.]
April 10— (tweeted on the day the US pandemic death toll reached 18,000, and the daily toll reached 2000 deaths for the first time) “Wow, Approval Rating in Republican Party—96%. Thank you.”
April 11— (when a reporter raised the issue of the reported shortage of medical supplies by asking “Do we have enough tests? No. Do we have enough PPE? No.”) “Why would you say that? The answer is yes. I think the answer is yes…. A lot of it is fake news…. Well yeah, depending on your air they are always going to say that because otherwise, you are not going to put them on.”
April 12— (as the US hospital death toll passed 21,300, with over half-a-million confirmed cases) “For the first time in history there is a fully signed Presidential Disaster Declaration for all 50 States. We are winning, and will win, the war on the Invisible Enemy!”
April 13— “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up.” [Trump did not “ban China”, but blocked foreign nationals who had been in China in the past 14 days from entering the US starting on Feb. 2. Even so, 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers have still come into the country from China since then.]
April 13— (when asked by a reporter what the administration did in February after putting in place the travel restrictions on China in January) “You know you’re a fake. You know that.”
April 13— ““When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total.”
April 13— “Everything we did was right.”
April 13– “…I saved tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives.”
April 14—(listing the names of companies and their CEOS who are working with the White House) “Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, Chick-Fil-A, Subway… Wendy’s, Waffle House, Wolfgang Puck.”
April 15— (about the government-funded Voice of America radio station) “what things they say are disgusting toward our country.”
April 15– “We’ll be the comeback kids – all of us … Tomorrow’s going to be a very big day … We’ll have some openings that will exceed our expectations. And they’ll be safe, they’ll be strong, but we want to get our country back. We’re going to do it, and we’re gonna do it soon.”
April 16— “She [Nancy Pelosi] wanted everyone to pack into Chinatown long after I closed the BORDER TO CHINA. Based on her statement, she is responsible for many deaths. She’s an incompetent, third-rate politician!” [Pelosi visited Chinatown before there were any confirmed cases of coronavirus in San Francisco to help dispel racially-based fears about COVID-19 that had caused the neighbourhood’s businesses to see a drop in customers.]
April 16– “Think of it: they’re [China) are considered a developing nation … and we’re not. Well, we’re a developing nation, too, in my book, okay? We’re developing too.”
April 16— “America wants to be open and Americans want to be open.” [a Pew research poll published today found that “Americans say their greater concern is that state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly (66%) than not quickly enough (32%).”]
April 16– “We’ve done the most advanced and robust testing of anywhere in the world.” [However, some of the initial coronavirus tests sent out to states were seriously defective. Part of the problem came from the CDC shunning the WHO template for tests, and insisted on developing a more complicated version that correctly identified Covid-19, but also flagged other viruses – resulting in false positives. Other countries – after their first coronavirus case – swiftly developed their own tests. South Korea, which recorded its first case on the same day as the US, did so within a week. The US only allowed laboratories and hospitals to conduct their own tests on February 29, almost 6 weeks after the first case was confirmed.]
April 16— “People should have told us about this.” [recent memos reveal that Trump was warned at the end of January by one of his top White House advisers that COVID-19 could potentially kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and disrupt the US economy, unless action was taken immediately.]
April 16– (on his gun-toting supporters who are ignoring the lockdown) “They seem to be protesters that like me and respect my opinion.”
April 17– (on his gun-toting supporters who are ignoring the lockdown) “These are people expressing their views. I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”
April 17– “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”
April 17– “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
April 17– “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”
*April 19— (When asked if he is inciting violence by encouraging people to liberate states) “They’ve got cabin fever. They want to get back. They want their life back. Their life was taken away from them. And you know, they learned a lot during this period. They learned to do things differently than they have in the past and they’ll do it hopefully until the virus has passed. And when the virus passes, I hope we’re going to be sitting next to each other at baseball games, football games, basketball games, ice hockey games. I hope we’re going to be sitting next to each other. The Masters is going to have 100,000 people, not 25 people watching at the course.”
* April 19— “You’re allowed to protest, some governors have gone too far.” [The governors in question were adhering to federal guidelines.]
7April 17—(at his daily press briefing) “I certainly hope we can have rallies… I don’t like rallies like this – where we’re sitting like you’re sitting now.”
April 18– “We don’t have the-most-in-the-world deaths. The most in the world has to be China. It’s a massive country. It’s gone through a tremendous problem with this, a tremendous problem. And they must have the most.”
April 18— “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. Better than China, better than any country in the world, better than any country has ever had. We had the highest stock market in history by far – and I’m honored by the fact has started to up very substantially. That’s because the market is smart.”
April 18– “Unfortunately some partisan voices are attempting to politicize the issue of testing – because I inherited broken junk. Just as they did with ventilators where we had virtually none and the hospitals were empty. For the most part the hospitals didn’t have ventilators. We had take care of the whole country … and now the rest of the world is coming to us asking if we can help with ventilators because they’re very complicated, very expensive. They’re very hard to build. And we have them coming in by the thousand.” [There could be no test for the COVID-19 virus until it emerged.]
April 19– “Just like I was right on Ventilators (our Country is now the “King of Ventilators”, other countries are calling asking for help-we will!), I am right on testing. Governors must be able to step up and get the job done. We will be with you ALL THE WAY!” [Governors, both Democratic and Republican, describe Trump’s claim as “absolutely false” and delusional”.]
April 19— (On his move to restrict travel from China) “It could have been billions of people if we had not done what we did”. [The population of the US is 330 million.]
April 19– (When asked why he is reading and showing clips full of praise for himself at a time when more than 22 million Americans are unemployed and more the 40,000 have died as a result of the coronavirus) “What I’m doing is I’m standing up for the men and women that have done such an incredible job. Nothing is about me. You’re never going to treat me fairly, many of you. And I understand that. I got here with the worst, most unfair press treatment they say in the history of the United States for a president. They did say Abraham Lincoln had very bad treatment, too.”
* * *
In two previous pieces in CounterPunch I compiled Donald Trump’s statements on the COVID-19 pandemic up to April 19th (early evening). Here is a continuation of that list.
Rather than place Trump’s statements in strict chronological order, I have sometimes put 2 or more of statements from different days together, to highlight Trump’s contradictions and subsequent deviations– these are prefaced by an asterisk. I have retained Trump’s numerous linguistic infelicities. It should be noted that Trump sometimes refers to himself in the third person:–
April 19– “We’re going to — that’s something — somebody said to me, President, you look tired. I said, I should be tired.”
April 19– “Is it — does it remind you of something? Reminds you of this. Right? One’s a swab, ones a Q-tip. It’s actually different. It’s very sophisticated actually but it’s a little bit like — so this is the swab and we’ve ordered a lot of them.”
April 19— “It was hard to get it aroused and it is hard to get it aroused but we got it aroused.”
April 19– “Some people believe in it like they can’t exist without testing and other people don’t believe in it nearly as much.”
April 19– “It’s not the same thing as a flu at all.” [To quote Trump from Feb 26: “This is a flu. This is like a flu.”]
April 19– “You know, it’s a very complex subject. You need buildings or you have to do tents or you have to do a lot of different things, a lot of different ways.”
April 19– “Nervous Nancy is an inherently ‘dumb’ person. She wasted all of her time on the Impeachment Hoax. She will be overthrown, either by inside or out, just like her last time as ‘Speaker’. Wallace & @FoxNews are on a bad path, watch!”
April 19– “So nobody ever thought this could have happened, a thing like this.”
April 19– “No, no, we’re going to be safe. We have to be safe. We don’t want to close anything. We’re not going to be closing. But we’re going to be doing it beautifully, systematically.”
April 19— (to a female reporter) “Nice and easy, nice and easy, just relax.”
April 19— (to the same female reporter) “Keep your voice down, please. Keep your voice down.”
April 19— “They were excoriated by people like you that don’t know any better because you don’t have the brains you were born with. You should be praising people that have done a good job, not doing what you do.” [some reporters seemed puzzled by this remark]
April 19– (to a CNN reporter) “That’s why your ratings are so bad, because you’re pathetic. Go ahead, let’s go. Your ratings are terrible. You got to get back to real news. Go ahead.”
April 19– “I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney. I don’t really want his advice.”
April 21– “We’ve tested more than any country in the world, even put together.” [said as daily news reports report backlogs in labs across the country, and many people with symptoms — including health workers — are still unable to access tests. To date, the US has tested 1 in every 80 people, while Germany has tested every 1 in 63 people.]
April 21– “Our mortality rate remains roughly half that of other countries. It is one of the lowest in any other country in the world.” [The US rate is 5.4% — more than double the rate of Japan and South Korea (2.2%), and several times the rate of Singapore, with a rate of 1%.]
April 22— (about a possible recurrence of COVID-19 in the winter) “What we’ve just gone through, we will not go through.”
April 23– “Medical doctors should see if there any way to apply light and heat to cure. It’s just a suggestion. If heat is good and if sunlight it good, that’s. a great thing as far as I’m concerned.”
April 23– “We’re very close to a vaccine. We’re not close on testing” the vaccine”.
April 23– (responding to Dr Fauci’s comment that he’s not “overly confident” about the US’ testing capacity) “No I don’t agree with him on that. No I think we’re doing a great job on testing. If he said that, I don’t agree with him.”
April 23—(addressing his COVID-19 adviser Dr Deborah Birx) “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
April 24– (after his disastrous “can injecting disinfectant be a cure?” news briefing) “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”
April 27—(asked if he takes any responsibility for reports of people ingesting disinfectant after his remarks at a previous press briefing) “No, I don’t.”
April 27– “We’re doing very serious investigations … We are not happy with China. We believe it could have been stopped at the source. It could have been stopped quickly and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world.”
April 27– “There has been so much unnecessary death in this country. It could have been stopped and it could have been stopped short, but somebody a long time ago, it seems, decided not to do it that way. And the whole world is suffering because of it. 184 countries, at least.”
April 27– “I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. I built it.”
April 28—(when asked by a CNN reporter how the US got from Trump’s prediction of zero to 1 million cases) “Well, it will go down to zero ultimately.”
April 29– (speaking about governors who have reopened their states for business) “I am very much in favor of what they’re doing. They’re getting it going.”