Trump Acknowledges Downplaying the COVID-19 Threat
President Trump has admitted to downplaying the severity of the threat posed by the novel coronavirus in the early days of the outbreak, claiming that he didn't want to be "negative" in his approach to the crisis. As a White House task force announced in a press briefing on Tuesday that the coronavirus could kill upwards of 240,000 Americans, the president said his aim was to be a "cheerleader for the country."
"We lose more here potentially than you lose in world wars as a country," he told reporters. "So there's nothing positive, there's nothing great about it, but I want to give people in this country hope. I think it's very important."
Trump went on to say that he "knew everything" with regards to the potential death toll. "I knew it could be horrible, and I knew it could be maybe good," he said. "Don't forget, at that time people didn't know that much about it, even the experts, we were talking about it, we didn't know where it was going to go. We saw China but that was it. Maybe it would have stopped at China. We wish we could have killed it in China. But it didn't happen, it started spreading to Europe, it started spreading here, it started spreading all over."
"I don't want to be a negative person," he continued. "It would be so much easier for me to come up here and say 'we have bad news, we're going to lose 220,000 people, and it's going to happen over the next few weeks'... 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."
Trump's statement comes in the wake of several White House press conferences that have prompted critics to accuse him of ignoring expert advice and squandering valuable time in responding to the outbreak. "We've wasted two months," Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Insider in March. "And this is not a disease where you're allowed to waste two months."
Just two days ago, Trump denied knowledge of a shortage of COVID-19 testing kits in the United States, saying he was aware of no such problems despite multiple state governors reporting otherwise.
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