Trump news: White House pushes back on projection of 100,000 coronavirus deaths as president promotes murder conspiracy theory
The White House has pushed back on a Trump administration projection from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention that would see the daily death toll increase to 3,000 per day by 1 June.
The latest projection, first obtained by The New York Times, was confirmed as authentic, but the White House has denied the veracity of the report despite the CDC's role in its drafting.
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere claimed the report has not been vetted by the coronavirus task force and is "not reflective of any of the modelling done by the task force or data that the task force has analysed".
But an influential model that has been previously cited by the White House now predicts as many as 134,000 deaths by 4 August, nearly doubling a previous forecast. In its most recent modelling on 4 May, University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation attributed the spike to states beginning to relax quarantine measures and stay-at-home orders.
Donald Trump has amended his death toll prediction multiple times in recent weeks, from 50,000 to 70,000 than to "hopefully" under 100,000 deaths by August.
The president has started his Monday explosively on Twitter, attacking MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and suggesting that the host of Morning Joe be investigated for murder over a conspiracy theory dating back to his tenure as a congressman in 2001.
Mr Scarborough fired back, calling his message "extraordinarily cruel" and suggesting that vice president Mike Pence step in to "run things for a couple of weeks" during the pandemic.
The president also congratulated himself on the “great reviews” his administration had received for its response to the coronavirus.
Speaking during a virtual town hall with Fox News in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on Sunday night, the president trailed the possibility of a vaccine being developed “by the end of the year” and complained that he is “treated worse” than Honest Abe, who was, of course, assassinated in the aftermath of the Civil War.
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