Trump ditches new tone on coronavirus to tout questionable theories
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s much heralded new tone on the coronavirus pandemic evaporated Tuesday in a burst of misleading medical speculation, criticism for his own top virus expert, and praise for an eccentric preacher-doctor touting conspiracy theories. Just a week ago, Trump sought to get his shaky reelection campaign back on track by addressing national criticism of a leadership void in a crisis that has already killed nearly 150,000 Americans and wreaked havoc on the world’s biggest economy.
The president admitted things were going to “get worse before they get better.” He indicated he was embracing the science. He finally urged the wearing of masks. But at a press conference in the White House on Tuesday, it was the old Trump in full. He said it was unfair that the leading US infectious diseases specialist Anthony Fauci was more popular than him. “Nobody likes me,” he said. He pushed his pet theory-counter to advice from his own government and most doctors-that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine can be used to treat COVID-19 patients. “Many doctors think it’s extremely successful.” And he took pains to praise Stella Immanuel, a doctor and preacher who believes in witchcraft and a plot being carried out to vaccinate people against being religious, calling her “spectacular.”
Social media outcast Trump’s testy press conference, which he abruptly ended while answering a second question about his praise for Immanuel, followed an overnight row with social media giants Twitter and Facebook over some of the same controversies. Twitter took the rare step of removing clips tweeted by Trump from a video earlier deleted by Facebook in which Immanuel and a group of doctors told Americans that masks are unnecessary and that hydroxychloroquine can defeat the COVID-19 virus.
Twitter said Tuesday that tweeting the video, which was seen by millions of people online late Monday and remained up on different right-wing websites, was “in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.” Twitter also blocked Trump’s son Don Jr-a major player in the president’s reelection campaign-from tweeting for 12 hours after he uploaded a version of the video.
The physician, who calls herself “God’s battle axe,” claims in the video that “the virus has a cure” in hydroxychloroquine. This is false-there is currently no cure for the coronavirus. Also, a majority of medical authorities now have decided, after some initial debate, that hydroxychloroquine has no proven benefit for coronavirus patients and can be very harmful. Trump has for months pushed the notion of hydroxychloroquine and says he took the drug for two weeks as a precaution, without suffering ill consequences. As he repeated on Tuesday, “I’m here, right? I’m here.” In his Twitter spree late Monday, the president also retweeted a growing right-wing conspiracy theory that Fauci helped push coronavirus to hurt Trump’s reelection in November. The tweet, shared by Trump to his 84 million followers, claimed that Immanuel is highlighting “what should be the biggest scandal in modern American history.” This was “the suppression of #Hydroxychloroquine by Fauci & the Democrats to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump,” the tweet reads.