PREZ SHRUGS OFF TOLL
‘It is what it is,’ Don says of virus deaths, while kicking Lewis & suggesting Ep was killed
Even for President Trump, this was unusually all over the map.
In a freewheeling TV interview, the loose-lipped president shrugged at the devastating U.S. coronavirus death toll, scolded late Congressman John Lewis for skipping his inauguration, questioned whether Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and spouted off on a dizzying array of other hot button issues.
The jaw-dropping interview, conducted at the White House by Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, aired late Monday night on HBO and dominated much of Tuesday’s news cycle, as clips of Trump’s head-spinning assertions spread like wildfire across social media.
One of the most eyebrowraising features of the interview was Trump’s repeated and false insistence that the U.S. is doing better than other countries in containing the coronavirus pandemic.
“Right now, I think it’s under control,” Trump said.
An incredulous Swan interjected: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
“They are dying, that’s true … It is what it is,” Trump shrugged. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 156,000 Americans had died from COVID-19 — by far the world’s worst national death toll.
Across swaths of the South and Midwest, coronavirus death, infection and hospitalization rates are on the rise again after states — most of which are Republican-led — rushed to reopen their economies, in many cases at Trump’s urging.
But Trump suggested all is well because the daily national death toll is down from its peak in April of more than 2,000 lives a day to about 1,000 per day now.
“Deaths are way down from where it was,” he said. “Where it was is much higher than where it is right now.”
Despite Trump’s claims, the daily death rate is rising again after dipping down to 500 lives lost per day earlier this summer.
But the president wasn’t done.
He shuffled colorful charts on coronavirus testing into Swan’s hands that he claimed backed up his suggestion that the U.S. is doing better than other nations at fighting the virus.
“We test, we get more cases,” Trump said. “Even a kid with a little runny nose, it’s a case. So we look like we have more cases.”
Trump’s oft-repeated claims about testing are belied by the fact that death, infection and hospitalization rates are going up as well.
Still, in a White House briefing on Tuesday evening, Trump defended his fact-challenged assertions by blaming New York.
“A lot of our numbers were based on New York, New Jersey having a tough time and when you take that out … our numbers are among the lowest,” Trump told reporters.
Moving on from the virus, Swan asked Trump how he thinks history will remember John Lewis, the Democratic congressman and civil rights icon from Georgia who died last month after a long battle with cancer.
The president made his reply mostly about himself.
“I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration,” said Trump, who had a rocky relationship with the late lawmaker and once called his majority-Black congressional district “crime-infested.”
“He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK, that’s his right. Again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I
have. I think he should have come. I think he made a big mistake.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who marched with Lewis, said Trump’s response exposed his insecurities.
“If you’re the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, do you really keep tabs on who came to your State of the Union address unless you’re very insecure and thin-skinned?” Sharpton told the Daily News. “He can’t live with the fact that people don’t like him … It’s sad really. It’s even more sad that he’s the president.”
Toward the end of the interview, Swan asked Trump why he recently offered well wishes to Ghislaine Maxwell, the Epstein associate who’s being held in a Brooklyn jail on charges that she supplied the convicted late pedophile with underage girls to abuse.
“Her boyfriend [Epstein] died in jail — yeah, I wish her well … good luck,” said Trump, who used to socialize with Epstein and Maxwell in South Florida.
Giving no mention to the disturbing charges against Maxwell and Esptein, Trump pondered whether U.S. authorities were correct in concluding that the billionaire perv killed himself at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center last year while awaiting trial.
“People are still trying to figure out how did it happen,” Trump said. “Was it suicide? Was he killed?”