President Trump appeared to try and turn Monday’s daily coronavirus briefing into his own propaganda session by playing a video produced by the White House staff showing state governors praising his response to the current pandemic.
He said: “We’ve done this right, we’ve really done this right, the problem is the press doesn’t cover it.”
The video scarcely mentioned the situation in the US in February and March, the crucial weeks when Trump was accused of not acting fast enough in promoting social distancing and providing enough testing for the virus. It also appeared to be heavily edited in Trump’s favour with Maggie Haberman, a Times White House correspondent, heard commenting on the president’s decision to halt some flights from China on Jan 31.
She said during the interview: “At the end of the day, it was probably effective because it did actually take a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus.”
However, her last sentence, where she said, “the problem is, it was one of the last things that he did for several weeks,” was edited out.
When challenged, Trump said that the video had been put together in only a few hours by his staff and that he had “hundreds of other statements, better clips.”
Trump grew increasingly aggressive and agitated with the press throughout the briefing, arguing: “You’re fake, you know you’re fake. You’re disgraceful, you’re also disgraceful,” when asked what the administration had done to stop the spread of the virus.
The briefing began with Trump inviting Dr. Anthony S. Fauci to the lectern so that he could clarify the comments he made on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where he said that more lives could have been saved if America had been shut down earlier.
With the president standing over him, Fauci said he was responding to a “hypothetical question” during the appearance and claimed that his answer to questioning “was taken as a way that maybe somehow something was at fault here.”
“We’re very close to completing a plan to open our country.” pic.twitter.com/xnV4XxwnjL
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 13, 2020
He went on to say that his remark about “pushback” inside the administration to some of his recommendations was a poor choice of words.
Dr. Fauci insisted that the president did approve aggressive social distancing measures as soon as he and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, advised him to do so.
Four banners on @CNN over the last five minutes … pic.twitter.com/UBxpCcY2vl
— Kate Bennett (@KateBennett_DC) April 13, 2020
He said: “The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president, [to put in place strong mitigation measures] the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.”
Trump insisted that he had no plans to dismiss Dr. Fauci despite tweeting, “Time to #FireFauci” on Sunday.
The president spent much of the briefing accusing news organisations and, in particular, The New York Times, of creating fake news stories about him, with one popular television network describing his rant as “the biggest meltdown from a US president” they had ever seen.
In response to an article published by the NY Times over the weekend, Trump repeatedly insisted that the US had very few cases of the virus in January and aggressively mocked a suggestion, that was apparently never said, saying that he should have shut all schools and businesses for a month.
He said: “I am supposed to close down the greatest economy in the history of the world, and we don’t have one case confirmed in the United States?”
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