After Bill Gates ripped Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic on Fox News Sunday, “tough journalist” Ainsley Earhardt whitewashed and misrepresented what he said, then gave Trump a platform to attack Gates without challenge.
On this week’s Fox News Sunday, Gates was blistering in his criticism of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, specifically citing Trump’s travel ban and his failure to ensure adequate testing.
GATES: Well, unfortunately, we did a very poor job and you can just see that in the numbers. If you compare the Asian countries like South Korea and Australia, you know the key was the, getting the testing going. You know, what happened was that 40,000 people came out of China because we didn’t ban the residents and citizens from coming in. So, we created this rush and we didn’t have the ability to test or quarantine those people.
And so that seeded the disease here. You know the ban probably accelerated that, the way it was executed and we, we just didn’t go to the commercial providers and get the tests ready. The FDA made it harder. And so we’re - even today, people don’t get their results in 24 hours, which it’s outrageous that we still have that.
[…]
WALLACE: You’re saying that the travel bans made the situation worse, not better?
GATES: Yeah. So when you have people realize that the flights are going to start to get canceled and if they don’t, the citizens and residents, if they don’t come back right away [they won't be able to do so later], you get a rush and that’s where you really need to do like South Korea, Australia did, where you take those people and you test them and if you can’t test them, you put them in quarantine. If they test positive, you put them in quarantine. We didn’t do that. We didn’t have any community testing. We didn’t have the scale of testing, which would have required the commercial providers.
And so that meant that March saw this incredible explosion.The west coast coming from China and then the east coast coming out of Europe.
Earhardt claims to want to be a tough journalist not in the tank for Trump, but she once again proved she’s just the opposite.
First, she lied about what Gates said:
EARHARDT: Bill Gates was on with Chris Wallace yesterday, and he said the travel ban that you implemented in January might have worsened the pandemic.
FACT CHECK: Gates didn’t say the travel ban “might have worsened” the pandemic. He unequivocally stated that Trump’s travel ban did worsen the pandemic.
To further the deceit, Earhardt played a selectively edited clip from Fox News Sunday:
[BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]
GATES: -- this rush and we didn't have the ability to test or quarantine those people. And so, that seeded the disease here. You know, the ban probably accelerated that the way it was executed.
WALLACE: And you're saying that the travel bans made the situation worse, not better?
GATES: March saw this incredible explosion, the West Coast coming from China and then the East Coast coming out of Europe. And so, even though we'd seen China and we'd seen Europe, that testing capacity and clear message of how to behave wasn't there.
[END VIDEO CLIP]
While Earhardt feigned providing balance, what she really did was hand Trump an opening to hit back at Gates without any pesky pushback. So Trump predictably attacked Gates but offered no evidence or data to indicate he was wrong. Not one of the three cohosts asked for any. Instead, cohost Brian Kilmeade explicitly validated Trump’s evidence-free smear:
EARHARDT: Mr. President, what's your reaction?
TRUMP: Well, here we go with Gates. It's always Gates, and here we go. This is a new one that I hear for the first time. I heard it yesterday actually, and I watched. I listened to Chris. He had a good show. But here we -- I said, here we go. Gates again. And, frankly the -- we did quarantine and we were careful.
The people that came in were all Americans, so what are we going to do, say, You can't come back? They wanted to come back because they wanted to get out of Wuhan Province, which was, you know, heavily infected. And because of the fact that we knew it was heavily infected, we had quarantine, we had -- we were very careful.
And did, you know, some -- some slip by? Perhaps. But this is a new one. This is a Democrat talking point.
KILMEADE: Right.
Shortly before the Gates question, the three lapdogs made no challenge as Trump gave himself an A+ for handling the coronavirus. Nobody brought up the unfortunate matter of Bob Woodward’s tapes of Trump admitting he lied about the seriousness of it.
TRUMP: So, we're rounding the corner with or without a vaccine. They hate it when I say that, but that's the way it is. We're rounding the corner on the pandemic, and we've done a phenomenal job -- not just a good job, a phenomenal job, other than public relations, but that's because I have fake news. I can't I can't -- you know, you can't convince them of anything.
They're fake. But we have done -- on public relations I give myself a D. On the job itself we take an A-plus with the ventilators and now with the vaccines that are years ahead of schedule.
Coincidentally, Trump’s “my only problem on the pandemic is the PR” perfectly matches Fox pundit Brit Hume’s pro-Trump spin last week.
Today, even Fox News has acknowledged that more than 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and that the U.S. is the world leader in cases and deaths from the pandemic.
But Earhardt and her fellow propagandists would rather cover up for Trump than tell the truth to viewers and perhaps save lives.
You can watch Fox & Friends put Dear Leader over American lives below, from the September 21, 2020 Fox & Friends.
