As coronavirus cases continue to rise in the U.S. and the death toll passed 200,000 last week, Donald Trump expressed no sympathy or concern for the suffering and lives lost, but he spent plenty of time boasting and falsely suggesting the pandemic is behind us. Host Pete Hegseth let the lies go unchallenged.
Trump again visited his campaign’s TV headquarters, Fox News, today, this time for a chat with Fox & Friends host and war-criminal advocate Pete Hegseth.
Trump’s boast was prompted by Hegseth asking how Trump is preparing for the debate with Joe Biden on Tuesday. Trump first argued that he’s doing such a great job he doesn’t need to prepare and then held up his handling of the pandemic as “proof.”
TRUMP: I think I prepare every day. I think, you know, when you're president, you sort of see everything that they're going to be asking. And they may disagree with you, but we've done a great job. We created the greatest economy in history. And there's never been from an employment standpoint, from every standpoint -
And now it's coming back. We closed it. We saved millions and millions of lives by doing what I did. And now we're bringing it back. It's a V, it's a V shape, which is, it's maxed out. I mean, we're setting records, on employment and everything else. Even the stock market. Look, how high the stock market is and we're rounding the turn.
They hate when I say that, the opposition. But we are. We're rounding the turn on the on the pandemic. And very incredibly, we have some of the great vaccines, great companies. And we're going to have different vaccines, very powerful vaccines, great vaccines and therapeutics. But this is all happening very, very soon.
So, we're in great shape. But we've built the greatest economy in history and now we're doing it again and we're doing it rapidly. And I think next year - we're gonna have a great third quarter, by the way. And next year, I think, is going to be one of the greatest years we've ever had on the economy. And it's going to it's really very exciting, actually.
FACT CHECK: From the U.S. News & World Report, on September 23:
The U.S. coronavirus death toll reached the tragic milestone of 200,000 on Tuesday, with at least 22 states now reporting a rise in new cases.
Just last Monday, only nine states were reporting increases in new COVID-19 cases, CNN reported. For the most part, the case spikes are showing up in the country's heartland and the Midwest.
…
In the next three months, another 150,000 people could lose their lives to COVID-19, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), CNN reported.
…
COVID-19 is now the second-leading cause of death in the United States, just after heart disease, according to the IHME, CNN reported.
But “pro-life” Hegseth said nothing to challenge Trump’s pro-death results. Nor did he mention the pesky fact that the majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. Nor did he mention that more than 824,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, a rise of nearly 30,000 from the week before. Many Americans are struggling in Trump’s “great" economy. About 14% of adults living with children reported that “the kids in their household sometimes or often didn’t eat enough over the past week because the family couldn’t afford it,” CNBC reported this month, according to a survey in late August. “That’s particularly concerning given that parents and guardians generally try to protect children from going hungry, usually cutting down their own portions first.”
Hegseth responded by closing the discussion, thus implicitly validating Trump’s lies.
You can watch the pro-death agenda below, from the September 27, 2020 Fox & Friends.
Just watched poor old Hume subbing for Wallace. Utterly sad and hopeless. He was lost with even Senator Old Muppet (Waldorf or Stadler?) Kennedy ran rings around him. Ended with 2016 Debate Trump refusing to guarantee he’d accept the results, cutting directly to the aged bloodhound quietly shaking his head.