This comment is a great example of bad faith pro-Trump arguments. It is a despicable bunch of disinformation. It’s cherry picking a few old comments while ignoring the overwhelming tide of know-nothing minimization of the pandemic that characterizes Trump’s comments right up to the present day.
He did not. If you read it in some news article, please do yourself a favor and do not use this news source anymore. If somebody of your friends told you that, please keep loving them as friends but accept anything they say with a grain of salt as they may be more gullible than you thought.
What Trump actually said is that his opponents suggestion that he doesn't do enough to counter the epidemic is the next hoax (previous one obviously being, in his opinion, the impeachment proceedings). This is somewhat unusual application of word "hoax", as "hoax" usually refers to false statement of fact, and whether Trump is doing a good job is not a fact but an opinion, which you can disagree with but it can't be "hoax". What he obviously meant is that his opponents unjustifiedly accuse him of doing poor job, and he expressed it in the usual Trumpian manner, sacrificing precision for expressiveness. What he didn't ever say is that the epidemic itself is a "hoax" and everybody that told you he did, unfortunately, lied to you, either knowingly (because they hate Trump and think it's ok to sacrifice the truth for the noble goal of getting rid of Trump, somehow thinking when they do it, as opposed to Trump doing it, it's ok) or unknowingly (being deceived by the former kind).
This is one of the examples of how tribal things are. All Trump says is available in transcripts. Not many - especially from the opposing tribe - bother to read them and actually know what he says before forming (or, rather, confirming the pre-existing) opinion on the matter.
You can get the words e.g. here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re... - I choose a source that is not in Trump's tribe so that there was no doubt their conclusion that Trump didn't say coronavirus is a hoax is not tribally motivated.
> it should be beyond question that Trump is downplaying the severity of the coronavirus in the last few sentences.
He may have downplayed the severity, but it's light years away from claiming it's a "hoax". One can reasonably debate whether he did the former, but the latter is flat out lie. It's not ok to lie, even about Trump. There's a huge difference between choosing how to react to coronavirus (a lot of people were unsure initially how severe it is) and flatly denying it is happening. It's OK to argue that Trump was wrong on his chosen reaction, but it's not ok to lie that he called it a "hoax".
> It follows that the "hoax" is referring to the opposition party making a mountain out of molehill.
The "hoax" was about the claim that he did poor job handling the coronavirus. He thinks he did great job and his opponents are wrong. Not about that coronavirus epidemics doesn't exist.
> Which is fine and good!
What is not fine and not good is that people are ok with lying as long as it hurts the other tribe and helps theirs. Not ok at all. It's not a matter of "interpretation", it's a matter of twisting facts to the point where it becomes outright falsity.
If that is somehow supposed prove the WHO mishandled the pandemic, then the administration who is withdrawing from the WHO has been absolutely criminal in their handling of this disease.
February 28: "When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
— Trump, at a coronavirus task force press briefing
March 5: “Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled.”
— Trump tweet.
March 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.”
— Trump, while visiting CDC headquarters in Atlanta. This was false. In fact, at this time testing capacity was about 75,000 nationally, according to the CDC.
March 10: "This was unexpected. … And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
— Trump, to reporters at the U.S. Capitol
The Verge has got good, non-political coverage of the issue. Needless to say it isn't clear cut:
Trump surrogates said after the rally that he wasn’t calling coronavirus a hoax. “He was referring to the way he had been treated by the opposite party … in terms of taking every opportunity to bring him down,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams on SiriusXM’s The Black Eagle with Joe Madison. And you can argue that Trump is limiting his claim to Democrats arguing he’s not prepared for the coronavirus. But the speech simply compares coronavirus to the “impeachment hoax” (which Trump describes as a “perfect conversation” that Democrats twisted into something negative), so it’s also easy to argue that Trump is saying the coronavirus itself is similarly overblown.
I’m happy to hear how exactly my statement is biased.
Fox News just fired Trish Regan for stating that Coronavirus was “another attempt by Democrats to impeach Trump.” That statement came just a few weeks after Trump himself claimed that concern around the virus was also a liberal hoax. Days after making that statement, he said that cases would drop to zero in a few days, we’re now in the hundreds of thousands. When asked why he cut the pandemic preparedness unit at his National Security Council, he claimed he had no idea that happened, despite video surfacing that shows him talking about those cuts in 2018. Doctors in NYC are days away from having to decide who lives and dies because there won’t be enough respirators for everyone, they’ve already set up refrigerated trailers to store bodies. Testing still isn’t widely available even though we were all told it would be weeks ago.
We’re now at hundreds of thousands infected, thousands dead, and no end to this in sight, given that the president has now pushed social distancing measures to the end of April.
I edited my previous to be more on-topic, but oh geez, this is a whole different thing and I'll take the bait.
Are you referring to Donald Trump? (There, invoked.) He's a moron and there's plenty to criticize him on. Which is why it's bizarre to see this particular false[0][1] narrative thrown around so much even to this day. If you watch (TDS trigger warning; transcripts in [0][1]) what he actually said[2] and the immediate followup and clarification[3], we can definitely agree that he's not a great communicator, but I think that whole thing got taken out of context in a very dishonest way.
That's what I find most incredible about this thread and the confidence of the person denying something Trump said on the record. It hasn't even been a year and we're already forgetting the dumpster fire that was the original response to COVID.
Get out of here with this. We had expert teams and processes in place to combat the possibility of this exact thing and his administration fired them without any replacement.
The virus existing is not his fault, but nearly all of the national consequences rest directly at his feet.
> Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
> One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
> [Speaking of Trump] Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax.
False. Trump referred to "politicizing" of the coronavirus by Democrats as "their new hoax." He did not refer to the coronavirus itself as a hoax or call it fake. You can criticize that he did not take it seriously enough to shut down the economy sooner, and that'd be fair, but he did shut down air travel from China on Jan 31, for which he was shat on at the time, as usual. Had he not done that, we'd be dealing with 10x the number of cases now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...
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