As the U.S. death toll approached 150,000, Donald Trump sat down for an interview that aired days later — after thousands more Americans were dead from the coronavirus.
Nevertheless, the president downplayed those numbers and continued proclaiming his administration’s response as a success. He clung to very narrow — and misleading — statistics in an effort to prove his point to Axios’ Jonathan Swan.
Trump kept citing a decreasing death rate among the total tests, while Swan stuck to the more informative and damning toll as represented by the proportion of the nation’s population.
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“That’s where the U.S. is really bad,” Swan said. “Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”
“You can’t do that,” Trump retorted.
“Why can’t I do that?” the host asked, noting that it is “surely a relevant statistic to say if the U.S. has X population and X percentage of death of that population vs. South Korea.”
While Trump at one point acknowledged the widespread death caused by COVID-19, he offered little consolation or compassion for those mourning and afraid.
“They are dying, that’s true,” he stated. “And you have — it is what it is. 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.”
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