President Donald Trump has been holding daily press conferences to provide the latest information about the coronavirus from the federal government, but his rhetoric has sometimes been imprecise, misleading or outright incorrect.
At a White House briefing March 19, President Donald Trump said, “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.” But that’s simply not the case.
President Donald Trump said on March 17, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” While it’s not possible to know what Trump “felt,” there’s no doubt that Trump had minimized the threat of the new coronavirus for weeks in statement after statement.
At a town hall event in the swing state of Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump made several false and misleading claims, some of which we have repeatedly debunked before.
The World Health Organization says that 3.4% of reported COVID-19 patients worldwide have died – a global fatality figure that President Donald Trump dismissed as “a false number.” It’s not a false number, although experts say Trump has a point that the fatality rate may ultimately be quite a bit less than 3.4%.
President Donald Trump accused the Democrats of “politicizing” the new coronavirus, calling it “their new hoax.” Even after Trump explained his remarks, some Democrats — including Mike Bloomberg — continued to wrongly accuse Trump of describing the coronavirus as a “hoax.”
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, newly crowned coronavirus point man Mike Pence spun the facts in claiming he moved decisively when confronted with a disturbing HIV outbreak in a rural Indiana county when he was governor of the state.
A misleading television ad from the Committee to Defend the President falsely suggests that former President Barack Obama is criticizing his former vice president, Joe Biden, for his racial attitudes.