Trump Dismisses Daily US COVID-19 Deaths With Eye Roll: ‘It Is What It Is’

(Screenshot: Axios/YouTube)
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In his effort to whitewash his administration’s botched handling of the pandemic, President Donald Trump is now actively shrugging off the daily COVID-19 death toll in the U.S.

“I think it’s under control,” Trump told Axios correspondent Jonathan Swan in a pre-taped interview released on Monday night.

“How?” Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.”

Trump rolled his eyes.

“They are dying, that’s true, and it is what it is,” the President said. “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 that beset us,” he added.

Later in the interview, Trump pulled out several graphs to prove that “we’re lower in the world” in terms of COVID-19 deaths.

A puzzled Swan examined the graphs.

“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” the reporter noted. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”

“You can’t do that,” Trump replied.

When Swan asked why he couldn’t “do that,” the President just continued to insist that “you have to go by the cases.”

Trump’s comments about the U.S. death toll fall squarely under the White House’s reported strategy of hoping Americans will simply grow numb to the crisis as the November elections draw near.

More than 155,000 Americans have died from the virus as of Tuesday morning, according to John Hopkins University’s pandemic tracker.

Watch Trump below:

Notable Replies

  1. Trump “rolled his eyes”. :astonished: What’s next? He’ll roll his poo into little balls and start flinging them at reporters who ask tough questions?

  2. Nothing has changed, he just can’t be bothered by it. It is understandable that he doesn’t want to get involved because he has so many other things on his plate – like playing golf and tweeting. I would say that dealing with COVID would be improved if he resigned but Pence has already proven he will be worse than useless.

  3. Someday the world will “sigh” with relief when he is either terminated or dead.
    hey, It is What It Is.

    Come on SDNY. get to work and make his life as miserable as possible until he either goes to prison or flees the country into Putin’s arms.

  4. Avatar for bdtex bdtex says:

    I just have to trust Cristina that he did that because I ain’t watching any Trump video.

  5. “You have to go by the cases.”

    So Trump bitches that we have so many cases only because we have such a magnificent testing program, but then uses that number to minimize the number of deaths, in which we are doing terribly in comparison to the rest of the world.

    Anyone else notice a logical problem here? He can’t both ask Swan to disregard the high number of cases as irrelevant and then use that number to make himself look good.

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