Tuesday on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called the coronavirus outbreak President Donald Trump’s “Chernobyl.”
Stephens said, “When coronavirus broke out in China, people said this is China’s Chernobyl. Actually, it’s Donald Trump’s Chernobyl. There are some things you can’t lie and spin your way through. Above all, something like a virus like this is out of control. Just as the Soviet government couldn’t lie its way through atomic particles going through the air in Ukraine 35 years ago.”
Anchor Katy Tur asked, “How do you make that argument to people who refuse to believe it’s a problem. A family member of mine was having dinner with some adamant Trump supporters the other night, and they were telling her that the coronavirus was all fake news.”
Stephens said, “That’s going to be fake news until it happens to someone in their neighborhood. That’s how long that I think fantasy lasts. This is beyond the area of just having a president make stuff up. I was just reading this extraordinary piece in the Wall Street Journal about a Rhode Island survivor of the coronavirus. This is a guy who is a vice-principal of a school. This will hit people’s neighborhoods. People will know someone who was hit by this. Having a president who treats this as another kind of real estate deal where he can kind of kind of BS his way through it isn’t going to work. I think this is probably not only the biggest test of Trump’s presidency, but it’s actually the way in which his entire presidency is exposed for the fraud that it is.”
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