Pelosi: As Trump ‘Fiddles People Are Dying’ of Coronavirus- His Denial ‘Was Deadly’

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) described president Donald Trump of fiddling while people died of coronavirus.

Pelosi said, “First let me say how sad it is that even since the president’s signing of the bill, the number of deaths reported has doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 in our country. This is such a very, very sad time for us. We should be taking every precaution. The president, his denial at the beginning, was deadly. His delaying of getting equipment to where it — his continued delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly. Now the best thing to do would be to prevent more loss of life rather than open things up because we just don’t know. We have to have testing, testing, testing. That’s what we said from the start before we can evaluate what the nature of it is in some of these other regions as well. I don’t know what the purpose of that is. I don’t know what the scientists are saying to him. I don’t know what the scientists said to him, when did this president know about this, and what did he know? What did he know, and when did he know it? That’s for an after-action review. But as the president fiddles, people are dying.”

Host Jake Tapper asked, “Speaker Pelosi when you say the president’s denial was deadly, he obviously downplayed the risks of coronavirus for several weeks, and it wasn’t until I think about two weeks ago that he started acknowledging the gravity of the crisis. Are you saying his downplaying ultimately cost American lives?”

Pelosi said, “Yes, I am. I’m saying that because when he made — the other day, when he was signing the bill, he said, just think, 20 days ago everything was great. No, everything wasn’t great. We had nearly 500 cases and 17 deaths already. And in that 20 days, because we weren’t prepared, we now have 2,000 deaths and 100,000 cases. So again, we really want to work in a unifying way to get the job done here. But we cannot continue to allow him to continue to make these underestimates of what is actually happening here. This is such a tragedy, and we don’t even know the magnitude of it because we do not have the adequate testing. Our first bill was about testing, testing, testing. The second bill was about masks, masks, masks. Of course both of them were about addressing the emergency.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN