Monday on CNN, anchor Anderson Cooper accused President Donald Trump of “hijacking” the coronavirus task force press briefing to “rewrite the history” of his administration’s response to the pandemic.
Cooper said, “The White House coronavirus press briefing ended a while ago. If you tuned in hoping to hear from the country’s top scientists, you were disappointed. What we mostly heard was the president. What we saw was a hijacking of the task force press conference by a president determined to rewrite the history of his early and irresponsible response to this virus.”
He continued, “What the president showed us today is what the nation’s top scientists have to deal with every day, a president who now uses these briefings as a reelection platform, an opportunity to lie, to deflect, to attack, to bully, and cover up his own deadly dismissals of the virus for crucial weeks. According to the president today, all governors are getting everything they need, and testing is now and always has been great. Reporters who asked fair questions but didn’t kowtow or suck up to this president were attacked and belittled.”
He added, “February was a lost month, and people died because of that. And the numbers tested do not begin to appreciably rise on their own chart until more than halfway through the month of March. That’s how late it was. Nonetheless, this is the victory the administration is repeatedly claiming. This is what the president is clinging to, claiming that testing always has been great. It hasn’t. Still not.”
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