Left-wing actor and director Rob Reiner proclaimed on Monday that President Trump is “murdering Americans,” linking his brazen statement to the number of U.S. fatalities connected to the coronavirus.
“Over 135,000 dead and counting. The President of the United States is killing US. You can trash doctors and scientists. You can try to spin your way out of this. But you can’t spin death,” the Emmy-winning actor said.
“There’s no other way to say this: Donald Trump is murdering Americans,” Rob Reiner told his 1.1 million Twitter followers in a follow-up.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Tuesday morning tally, the U.S. has reported over 3.2 million cases and over 134,000 related-deaths.
While Reiner has gleefully, and often, attacked the president over the number of coronavirus-linked fatalities in the U.S., he has not devoted the same amount of energy to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), whose state has reported over 402,000 cases of the virus and over 32,000 related deaths. Thousands of those deaths in New York State can be tied directly to nursing homes. In March, Cuomo’s administration initially directed nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients discharged from the hospital. Over 6,400 of the Empire State’s virus fatalities can be linked directly to nursing homes.
What’s more, New York State accounts for nearly 24 percent of the country’s overall virus fatalities — a statistic that remains unmentioned by Reiner or his Hollywood counterparts like Cher, who also accused President Trump of killing Americans “without a thought.”
Despite that, Cuomo has also placed the blame squarely on the president.
“Trump’s COVID scandal makes Nixon’s Watergate look innocent,” the governor said on Monday. “No one died in the Watergate scandal.”
While Trump critics have also blasted the president for his push for schools to reopen in the fall — warning of the potential risk — even the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has “strongly” advocated for in-person learning for the upcoming academic year.
This, of course, is not the first time Reiner has connected Trump to impending death. In March, he said Trump was “causing people in NY to DIE,” and last month the director declared that “a vote for Trump is a vote for Death.”