President Donald Trump on Thursday visited a medical supply company in Pennsylvania, but he also had a message for the state’s governor.
“We have to get your governor of Pennsylvania to start opening up a little bit,” Trump said. “You have areas of Pennsylvania that are barely affected and they want to keep them closed. You can’t do that.”
The president spoke as many Republicans in the state are in open rebellion over Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s lockdowns as a result of the coronavirus.
The president spoke to workers after visiting the Owens & Minor, Inc. Distribution Center, a 137-year-old American medical equipment distributor in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
The president was not spotted wearing a mask, although he maintained social distancing from workers in the plant who wore masks.
The president also boasted that the United States had just completed its ten millionth coronavirus test, boasting that they were leading the world in testing.
“Could be that testing is, frankly, overrated, maybe it is overrated,” Trump said, but added that the country was producing the “best in the world.”
He said that his critics and the media repeatedly demanded more testing, refusing to give him credit for producing record levels of testing.
Some of the workers also laughed after Trump mocked the media, pointing them out in the back.
“They don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said. “They are a disaster, but that’s ok. The people understand, and that’s all that really matters when you get down to it.”
The president announced that he would continue adding medical supplies to the national stockpile, even after meeting the needs of the country for the coronavirus. He said former President Barack Obama’s administration left the stockpile empty after the H1N1 virus.
The president also mocked “Sleepy Joe Biden for flubbing his description of the H1N1 virus, as “N1H1.”
“You know who says that right?” Trump asked. “N1H1, who says that? Sleepy Joe Biden.”
The president also spoke about the importance of manufacturing medical products in the United States.
“The final step in rebuilding the stockpile is to bring critical manufacturing permanently back to America,” Trump said. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
He criticized previous American leaders for gutting manufacturing in the United States, making it difficult to get enough medical supplies to handle the pandemic.
“Globalists, they want the globe to do well, but they don’t care about us, now we want everybody to do well but we have to take care of America first,” Trump said.
Trump said that the virus was worse than the flu, commenting that he lost five people that he knew to the sickness.
“They’re gone,” he said. “Terrible, terrible thing.”