President Donald Trump on Monday morning escalated his efforts to whitewash COVID-19 by attacking health experts and even his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose science-based evaluations of the virus continue to clash with Trump’s falsely rosy portrayal of it.
Trump retweeted a deranged post by Chuck Woolery, a faithfully pro-Trump radio host, that ranted about so-called “outrageous lies” about the virus, which has seen major spikes in numerous states that have already begun reopening in recent weeks.
“Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust,” Woolery tweeted. “I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election.”
The President reposted the commentator’s evidence-free conspiracy theory on Monday morning:
Trump’s boosting of Woolery’s baseless accusation is the latest development in the President’s ongoing effort to salvage his reelection prospects by downplaying the destruction wreaked by COVID-19, which has infected more than 3.3 million Americans and killed approximately 135,000 while also devastating the U.S. economy.
Part of Trump’s attempts to publicly dismiss the alarming figures is to falsely claim that the outbreak is “going away” (Arizona, Florida, and multiple other states are seeing record-breaking increases in COVID-19 cases daily) and that increased testing is artificially inflating the number of cases.
But health experts, including White House COVID-19 task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, have pushed back on Trump’s deceptive framing of the pandemic and warned that the coronavirus is still very much on the rise.
Trump and the White House have begun trying to discredit those experts in response, with the President telling Fox News host Sean Hannity last week that they have been “wrong about a lot of things.” The White House even sent several media outlets on Sunday a list of remarks Fauci had made about COVID-19 in the beginning of the pandemic that turned out to be incorrect later on.
