In his effort to whitewash his administration’s botched handling of the pandemic, President Donald Trump is now actively shrugging off the daily COVID-19 death toll in the U.S.
“I think it’s under control,” Trump told Axios correspondent Jonathan Swan in a pre-taped interview released on Monday night.
“How?” Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
Trump rolled his eyes.
“They are dying, that’s true, and it is what it is,” the President said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”
“This is a horrible plague that beset us,” he added.
Later in the interview, Trump pulled out several graphs to prove that “we’re lower in the world” in terms of COVID-19 deaths.
A puzzled Swan examined the graphs.
“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” the reporter noted. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”
“You can’t do that,” Trump replied.
When Swan asked why he couldn’t “do that,” the President just continued to insist that “you have to go by the cases.”
Trump’s comments about the U.S. death toll fall squarely under the White House’s reported strategy of hoping Americans will simply grow numb to the crisis as the November elections draw near.
More than 155,000 Americans have died from the virus as of Tuesday morning, according to John Hopkins University’s pandemic tracker.
Watch Trump below:
