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NY Times, July 19, 2020
Trump Leans Into False Virus Claims in Combative Fox News Interview
By Katie Rogers
WASHINGTON — An agitated President Trump offered a string of combative
and often dubious assertions in an interview aired Sunday, defending his
handling of the coronavirus with misleading evidence, attacking his own
health experts, disputing polls showing him trailing in his re-election
race and defending people who display the Confederate flag as victims of
“cancel culture.”
The president’s remarks, delivered in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,”
amounted to a contentious potpourri more commonly found on his Twitter
feed and at his political rallies.
The difference this time was a vigorous attempt by the host, Chris
Wallace, to fact-check him, leading to several clashes between the two
on matters ranging from the coronavirus response to whether Mr. Trump
would accept the results of the election should he lose.
The Coronavirus
The president made a litany of false claims about his administration’s
handling of the virus, despite evidence that key officials and public
health experts advising the president made crucial missteps and played
down the spread of the disease this spring. In the interview, Mr. Trump
falsely claimed that the United States had “one of the lowest mortality
rates in the world” from the virus.
“That’s not true, sir,” Mr. Wallace said.
“Do you have the numbers, please?” Mr. Trump said. “Because I heard we
had the best mortality rate.”
The United States has the eighth-worst fatality rate among reported
coronavirus cases in the world, and the death rate per 100,000 people —
42.83 — ranks it third-worst, according to data on the countries most
affected by the coronavirus compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Mr.
Trump said that by increasing testing, his administration was “creating
trouble for the fake news to come along and say, ‘Oh, we have more cases.’”
Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the coronavirus case rate in other
countries was lower than in the United States because those nations did
not engage in testing. When Mr. Wallace pointed out a low case rate
across the European Union, the president suggested it was possible that
those countries “don’t test.” And when Mr. Wallace pointed out that the
death rate in the United States was rising, Mr. Trump replied by blaming
China.
“Excuse me, it’s all too much, it shouldn’t be one case,” Mr. Trump
said. “It came from China. They should’ve never let it escape. They
should’ve never let it out. But it is what it is. Take a look at Europe,
take a look at the numbers in Europe. And by the way, they’re having cases.”
Mr. Trump called Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious
disease expert, an “alarmist” who provided faulty information in the
early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I don’t know that he’s a leaker,” Mr. Trump said during the interview.
“He’s a little bit of an alarmist. That’s OK. A little bit of an alarmist.”
Mr. Trump said that Dr. Fauci had been against his decision to close the
borders to travelers from China in January. That is misleading: While
Dr. Fauci initially opposed the idea on the grounds that a ban would
prevent medical professionals from traveling to hard-hit areas, he
supported the decision by the time it was made.
Mr. Trump also said Dr. Fauci had been against Americans wearing masks.
Dr. Fauci has said he does not regret urging Americans not to wear masks
in the early days of the pandemic, citing a severe shortage of
protective gear for medical professionals at the time.
Mr. Trump said he doubted whether Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was correct in
predicting that the pandemic would be worse this fall. “I don’t know,”
Mr. Trump said. “And I don’t think he knows.”
He said public health experts and the World Health Organization “got a
lot wrong” early on, including a theory that the virus would abate as
the weather warmed — one that Mr. Trump himself had promoted repeatedly.
Then the president reiterated his earlier claim, unsupported by science,
that the virus would suddenly cease one day. “It’s going to disappear,
and I’ll be right,” Mr. Trump said. “Because I’ve been right probably
more than anybody else.”
The Election
Mr. Trump insulted Fox News pollsters as “among the worst” when
presented with data that showed him trailing former Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, claiming that
he had seen polls that showed him winning.
“I understand you still have more than 100 days to this election, but at
this point you’re losing,” Mr. Wallace told Mr. Trump after detailing a
new Fox News poll that showed Mr. Biden leading the president by eight
points, 49 percent to 41 percent, among registered voters.
“First of all, I’m not losing,” Mr. Trump replied, “because those are
fake polls. They were fake in 2016, and now they’re even more fake. The
polls were much worse in 2016.”
But in reality, the Fox News poll was much better for him than another
major survey released Sunday. A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Mr.
Biden with a double-digit lead: 55 percent to 40 percent among
registered voters. The numbers were part of a slate of polls showing Mr.
Biden’s lead widening as the pandemic weighed on the president’s
approval ratings.
Mr. Trump said he was not worried about losing the election with the
decision last week to replace his campaign manager, Brad Parscale. Mr.
Trump called Mr. Parscale “a great digital guy” before saying that many
of his 2016 campaign hands were getting more involved. He did not
mention his new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, by name.
When told that Mr. Biden was chosen in the Fox poll as the more mentally
sound candidate, Mr. Trump disputed that finding and defended his
cognitive test results to Mr. Wallace, who said he had taken the same
test that the president had bragged about acing this month. Mr. Wallace
pointed out that one of the questions asked to identify an elephant.
“It’s all misrepresentation,” Mr. Trump said. “Because, yes, the first
few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last
five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t. They get very hard, the last five
questions.”
Mr. Trump suggested that he might not accept the results of the election
should he lose. Mr. Wallace, who spent the interview grilling the
president — a tactic he has used in other high-profile interviews —
pointed out that Mr. Trump said the same thing in 2016.
“You don’t know until you see,” Mr. Trump said. “It depends. I think
mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.”
Mr. Trump, who has voted by mail, has repeatedly warned, without
evidence, that mail elections would involve robbed mailboxes, forged
signatures and ballots printed by foreign countries.
Race and Policing
Mr. Trump again tried to attack Mr. Biden, claiming that the former vice
president wanted to defund the police. The president suggested this was
evidenced by his work with more progressive Democrats to create a
charter pledging to work together on matters including changes to policing.
“It says nothing about defunding the police,” Mr. Wallace said of that
document.
“Oh really? It says abolish, it says defund. Let’s go! Get me the
charter, please,” Mr. Trump said, before demanding to see the document.
In a promotional clip of the interview, Mr. Wallace said the president
had been unable to find evidence that Mr. Biden sought to defund or
abolish the police.
When Mr. Wallace asked the president if he could understand why Black
people would be angry about their increased likelihood to be killed by
the police, Mr. Trump reiterated a claim he made in another interview
last week: that white people are fatally shot in high numbers, too.
“I mean, many, many whites are killed,” Mr. Trump said. “I hate to say,
but this is going on for decades.”
Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police
over all, people of color are killed at higher rates.
Mr. Trump also refused to back down from supporting people who were
against abolishing the Confederate flag, even as Mr. Wallace pointed out
that they had used it in defense of slavery. The president equated the
movement to pull down the flags and Confederate monuments to “cancel
culture,” a term more commonly used to describe a boycott against a
person, often a celebrity, who says or does something culturally offensive.
“And you know, the whole thing with cancel culture, we can’t cancel our
whole history,” Mr. Trump said. “We can’t forget that the North and the
South fought. We have to remember that. Otherwise we’ll end up fighting
again.”
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