The Bulwark ― a conservative news and opinion website ― released a supercut on Tuesday chronicling President Donald Trump’s reckless slew of misleading or false statements since the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, leading up to his recent pivot.
The video dropped the same day Trump declared at a news conference that he had “always” known the threat was real, and that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
The first clip is dated Jan. 22, when the U.S. had recorded only one case of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. The president was asked during a CNBC interview if there were concerns about the novel coronavirus in China becoming a pandemic.
“No, not at all, and we have it totally under control,” Trump replied.
The Bulwark was created last year by several Republican opinion leaders who, though their conservative ideology remains unchanged, are staunch “Never Trumpers.”
The outlet’s montage continues along the timeline for the crisis to show the president repeatedly offering misinformation about the outbreak and downplaying its severity. In the process, he squandered valuable time which could have been used to mitigate and prepare for the pandemic in the U.S. ― his claim on Monday that he would rate his response a “10” notwithstanding.
Clips show Trump claiming the disease’s spread from China had been shut down, that the virus could go away in April come rising temperatures, that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. was dropping and would soon reach zero, and that a vaccine might be available in a matter of months ― all of this despite consistently contradictory information from medical professionals.
Over the course of these claims, the number of U.S. cases soared from 1 to more than 4,200 on Tuesday, with a total of 75 deaths so far recorded and cases now reported in every state. Trump declared a national emergency last Friday, allocating $50 billion in disaster relief funding, but as he did that shirked responsibility for the lack of testing availability and other failures.