From “it will disappear” to 100,000 deaths: Trump’s coronavirus projections have shifted dramatically
Trump’s Fox News town hall showed how he keeps revising the death toll forecast upward — even as he pushes for businesses to reopen.
May 4, 2020, 1:00pm EDT
President Donald Trump’s “America Together: Returning to Work” Fox News town hall event was a remarkably dishonest affair, replete with lies about topics ranging from the efficacy of
hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19 to the
trajectory of new coronavirus cases in the country to how
tariffs work. At one point, Trump
whined that he’s treated worse than Abraham Lincoln — a president who was assassinated.
But one moment of unusual honesty stood out.
With the US coronavirus death toll approaching 70,000 as of May 4 — a grim milestone significantly beyond the “50 or 60,000” number that Trump said the country was “going toward” on April 20 — Trump revised his estimate upward. And he acknowledged he was doing so.
“I used to say 65,000. Now I’m saying 80 or 90, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the very lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown,” Trump said, alluding to the 100,000-to-200,000 death estimate
cited in late March by public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Trump’s Fox News town hall showed how he keeps revising the death toll forecast upward — even as he pushes for businesses to reopen.
www.vox.com