President Donald Trump delayed signing an $8.3 billion emergency coronavirus bill Congress passed and sent to his desk Thursday so he could do a bill signing photo-op at the CDC on Friday. But after a high level CDC official was suspected of possibly having coronavirus, Trump canceled the trip – just days after telling Americans not only that it is OK for coronavirus patients to go to work, but that they “get better” by doing so.
The White House appears to be in total confusion.
According to CNN’s Kevin Liptak, the White House said Trump canceled the trip because the “CDC has been proactive and prepared since the very beginning and the President does not want to interfere with the CDC’s mission to protect the health and welfare of their people and the agency.”
The official White House talking point was shared with reporters, but apparently not with the President himself, who revealed it to be nothing more that gaslighting.
“They thought there was a problem at CDC with somebody that had the virus,” Trump told reporters this morning, Politico reports. “It turned out negative so we are seeing if we can do it. They’ve tested the person fully and it was a negative test.”
But now that the unnamed “high level” official tested negative for coronavirus, the White House scrambled to get the photo-op, sans bill signing, back on the President’s agenda for the day.
“I may be going. We’re going to see if they can turn it around with Secret Service. We may be going,” Trump told reporters, but not the Vice President who is in charge of the coronavirus response.
Now that the CDC official has tested negative, Trump’s CDC trip may be back on.
All of which shows that Trump’s focus is not in protecting Americans but in gaslighting Americans.
Wednesday night Trump called the new novel coronavirus the “corona flu,” and challenged the World Health Organization’s assessment that the death rate for COVID-19 is 3.4%. Trump claimed it is less than 1%, which is provably false and a dangerous claim to make.
Worse, he falsely told Americans people get better by going to work.
“So we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that just get better, by, you know, sitting around and even going to work – some of ’em go to work – but they get better,” Trump falsely claimed, which is dangerous, given how highly-contagious COVID-19 is.
Earlier Friday a former CIA terrorism analyst warned that if the Trump administration doesn’t begin to do a demonstrably better job managing the coronavirus crisis world leaders may force the US into some form of containment.
Here’s Trump at the emergency $8.3 billion coronavirus bill signing: