Trump Has Devoted Less Than One Percent of His Coronavirus Briefings Offering Condolences for COVID-19 Victims: Report

“Just 4½ minutes expressing condolences for coronavirus victims”

Americans learned early on that President Donald Trump was never going to step up and become Consoler-in-Chief, but a new report reveals just how little this American President has shown he feels for coronavirus victims or their families.

Now that President Trump has apparently paused his seven-days-a-week press conferences that originally were supposed to be Coronavirus Task Force briefings led by Vice President Mike Pence but quickly morphed into campaign rallies replete with grievance sessions and enemy attacks led by President Donald Trump, The Washington Post has taken a look at the numbers and delivered a sobering analysis.

“President Trump strode to the lectern in the White House briefing room Thursday and, for just over an hour, attacked his rivals, dismissing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a ‘sleepy guy in a basement of a house’ and lambasting the media as ‘fake news’ and ‘lamestream,'” The Post’s Philip Bump and Ashley Parker report. “He showered praise on himself and his team, repeatedly touting the ‘great job’ they were doing as he spoke of the ‘tremendous progress’ being made toward a vaccine and how ‘phenomenally’ the nation was faring in terms of mortality.”

But the President offered no sympathy for the 2081 Americans who had died over the past day, a toll that Sunday broke 55,000.

In the 35 press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic Trump has held since mid-March, he has spoken 60 percent of the time, according to the Post which analyzed data from data analytics firm Factba.se.

Related: Trump’s ‘Disinfectant Injection’ Claim Has Actually Caused People to Poison Themselves

“Over the past three weeks, the tally comes to more than 13 hours of Trump — including two hours spent on attacks and 45 minutes praising himself and his administration, but just 4½ minutes expressing condolences for coronavirus victims.”

That works out to less than one percent of Trump’s speaking time devoted to the victims of this deadly disease and their families. Most of the time those mentions came in prepared remarks written by staff. They came just eight days out of a three-week period.

The President spent twice as much time promoting hydroxychloroquine, the “unproven antimalarial drug that was the object of a Food and Drug Administration warning Friday.”

“Trump also said something false or misleading in nearly a quarter of his prepared comments or answers to questions, the analysis shows,” including 87 “factually inaccurate comments.”

Trump has used the briefings to talk about talk or boast about coronavirus testing capacity 14% of the time, ventilator supplies 12%, and his travel bans 9% of the time.

Read the entire report here.