On Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump held a press conference that he called to mark the occasion of the release of a new list of his potential picks for the Supreme Court if he gets a second term in office. The list included some, uh, “highlights” like the hyperpartisan right-winger Ted Cruz, who’s currently a Senator from Texas and has “distinguished” himself through his relentless fealty to the GOP party line. At the press conference, Trump also addressed tapes that had been released earlier in the day which contain clips of his conversations with longtime journalist Bob Woodward. He tried to defend some of his comments, although he admitted to intentionally downplaying the Coronavirus, which he told Woodward that he did.
Trump said:
‘We don’t want to instill panic. We don’t want to jump up and down and start shouting that we have a problem that is a tremendous problem [and] scare everybody… We don’t want to cause pricing [for medical supplies] to go up to a level that becomes almost unaffordable.’
The entire point is that the Coronavirus is a “tremendous problem”! That is the basic reality of the situation! There have been millions of confirmed cases and almost 200,000 deaths in the United States, but Trump made a fool of himself with his suggestion that he should supposedly get some kind of credit for not over-hyping the situation.
In response to a follow-up question from another journalist, Trump added:
‘The last thing you want to do is create a panic in the country. This was a horrible thing. It was sent to us by China — should not have happened, it should never have happened.’
The virus was not “sent” to the United States by China. That is conspiratorial racist nonsense that has no relationship to reality. Trump just keeps making a laughingstock out of himself. Check out his comments in the video below:
Q: "Did you mislead the public?"
President Trump: "Well, I think if you said in order to reduce panic, perhaps that's so. The fact is, I'm a cheerleader for this country. I love our country and I don't want people to be frightened. I don't want to create panic." pic.twitter.com/NNbnkPz346
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 9, 2020
Meanwhile, before he got to the question-and-answer part of the press conference, Trump made clear that the Coronavirus was far from the only subject about which he held onto wild delusions. He insisted that there’s some kind of left-wing movement that wants to throw out the “impartial rule of law” — which is just ridiculous and has no relationship to reality. It’s also rich coming from a guy who has so many former allies who’ve faced criminal charges.
Trump said:
‘What has always made America exceptional is our reverence for the impartial rule of law. People have come from all over the world to pursue the American Dream based on this sacred principle. Equality under the law is the bedrock of our society… Unfortunately, there is a growing radical left movement that rejects the principle of equal treatment under the law. If this extreme movement is granted a majority on the Supreme Court without a single vote of Congress.’
Check out his comments below:
He had some supposed examples. He claimed, for instance, that “radical justices will erase the Second Amendment, silence political speech, and require taxpayers to fund extreme late-term abortion” — but these allegations are all baseless fearmongering. Still, Trump added that these Democrat-appointed justices “will give unelected bureaucrats the power to destroy millions of American jobs,” “will remove the words ‘under God’ from the pledge of allegiance,” and “will erase national borders, cripple police departments.” All of that is nonsense.
