June 23, 2020 10:31 AM UTC

The Wheels are Coming Off the Trump Train

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote yesterday about how Sen. Cory Gardner’s past statements were at odds with President Trump’s declarations that he instructed officials to “slow down” testing for COVID-19 because Trump didn’t think it looked good that so many people were getting sick. As POLITICO reports today, Trump made it clear to reporters that he was not joking around when he made his “slow down” comments at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday insisted he was serious when he revealed that he had directed his administration to slow coronavirus testing in the United States, shattering the defenses of senior White House aides who argued Trump’s remarks were made in jest.

“I don’t kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear,” Trump told reporters, when pressed on whether his comments at a campaign rally Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., were intended as a joke…[Pols emphasis]

…Administration officials as high ranking as Vice President Mike Pence have scrambled in recent days to clean up Trump’s statements on Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., where he reprised his dubious logic regarding testing rates before an arena of supporters.

“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people,” Trump said during the rally. “You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

Now, here’s where things start to get really weird. As NBC News reports:

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that the federal government is trying to expand testing, not slow it down it as President Donald Trump has suggested in recent days. [Pols emphasis]

In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fauci was asked about the president’s recent comments and whether he agrees that it makes sense to limit the number of COVID-19 tests.

“It’s the opposite, we’re going to be doing more testing, not less,” said Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, who has played a key role in the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.

On the same day that President Trump reiterated that he instructed officials to “slow down” COVID-19 testing, the top infectious disease expert in the United States was telling Congress that health officials were “doing more testing, not less.”

What in the hell is going on here? Did Trump just have a dream that he instructed officials to “slow down” on testing, or did he really make that request and it was completely ignored? Have federal government officials stopped listening to Trump altogether?

This is very strange, even for an administration that is already well beyond normal.