March 12, 2020 02:32 PM UTC

President Trump Keeps Lying About Coronavirus

by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times (and formerly Fox 31 News in Colorado) summarizes Trump’s truth troubles:

One of the areas on which Trump has most conspicuously made statements that don’t square with reality involves testing for the virus.

“We’ve done a good job on testing,” he insisted Thursday.

Almost simultaneously, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the dearth of available tests in the U.S. as the outbreak spreads amounts to “a failing.”

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now,” Fauci said in testimony to the House Oversight Committee. “That is a failing. It is a failing. Let’s admit it.”

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President Trump addressed the nation on Wednesday night from the Oval Office, rattling off a bunch of information about the U.S. response to the Coronavirus pandemic that turned out to be absolutely wrong. As Dan Balz writes for The Washington Post:

In times of national crisis, people look to the president for direction, reassurance and confidence. President Trump’s Oval Office speech on Wednesday night provided precisely the opposite.

Trump’s Wednesday night bullshitting continued today during a press conference at the White House. Chris Cillizza of CNN points out the many, many, many falsehoods uttered by the actual President of the United States of America. You should really read Cillizza’s entire recount of this morning’s press event, but here’s a sampling of some of the most ridiculous of those quotes:

“You know, you see what’s going on. And so I just wanted that to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stopped it.”

We stopped the Coronavirus? No.

“And what is the number as of this morning? Is it 32? You could tell me. Is it 32 deaths, Steve, around that?”

We can’t add anything to Cillizza’s response here: The President of the United States is unaware of how many Americans have died as a result of coronavirus. Indefensible. At the time Trump said this, there were 38 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the United States.