Trump has consistently acknowledged during White House coronavirus briefings, beginning on March 19, that hydroxychloroquine might not work but was worth trying in some patients, given preliminary studies showing possible promising results. New, non-rigorous data has called those indicators into question, however.
“I’m standing up there and instead of a normal question, the level of anger and hatred. I’ll look at them, I’ll say ‘what is your problem?” Trump said at the town hall, referring to how the media treated him during White House coronavirus briefings.
Joe Biden, media outlets and other Democrats, Trump pointed out, had initially characterized his January travel ban on China as xenophobic, before changing their tune. When Baier queried Trump about a recent Biden tweet saying Trump had left the U.S. “unprepared” for a pandemic, Trump was immediately dismissive.
“Joe Biden didn’t write that,” Trump said. “That was written by a young man who got very good grades at a very good school.” At a previous Fox News town hall in March, Trump similarly implied that Biden is no longer mentally competent.
China, Trump said, had conclusively misled the world on the spread of the coronavirus. “I think, personally, they made a horrible mistake, and they didn’t want to admit it,” Trump said. He added that China had misled the World Health Organization, for which Trump suspended funding earlier in the year for failing to warn the global community and simply parroting China’s claims about the virus.
“The World Health Organization has been a disaster,” Trump said. “Everything they’ve said was wrong. And they’re China-centric. They agree with China, whatever China wants to do. So our country, perhaps foolishly in retrospect, has been paying $450 million a year to the World Health Organization. And China’s been paying $38 million a year. … So I’ll have to make a decision on that. … They missed every single call.”
Politico reported Sunday, citing the Department of Homeland Security, that China delayed informing the WHO that the coronavirus was contagious until it could first stockpile masks and other critical equipment.
A research dossier compiled by the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance, that reportedly concludes China intentionally hid or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus pandemic, is consistent with U.S. findings about the origins of the outbreak so far, senior U.S. officials told Fox News on Saturday. Fox News was the first to report that sources were increasingly confident the virus likely had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the naturally occurring strain was being studied. The matter remains under investigation, however.
Sunday’s town hall event was entitled “America Together: Returning to Work.” It featured video questions submitted by viewers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
After what he called a “working weekend” at Camp David, Trump returned to the White House Sunday afternoon. The president has faced a cascading series of challenges in recent days, including protesters in Michigan storming the state capitol to protest stay-at-home orders, reports that North Korea’s leader was alive and healthy despite a CNN report that he was near death, and apparent discord within his administration as to the potential threat still posed by the coronavirus.
“A lot of people want to go back,” Trump told Baier and MacCallum. “You see demonstrations all over the country — and those are meaningful demonstrations. … Now we have to get it open. We have to get it open safely, but we have to get it open as quickly as possible.”
Asked by MacCallum whether he ever considers whether he went too far in pushing for a nationwide shutdown, Trump responded, “No, we did the right thing.” He added that millions of lives had been saved — but, he conceded, “I do look back on it.”
Trump said he has lost three friends due to the coronavirus: “This is a very advanced, very horrible thing we’re fighting. But, with all of that said, we’ve learned a lot about it. It affects older people. … This thing is vicious. And it can take you out. But children do very well. Young children do better than teens.”
At the same time, Trump said some states, including Virginia, aren’t opening up fast enough. He also took an apparent shot at California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, ordered Orange County beaches — prompting hundreds of protesters to flood the city of Huntington Beach in protest.
The town hall came amid other whirlwind developments in Washington. Bombshell new disclosures by the Justice Department, for example, largely supported Trump’s claims that FBI officials furtively worked to target some of his former top officials.
Among other revelations, FBI communications made clear that top bureau officials discussed their motivations for interviewing former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in the White House on January 24, 2017 — and openly questioned if their “goal” was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
Back in the White House, Trump tweeted Sunday that the intelligence community had vindicated him on another matter.