President Donald Trump has been holding daily press conferences to provide the latest information about the coronavirus from the federal government, but his rhetoric has sometimes been imprecise, misleading or outright incorrect.
Over the weekend, the Biden campaign posted a video that claims the Trump administration silenced Dr. Nancy Messonnier for “speaking out” about the new coronavirus at a Feb. 25 press briefing. But the campaign’s support for the claim is awfully thin.
At a White House briefing March 19, President Donald Trump said, “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.” But that’s simply not the case.
After President Trump said, “I don’t know anything about” the disbanding of a White House pandemic response office, the Democrats claimed that he “lied” and pointed to Trump’s earlier remarks about “some of the people we cut” as evidence. But those remarks were in response to a question about proposed budget cuts — not the anti-pandemic team in question.
President Donald Trump left the misleading impression that two drugs were “approved” for use in treating the new coronavirus and were available for “immediate delivery.”
President Donald Trump said on March 17, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” While it’s not possible to know what Trump “felt,” there’s no doubt that Trump had minimized the threat of the new coronavirus for weeks in statement after statement.
We launched a new Coronavirus Coverage page to help readers navigate our website and more easily find the articles they want to read.
In this video, we review three claims from the first head-to-head presidential primary debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In tweets and other appearances, President Donald Trump has repeatedly compared his response to the new coronavirus with President Barack Obama’s handling of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. But Trump’s information is frequently incorrect or misleading — and the two viruses are very different.
In a short primetime address, President Donald Trump provided false, misleading and incomplete information about the new coronavirus and actions his administration has taken or will take to staunch its spread.