Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response

Chris Wallace fires back at Lara Trump for lies about wearing masks at debate: ‘I’m not making this up’

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Fox News host Chris Wallace questioned Trump campaign surrogate Lara Trump on Sunday about the first family’s decision not to wear masks at the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Wallace began his interview with the president’s daughter-in-law by asking whether a White House Rose Garden gathering for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was a “super-spreader event.”

“People were packed in, almost no masks and Dr. Fauci has said that event was a super spreader,” Wallace explained. “Why did it take the president getting COVID for the White House to take the CDC safety guidelines more seriously, although even yesterday they were still violating some?” Continue reading.

Pentagon puts on show of force as questions circle on COVID-19 outbreak

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The Pentagon is putting on a show of force as most of its Joint Chiefs of Staff quarantine after two top military officials tested positive for COVID-19 last week and possibly exposed others.

Defense Department officials have repeatedly insisted that military readiness has not been affected and that it remains ready to defend the country, a stance it repeated on Thursday.

“The Joint Chiefs and I remain in constant communication while in quarantine and the chain of command remains the same,” Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, who is himself waylaid at home, said through the Joint Staff Twitter account. Continue reading.

White House blocks medical experts on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force from appearing on ABC’s ‘This Week’

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The White House refused to allow expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci or another medical expert on President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force to appear on ABC’s “This Week,” Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl said Sunday.

Karl told viewers that while Fauci was “more than willing to join” the program to discuss the nation’s faltering response to COVID-19, as well as the White House’s current status as a coronavirus hot spot, “the White House wouldn’t allow you to hear from the nation’s leading expert on coronavirus.”

“In fact, they wouldn’t allow any of the medical experts on the president’s own coronavirus task force to appear on this show,” Karl said. Continue reading.

Chris Wallace fires back at Lara Trump for lies about wearing masks at debate: ‘I’m not making this up’

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Fox News host Chris Wallace questioned Trump campaign surrogate Lara Trump on Sunday about the first family’s decision not to wear masks at the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Wallace began his interview with the president’s daughter-in-law by asking whether a White House Rose Garden gathering for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was a “super-spreader event.”

“People were packed in, almost no masks and Dr. Fauci has said that event was a super spreader,” Wallace explained. “Why did it take the president getting COVID for the White House to take the CDC safety guidelines more seriously, although even yesterday they were still violating some?” Continue reading.

Like Trump, I was on monoclonal antibody drugs. This is what they do to you

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After Donald Trump was hospitalized last week following a positive test for COVID-19, he emerged from Walter Reed with all the “Scarface” energy of one of his sons, declaring that, after “some really great drugs” he felt better than he did twenty years ago. Those drugs include Regeneron’s REGN-COV2, a monoclonal antibody cocktail that is not approved by the FDA but was administered through a process known as compassionate use. (Regeneron’s CEO, Dr. Leonard S. Schleifer, is also a friend of the Trump family.) Mainstream and social media quickly lit up over Trump’s revelations, especially when he declared that the treatment “wasn’t just therapeutic, it made me better. I call that a cure.”

But is it?

If you’ve ever seen television ads for drugs with names like Opdivo (nivolumab) or Keytruda (pembrolizumab), you may notice a common denominator in their nomenclature. That “mab” — usually written as “mAb” — at the end is short for “monoclonal antibodies,” antibodies engineered in a lab. Continue reading.

Trump returns to public campaigning, falsely claiming that the virus that infected him is ‘disappearing’

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President Trump held his first public event since contracting the novel coronavirus, gathering a crowd of hundreds of supporters at the White House on Saturday despite providing no evidence that he was no longer infectious.

It marked the beginning of what aides have described as a triumphant return to campaigning for reelection after his hospitalization — and a sign that the virus that rocked Trump’s campaign and infected much of the West Wing has not changed his combative and defiant approach to governing.

“We’re starting very, very big with the rallies, and with our everything,” Trump told the crowded group of conservative activists while standing on a balcony. “Because we cannot allow our country to become a socialist nation.” Continue reading.

Trump dodges tough questions on his health during rambling Tucker Carlson interview

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Donald Trump’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, less than a week since the president returned from being hospitalized for COVID-19, revealed very little about Trump’s health or infectiousness. Yet unintentionally, the president seems to have dropped some clues about the seriousness of his condition during the rambling, tangent-ridden interview.

The interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was conducted by Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox News contributor who has defended Trump’s poor handling of the American coronavirus outbreak, compared the pandemic to the flu and in 2016 raised concerns about the neurological health of then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton despite never having examined her in person.

Carlson set a hagiographic tone for the segment at the beginning, describing Trump’s supposed “remarkable turnaround” before allowing Siegel to conduct the interview. The two were not in the same room: Siegel was in a studio and Trump was in the White House, being filmed separately. Trump and Siegel’s conversation wandered, from Trump blaming China for the virus and repeatedly mentioning Regeneron (a company that gave him an experimental drug and with which he has personal ties) to describing himself as “very strong,” offering to donate his plasma and claiming that he has improved faster and better than others who have had COVID-19. Continue reading.

Down in the polls, an ailing Trump finds lavish airtime on conservative media in two-day interview blitz

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Down in the polls and isolated by illness, President Trump retreated to the safe spaces of two Fox networks and Rush Limbaugh’s radio program in a 36-hour burst of media interviews three weeks before Election Day.

The sprawling, somewhat manic phone-in interviews put Trump front and center on the radar of many of his most loyal supporters, via the most conservative-friendly media outlets, but arguably did little to reach the independent and moderate voters Trump will need to close the gap with former vice president Joe Biden.

The method to Trump’s occasional madness — at one point Friday he boasted to Limbaugh that “our nuclear is all tippy top now” in an apparently reference to military weapons systems — seemed to play out as an effort to seize and maintain the media spotlight without spending any of his remaining campaign cash. Continue reading.