This week, President Donald Trump defended his response to the coronavirus pandemic by asserting that that the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States isn’t so bad when analyzed on a per capita basis. But when Trump expanded on that line of thinking, his statement led to brutal mockery on social media.
“And you know, when you say ‘per capita,’ there’s many per capitas,” Trump asserted. “It’s like, per capita relative to what? But you can look at just about any category, and we’re really at the top, meaning positive, on a per capita basis too.”
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski slammed and fact-checked Trump on Thursday morning, May 21 — noting that according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the U.S. has the ninth highest coronavirus death rate, per capita, in the world (and the highest numbers of coronavirus deaths period). But Scarborough and Brzezinski’s comments, as biting as they were, weren’t as brutal as some of the things that Twitter users have been saying about Trump’s “there’s many per capitas” statement. Trump, some of those Twitter users stressed, sounded like he didn’t understand what per capita means. Continue reading.