A House Democrat threatened Donald Trump Jr. over his claim that Democrats hope the coronavirus outbreak will be bad enough to damage President Trump politically.
Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat, discussed the government’s response to the virus and how it plans to contain it during an interview with MSNBC on Friday morning.
The anchor, Hallie Jackson, asked him for his thoughts on Trump’s eldest son saying the Democratic Party hopes coronavirus “comes here to kill millions of people so it can end the president’s streak of winning.”
“He should not be near me when he says that,” the congressman responded. “There would be a serious altercation.”
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“That is totally outrageous. I can assure you that there is not a Democrat or Republican in Congress that wants anybody to be sick,” he added. “What we are concerned about is the administration’s response to this illness. We’ve known since December that there was an epidemic in China … Don Jr. had better not get any place close to me. It would not be a healthy situation.”
The congressman’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Secret Service also did not immediately reply for comment.
Garamendi was referring to an interview Trump Jr. did on Fox & Friends earlier that morning.
“The playbook is old at this point, but for them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness,” he said.
“There’s no question that the threat of coronavirus can destabilize the market, but the fact that the Democrats are seemingly hoping for this to happen, just like you’ve seen them over the last year pray for a disaster to happen in the economy, meaning people lose their Jobs, their mortgages, their livelihoods, so that they can own Trump somehow, is absolutely insane,” Trump Jr. added.
The global outbreak has infected tens of thousands and led to the deaths of more than 2,000 people around the world. There have been roughly 60 confirmed cases in the United States and no deaths.
