MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough repeated a debunked claim that President Trump called the coronavirus “a hoax” during a campaign rally earlier this year and suggested the president’s rhetoric regarding the pandemic puts people in danger.
“That’s a great concern. If the president of the United States is giving Americans false assurances,” Scarborough said on his program Tuesday morning. “If he’s lying about this virus, if he is still trying to bully this virus, if he is spreading the lies in May that he was spreading in January and February about it magically going away, or now not magically coming back, that’s dangerous to Americans’ health.”
Scarborough said that because Trump was providing a “mixed message” on the virus, it was making people in rural America “still call the coronavirus a hoax.”
Voters in middle America, who make up a large swath of Trump’s political base, are especially ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic, Scarborough said.
The Washington Post levied a fact-check against the assertion that Trump called the virus a hoax after presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, selectively edited the president’s remarks for use in a campaign ad.
“He never says that the virus itself is a hoax, and although the Biden camp included the word “their,” the edit does not make clear to whom or what Trump is referring,” the Washington Post reported.
Trump’s full remarks from that speech are as follows:
“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs, you say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ ‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’ They have no clue, they don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since he got in. It’s all turning, they lost. It’s all turning, think of it, think of it. And this is their new hoax.”
Scarborough argued that Trump’s changing attitude toward the virus, whether it be displayed in tweets or during briefings with the press, downplays the dangers of the pandemic that has taken more than 68,000 lives in the United States as of Tuesday.
“I have heard it from friends who say many of their associates still consider this to be a hoax,” he said. “That it’s overblown, that it’s just not the case. That’s deadly thinking. And that’s thinking that’s been promoted by the president.”
Trump has attacked Scarborough in recent days, calling the former congressman “psycho” and making fun of his show’s ratings. On Monday, Trump tweeted that Comcast Universal, which owns NBC News, should look into the accidental death of an intern working for Scarborough when he was a congressman from Florida.
