President Trump scolded a reporter for asking a question in what he said was a “very nasty tone.”
Trump answered questions about the coronavirus pandemic at the daily coronavirus task force press briefing on Friday. The president reproached one reporter who questioned what the purpose of the national stockpile is if not to supply states with medical equipment when asked. The reporter brought up White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s Thursday comments in which he called the federal stockpile “our” stockpile.
“The federal government needs it, too, not just the states,” Trump said. “Out of that, we often choose, as an example, we have almost 10,000 ventilators, and we are ready to rock with those ventilators. We are going to bring them to various areas of the country that need them.”
“When he says ‘our,’ he is talking about ‘our country,'” Trump continued. “It’s such a basic, simple question, and you try and make it sound so bad. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. … Don’t make it sound bad.”
In Thursday’s press conference, Kushner emphasized that the White House was rationing out supplies from the federal stockpiles to states based on requests backed up by data. Kushner said the administration was attempting to send supplies where they are needed most by measuring a state’s trajectory of cases and its expected need for supplies.
