Actor and director Rob Reiner says he’s convinced President Trump is making a deliberate attempt to put children in harm’s way during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Donald Trump is actively trying to kill our children,” Reiner tweeted Thursday.
Donald Trump is actively trying to kill our children.
— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) July 16, 2020
As local governments across the country grapple with how to reopen schools safely this fall amid the health crisis, Trump has pressed school leaders to push for in-person instruction on a full-time basis.
“We do want to get our schools open,” the president said this week during an event in Georgia. “There’s virtually no impact on children. They’re just stronger than we are, their immune system or whatever it may be, but we want the schools open.”
Trump has also publicly broken with the nine-page Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for reopening schools.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said last week there is “no excuse for schools not to reopen” this fall.
“The data doesn’t suggest anything different. The medical experts aren’t suggesting anything different … this is more an issue of adults who are more interested in their own issues than they are about serving their students,” she said. “It’s very clear that kids have got to go back to school.”
Reiner, who is frequently critical of Trump and other Republicans on social media, in March said Trump was triggering the death of people with an insufficient coronavirus response.
“There’s no other way to put this: Donald Trump is causing people in NY to DIE,” Reiner tweeted on March 24, just weeks into the pandemic.
Nearly 140,000 people in the United States have died of the coronavirus since February. Trump has repeatedly said the nation has dealt with the pandemic better than any other country in the world.
“We want the lockdown to end for the states,” he said in June. “We may have some embers or some ashes or flames [of coronavirus] coming, but we will put them out, we will stomp them out.”
