MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said that “a lot of people” are asking how many lives President Trump is responsible for during the coronavirus pandemic.
She lamented how Trump is “wasting” the time of Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, along with other members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who have to stand and listen to Trump for “two, three hours” during the near-daily briefings.
“This is crazy. In the middle of a pandemic, when 16,000 Americans have died,” the Morning Joe co-host said on Friday’s show. “You wonder, could that number be lower, had the president done his job? A lot of people are asking that question,” she added.
Brzezinski has been a vocal critic of the president, claiming he has lied constantly during the coronavirus crisis. She and her husband and co-host, Joe Scarborough, have recommended MSNBC and the other networks fact-check Trump live during the briefings.
“I still for the life of me don’t understand why the networks, including our own, allow Donald Trump to lie for two hours to the American people,” Scarborough said Wednesday. “So, if this network or CNN or Fox is going to run him lying for two hours a night, they need a real-time fact-checker.”
Brzezinski and Scarborough both helped boost Trump during his 2016 campaign, giving him an open platform to speak on MSNBC, before becoming constant critics of the president.
There have been around 1,612,646 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world, 361,377 recoveries, and 96,787 associated deaths, according to the latest reading by the Johns Hopkins University tracker. In the United States, there have been 466,299 cases, 26,522 recoveries, and 16,686 deaths.
