Top 10 Stupidest Things President Trump has Said Regarding COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

Under control? Hardly. The virus has been identified in over 5,000,000 Americans and in all 50 states with the possibility of many more unidentified infections. The NBA, NHL, MLB, XFL, MLS and multiple other sporting leagues suspended play, and the NCAA cancelled the 2020 Division I men's and women's basketball tournaments. Schools are closed across the country. Of yeah, and over 175,000 people have died. Sure doesn't feel like everything is under control.

As for the stock market analysis and prediction, let's see how that has turned out. The very next day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped over a thousand points. A month later, the Dow was down over 10,000 points and The Fed slashed interest rates to 0% along with effectively relaunched the 2008-era bond buying program quantitative easing. Trillions of dollars in value has disappeared almost overnight. All of the gains the market had made during Trump's presidency were gone.

It's little wonder the stock market has done so poorly the day after Trump's televised coronavirus addresses. The things he says have no basis in reality and his track record of lying makes it so every time he tries to paint a rosy picture of the state of affairs, people naturally and correctly assume the opposite is true.

...containing viruses is so easy. Nobody is better at containing viruses than me. They say we're doing better than anyone ever has at dealing with coronavirus. Nobody believed we could do viruses as good as we have. Everyone is amazed.

Yeah, he didn't actually say any of that stuff, but it's scary how believable it sounds.

Did he hear this from the same "they say" sources Trump likes to attribute all the amazing things people say about him to?

The day after Trump said this, Italy reported they had 5,883 confirmed cases and 233 deaths. Two days later, another 230 people had died. Three days later over 550 more people had died and the number of confirmed cases had increased to over 15,000.

If 15 to 0 is the indication of a pretty good job, is 15 to over 1,000,000 in a couple months an indication of how terribly of a job whatever "we" Trump is talking about is doing? Because if it is, Trump and the rest of the "we" he is so proud of are not doing a good job at all.

Bear in mind, this claim of "really getting it" is coming from a man who asked doctors if the flu vaccine would work on COVID-19 ("no" was the prompt reply), continues to conflate preventative measures like vaccines with post infection treatments, and has endorsed the repeatedly debunked anti-vaxxer claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.

This is also a man who has claimed the human body is like a battery with a finite amount of energy. This energy gets depleted by exercise which causes a person to die earlier than they would if they didn't stay fit. That's right. A man who honestly thinks he has an unnatural aptitude for understanding human biology has claimed exercise is bad for you.

This doesn't sound like a natural ability. This sounds like an uneducated buffoon who would go on to suggest using UV light and disinfectants on people's "inside".

This is Trump explaining in a televised address to the nation how the travel ban affecting Europe will work. Is there any wonder that even after clarifying the inaccuracies in this statement, the Dow dropped 10% the next day which was the worst day it had experienced in over 30 years?

At a time when people are desperate for clarity and answers, and are looking for reasons to believe things will be alright, this buffoon goes on television and demonstrates that he has no idea what he's doing. Minutes after the broadcast, Trump issued a clarifying Tweet stating that cargo will still be allowed in and the ban only applies to people. Later administration communications further clarified that not all of Europe would be affected and American citizens would be allowed to return to the country. Ironically, he had picked this time to make things sound worse than they were after so many episodes of being so brazenly and baselessly optimistic.

Given the stock market dive; however, it appears the subsequent refining of Trump's gaffe was not enough to quell a panic. The President showed he is not competent to lead during this time of crisis and offered as a measure to contain the virus to close the barn door long after the horses had already escaped.

Wishful thinking from a hotelier who has refused to stop promoting and benefiting from the family business while he's been in office? That seems like as good an explanation of any as to why he would say this less than a week before floating the idea of offering bailouts to airlines and hotels to help them deal with the crisis.

So very untrue. Tests are and were in short supply. Medical professionals have cited lack of access to testing as a reason for being unable to reign in this epidemic. Literally the day before Trump said this, Mike Pence said "We don't have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward."

However, if this is Trump's version of "perfect", then that is illuminating. It helps explain why he felt compelled to lie multiple times about a "perfect" letter and why he was ultimately impeached in part as a consequence of his "perfect" phone call.

"Nobody". Because Trump is the smartest, most well read, most educated person in the whole world so if something is new to him, then it is something so amazing that nobody else could possibly have known about it already.

This is the type of egregious lie you only get from someone who a) has no reservations about lying to anyone and everyone and b) absolutely refuses to ever admit he is wrong. It's embarrassing as a country to have elected a "leader" who is the equivalent of a 3 year old with chocolate all over their face and fingers saying they didn't eat any of a forbidden cake.

Fortunately for Trump, this is so obviously a lie that nobody will ever hold him accountable for it. Fortunate because if anybody truly believed he thought this and then went on to downplay the risks to the citizens of this country as he did, both through rhetoric and inaction, the masses would be justified in demanding his head for intentionally putting millions of American's lives at risk.

Yes, it snuck up on us. Who could have possible anticipated the possibility of a pandemic like this except maybe the Obama administration, the scientific community, the WHO, and the various U.S. intelligence agencies who have been warning about the possibility of a global pandemic for years.

Who could have thought this specific coronavirus could have caused so much damage except maybe the experts and politicians who have been sounding alarms since is was first reported to be spreading in China only to be dismissed as "fake news", never-Trumpers, and Deep State actors.

Maybe the only one who could have seen it coming was Trump who just one day earlier claimed he had always known coronavirus was a pandemic, but apparently he forgot.

In a desperate attempt to provide hope, Trump spent frequently touted the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug that would help us win the fight against COVID-19. Despite insufficient research and in the face of the more grounded messaging from experts, Trump the snake oil salesman was promoting the elixir that would save the population, the economy, and more importantly, his hopes for re-election. The administration fast tracked the drug to be used in hospitals to treat COVID-19 and demand surged across the country. Millions were spent procuring Trump's miracle cure.

Flash forward three weeks later. More comprehensive testing has shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in treating COVID-19 and may increase the risk of death in patients as a result of known serious side effects of the drug.

Trump's evidence for backing the drug cocktail was based largely on his instinct over any real evidence. When contradicted over the science, he hedged his bets by asking "what do you have to lose?". As it turns out, the thing people may have lost is their lives.

"Under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)." - Reckitt Benckiser, the manufacturer of Lysol (April 24, 2020)

Despite later claims, Trump was not being sarcastic (and even if he was, making jokes in a nationally televised press briefing as thousands of people are dying is no better). Yes, the President of the United States, after being briefed on how sunlight and disinfecting products like Lysol neutralize the virus on external surfaces, went on national television and suggested injecting poisonous substances into people. Mr. Doctors are Surprised by How Well I Get This Stuff endorsed the concept of drinking bleach to treat a virus.

After the briefing, poison control office throughout the country reported an increase of calls related to ingesting disinfectants. When told by a reporter the Monday following his bone-headed display of being a moron trying to fake your way through a class presentation you didn't study for that the state of Maryland's emergency hotline had received hundreds of call seeking guidance about his comments, Trump replied "I can't imagine why. I can't imagine that". When asked if he took any responsibility for the increase, he replied "No, I don't".

1. The novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was first identified on January 8, 2020.
2. The "last administration" (the Obama administration) had been out of office for almost three years.
3. It is not possible to create a test for a virus like this before the virus exists.

Things are going very badly for Trump. He is facing a very serious challenge and is performing miserably. But instead of owning up to any failures and seeing opportunity to make improvements, Mr. "I take no responsibility" is blaming everyone but himself. While claiming his response has been perfect in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, Trump has blamed China, the World Health Organization, the media, Democratic governors, government watchdogs, and his favorite target Obama who failed to create a time machine, travel to the future, create coronavirus tests and return to 2017 to give them to Trump who would almost certainly destroy them in his ongoing mission to undo everything with the name Obama attached to it.

So many things to address here.

First, "great marks"? Like grades? The only way this response is getting a passing grade is if it's one of those projects where the teacher asks you to grade yourself and you have absolutely no compunction about abusing the honor system.

Second, it's probably time to stop patting yourself on the back for a China ban that wasn't really a ban and didn't work. Over 40,000 people flew from China to the U.S. in the two months after the "ban" was put in place and screening was inadequate. The argument could be made that the ban helped slow the spread and gave the country more time to prepare for the virus. That gets undercut; however, by the fact that instead of using that time to prepare the country by stockpiling supplies and implementing a robust testing system, the President spent the five weeks after implementing the ban downplaying the epidemic (see numerous "hoax" and containment claims), holding campaign rallies (New Hampshire, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, South Carolina, North Carolina), and golfing (4-5 outings at Trump International in West Palm Beach).

Lastly, now is probably not the best time to be comparing your administration's successes with handling the Coronavirus with the responses of previous administrations. Sure, in hindsight, there are things the previous administrations wish they would have done differently. The 2009 Swine Flu killed an estimated 12,000 people in the U.S. (as per the CDC) from April 2009 to April 2010. But when you compare that to the 2020 pandemic where 12,000 Americans were dying per week and the U.S. has far more reported cases of COVID-19 and far more reported deaths from COVID-19 than any country on the planet, it amounts to an epic self burn.

At the time the statement was made, the United States was averaging 20,000 new confirmed cases per day. 115,000 people had already died.

As for those embers, ashes, and flames that would be stomped out... The number of daily confirmed cases tripled to over 60,000 in a month. Two months later, another 50,000 people had died from COVID-19.

Testing is crucial to the suppression of a pandemic. Testing gives communities to tools to slow the spread of a disease and to better treat those who become infected. Testing saves lives.

Trump doesn't care about saving lives. Trump cares about Trump. Since testing further illuminates the administration's catastrophic failure in controlling the outbreak in the United States, he is against it.

125,000 deaths, millions have lost their jobs, Q2 GDP saw the biggest drop on record (including the Great Depression), and some people are still putting their faith in a leader who doesn't even know what the 19 in COVID-19 stands for?

Once again, it's not about helping Americans, it's about helping himself. People would still be getting sick and dying if there was no testing. In fact, they would be doing so at a greater rate than they are already. But in Trumpworld, it would be somehow be better if American corpses were filling refrigerator trucks and mass graves as a result of some mysterious and unidentified cause. Then maybe the administration could better hide the numbers and fudge the statistics.

Either that or he is genuinely stupid enough to believe that testing causes people to get sick and that you do not have a condition until it is diagnosed.

A great leader takes responsibility for his failures. Trump takes no responsibility for anything negative and demands full credit for anything positive, even when he had nothing to do with it.

Again, Trump is placing the blame for thousands of American deaths on someone else without giving a second thought to the failures of the orange face staring back at him in the mirror.

Every leader in the world whose country has been affected by the virus can identify something they could have done better. China's government shoulders plenty of blame here, but at the end of the day, their secrecy, obfuscation of the facts, and their inability to prevent the spread of the virus is not the sole cause for the damage it has wrecked upon the world. China was unfortunate to have the virus first appear within its borders, but the response of the Trump administration (secrecy, obfuscation, inability to control the spread) does not give anyone reason to believe the results would be any different if the virus has originated in the United States.

Americans, take comfort. After only six months and 150,000 American death, Trump not only is taking the virus seriously and not calling it a basic flu, but he is developing a plan to deal with it.

Certainly it will be a beautiful plan. The most beautiful plan anyone has ever seen. Many people are already saying it is a beautiful plan. When will it be ready? Well, in two weeks of course.

Critics have frequently pointed out that the unnamed "they" Trump loves to cite is Trump himself, or at the very least the voices in his head. "They" are typically enamored with Trump and have nothing but the highest praises for everything he does. In spite of all the available evidence to the contrary, it is this "they" that has lauded the Trump response to the virus as being the best in the world.

Now we have some more reason to equate the "they" and Trump since it was Trump himself who assured us multiple times that the heat will kill the virus. Americans should worry because it will "go away in April".

Of secondary interest is the idea that the "I take no responsibility" President who rarely if ever admits to making a mistake ("We've made every decision correctly") is in a roundabout way implying he may have, just maybe, been wrong.

Wow! How big of a surge did New Zealand have that the President of a country that is seeing 40,000 new cases per day felt it warranted commenting on?

Turns out, it was 13. Not thirteen thousand. Not even thirteen hundred. Just 13. A baker's dozen.

"The places they were using to hold up now they're having a big surge… they were holding up names of countries and now they're saying 'whoops!'"

If 13 new cases in a whoops, what is the word for 40,000? New Zealand has 22 reported COVID-19 deaths. There isn't a single state in the United States with fewer deaths than that and for many states, 22 or more deaths is a daily occurrence.

Is this really the comparison you want to invite. That 13 cases is a "whoops" while 1,000 deaths per day "is what it is", is the product of "doing everything we can", and is "under control as much as you can control it"?

All the negative things Michelle Obama had to say about the Trump Administration's response to the coronavirus and Trump chooses to attack her on when she said them. And not because she was using old numbers that made him look bad because things had gotten better, but because she used a number that has since become outdated as another 20,000 people died.

And even then, it's not like the address was pretaped that far in advance. Obama stated in her speech that there had been over 150,000 deaths, which remains true. The only time that would not have been true is if she had made the statement prior to July 25, 2020. So Trump proudly and publicly roasted himself with one of the most epic self burns in an attempt to shame the former First Lady for recording a speech somewhere between the time of the convention and three and a half weeks prior.