Trump: I deserve reelection even though 'we've lost a lot of people'

At a news conference on Monday, a reporter asked Trump whether he deserves reelection given that more people are expected to die from the novel coronavirus than Americans who died in the Vietnam War.

As of April 28, a total of 55,750 people have died from the coronavirus, according to the Washington Post. The Vietnam War led to 58,220 American deaths, according to the National Archives.

Here is what Trump said in response, from an April 27 White House news conference:

OLIVIA NUZZI, Washington correspondent for New York magazine: If an American President loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?

 

DONALD TRUMP: So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people.

But if you look at what original projections were — 2.2 million — we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It’s far too many. One person is too many for this.

 

And I think we’ve made a lot of really good decisions. The big decision was closing the border or doing the ban — people coming in from China — obviously, other than American citizens, which had to come in. Can’t say, ‘You can’t come in. You can’t come back to your country.’

 

I think we’ve made a lot of good decisions. I think that Mike Pence and the task force have done a fantastic job.

 

I think that everybody working on the ventilators — you see what we’ve done there — have done unbelievable. The press doesn’t talk about ventilators anymore. They just don’t want to talk about them, and that’s okay. But the reason they don’t want to talk — that was a subject that nobody would get off of. They don’t want to talk about them.

 

We’re in the same position on testing. We are lapping the world on testing. And the world is coming to us. As I said, they’re coming to us, saying, ‘What are you doing? How do you do it?’ And we’re helping them.

 

So, no, I think we’ve done a great job. And one person — I will say this: One person is too many.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.