Trump says COVID deaths aren't so bad 'if you take the blue states out'

Donald Trump said on Wednesday that “if you take the blue states out” of the death toll for the COVID-19 pandemic the U.S., response to the outbreak would be “at a level I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.”

Nearly 200,000 Americans have died since the outbreak began.

Many of those deaths have occurred in “blue” states like New York and California, but thousands have also died in Republican-led states like Texas (14,343 dead), Florida (12,787 dead), and Georgia (6,398 dead) among others.

On Trump’s watch, the United States leads the entire world in reported COVID-19 deaths.

From a Sept. 16 White House press conference:

DONALD TRUMP: If you look at what we’ve done, and all of the lives that we’ve saved — and I’m going to ask that a graph be put up and now it’s up. This was right at the beginning — this was our prediction that if we do a really good job, we’ll be at about 100,00 to 240,000 deaths, and we’re below that substantially, and we’ll see what comes out.

 

But that would be if we did the good job. The not so good job was [inaudible] between 1.5 million — I remember these numbers so well — and 2.2 million. That’s quite a difference.

 

So we’re down in this territory. And that’s despite the fact that the blue states had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.