President Trump and Fox News host Chris Wallace went toe to toe Sunday in a wide-ranging, and at times combative interview that included the commander-in-chief defending his handling of the coronavirus and calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a “bit of an alarmist.”
Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and member of the White House coronavirus task force, became the focus of attacks last week by two administration officials — Trade Representative Peter Navarro and aide Dan Scavino — questioning the decisions he made during the coronavirus pandemic and whether he’s leaking information to the media.
“Well, I don’t know that he’s a leaker,” Trump told Wallace in an interview that aired on “Fox News Sunday.”
Fauci, who called the attacks “bizarre,” criticized states for reopening too soon and causing a surge in cases and said local leaders should press people to wear masks.
During the sit-down, Trump and Wallace went got into a heated debate about the US coronavirus death toll after Trump suggested the remaining cases were “burning embers.”
Wallace said coronavirus cases have surged from 36,000 a day in April to more than 75,000 new cases by the end of last Thursday amid a surge of infections in the southern states.
“Chris, that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world,” Trump responded. “If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down.”
But Wallace said that doesn’t indicate burning embers, it’s a “forest fire.”
“No, no. But I don’t say – I say flames, we’ll put out the flames. And we’ll put out in some cases just burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame like, but it’s – it’s going to be under control,” Trump responded.
He continued to say that it’s not only the US.
“They don’t talk about Mexico and Brazil and still parts of Europe, which actually got hit sooner than us, so it’s a little ahead of us in that sense,” the president said.
Wallace, citing figures from the John Hopkins University coronavirus database, pointed out that the US has the seventh highest mortality rate in the world, higher than Russia and the European Union but behind Brazil.
“But when you talk about mortality rates, I think it’s the opposite. I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world,” Trump said.
“That’s not true, sir. … We had 900 deaths on a single day,” Wallace countered.
According to Johns Hopkins, the US has more than 3.7 million coronavirus cases and the death toll has surpassed 140,000.
Wallace then asked about the rise in cases as some states reconsider their reopening plans, hospitals nearing capacity with patients infected with coronavirus and shortages of testing equipment and personal protective equipment.
“A lot of people say this is because we don’t have a national plan. You talk about states. We don’t have a national plan. Do you take responsibility for that?,” he asked.
“I take responsibility always for everything because it’s ultimately my job, too. I have to get everybody in line,” the president said. “Some governors have done well, some governors have done poorly. They’re supposed to have supplies they didn’t have. I supplied everybody.”
Trump was also asked about comments by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that COVID-19 could make this coming fall and winter the “most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health.”
The president noted that some doctors have made mistakes during the handling of the virus, which has now killed more than 142,000 Americans.
“I don’t know and I don’t think he knows,” Trump said. “I don’t think anybody knows with this. This is a very tricky deal. Everybody thought this summer it would go away and it would come back in the fall. Well, when the summer came, they used to say the heat – the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? And then it might come back in the fall. So they got that one wrong.”