Trump: No reason to panic about coronavirus outbreak
President Trump asks politicians and media to not incite panic regarding coronavirus presence in U.S.
Filmmaker Michael Moore suggested that President Trump was worse than the coronavirus because while science could cure the illness, Trump created a "false ignorance" by spreading misinformation.
"If you have the president telling people it's a hoax -- that there's nothing to worry about, that it will disappear as he said yesterday, and it'll be a miracle ... which is more dangerous? The virus or a president who says that," Moore told MSNBC anchor Brian Williams on Friday.
"Because at least if we were honest and knew everything about the virus, and the facts were all out there, science could start to deal with it," Moore added.
"Whatever innoculation, whatever we need to come up with, whatever we need to invent, we can start that process. But the fact that we have only a few hundred test kits in this place or that place -- that there's no effort at all ongoing right now to deal with the shot or whatever we need to get if we need to get it."
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"To pretend that it doesn't exist and to tell people out in Tuscaloosa or Detroit that there's nothing to worry about -- and if he's wrong and if the World Health Organization is saying it's now at the highest risk level, what do you call that man who tells his people that there's nothing to worry about and not only that -- but that it's made up by the Democrats and the media," he said.
Moore argued that Trump's statement was "the most dangerous thing I've ever heard a president say in my lifetime." He went on to ask what kind of "apparatus do we have to arrest -- not arrest as in handcuffs -- but to arrest the enforced ignorance that he is propagating here."
Williams similarly claimed that Trump called the virus a "hoax" -- something the Trump campaign said was "massively dishonest."
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"Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus," Trump told a crowd on Thursday night. "Coronavirus, they're politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You see, 'How's president Trump doing?' They go, 'oh not good, not good.' They have no clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa -- not they can't, they can't count their votes."
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He added that one of his associates suggested the Democrats were perpetrating a hoax like they purportedly did during the Russia investigation.
"One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia, that didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax' -- that was on a perfect conversation -- 'They tried anything, they tried it over and over and they've been doing it since you got in,'" Trump said. "It's all turning, they lost, it's all turning -- think of it, think of it, and this is their new hoax.'"
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