Complete/Amazing: The Trump HBO/Axios Interview/Fight (must watch/warning/unbelievable)

By
Gordon Duff
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8
5691

Axios: President Trump said in an interview with “Axios on HBO” that he thinks the coronavirus is as well-controlled in the U.S. as it can be, despite dramatic surges in new infections over the course of the summer and more than 150,000 American deaths.

  • “They are dying, that’s true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague,” he told Axios’ Jonathan Swan.

Reality check: The U.S. is averaging roughly 65,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths per day. The virus has already killed nearly 150,000 Americans, and it spread largely unchecked through almost the entire country throughout June and July.



The big picture: In the interview, which took place last Tuesday, Trump returned to familiar themes and areas where the U.S. really has made significant progress. He cited the dramatic increase in ventilator production, the ramp-up in testing and treatment that has reduced the overall fatality rate from the virus.

  • Yes, but: He painted a far rosier picture of the pandemic than most data would support.

On testing, Trump said, “You know there are those that say you can test too much” — a view that no experts have advocated.

  • The U.S. is experiencing long turnaround times for coronavirus testing, as Trump acknowledged, because of the high demand for testing. But that is largely a function of the country’s high caseload and the number of people at risk of infection.

He also returned to his mantra that “because we’ve done more tests, we have more cases.”

  • The cases the U.S. has, we would have had with or without testing. We know we have them because of testing, but the massive outbreak here would be a massive outbreak whether we chose to know about it (through testing) or ignore it by not testing.

Trump also seemed to suggest that he did not trust South Korea’s coronavirus data, when pressed on that country’s more successful coronavirus response.

  • There have been no serious allegations, from experts, international authorities or the U.S., that South Korea’s numbers are inaccurate.

Daily Beast: It’s sometimes hard to determine whether President Trump is being willfully misleading or if he truly believes what he’s saying. But an astonishing interview clip from Axios appears to show that Trump has genuinely managed to convince himself that his response to the coronavirus pandemic has been effective—because he only considers partial and deceptively flattering statistics to be true.

Brandishing childishly simplistic, brightly colored COVID-19 graphs presumably provided to him by aides trying to keep him happy, Trump proudly tells Axios’ Jonathan Swan that the U.S. is “lower than the world,” without elaborating.

When Swan looks at the chart, it becomes clear Trump is only considering death as a proportion of coronavirus cases—not as a proportion of population, which shows the U.S. is faring very badly. Trump snaps back: “You can’t do that.” Holding out his charts, he goes on: “You have to go by where… look, here is the United States… You have to go by the cases.” Asked why South Korea has lower deaths by population, Trump hints that he believes the country is faking its stats, without providing any evidence to support himself.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. Your questions are based on you accepting childish bullshit as fact. You are trolling the zio-sewers for what you consider information. All…every statement you make..is childish and wrong. Grow up and find some other place to hang out.

  2. If the debate even happens, that is. Biden is sure to put preconditions on it, like to have a “truth” panel moderating it. Trump won’t be able to just bluster and lie his ass off like he does on Twitter.

  4. Trump is desperate. He’s grasping at straws, hoping that somehow he can retain the presidency and stay out of prison. He has tried to hide the evidence against him for decades. Now, it’s all coming out how he has been a con man, a tax evader, and an obdurate liar. He’s not even a good liar anymore, just a desperate one.

    Everything he says about COVID-19 is a lie, as well. We all know that the virus is a bioweapon that was initially directed at China, and now at the USA. That he knew about this back in November when he and his inner circle were vaccinated for it makes him a traitor as well as a con man and obdurate liar. But, like I said, he is desperate. That makes him the most dangerous man on the planet, by far.

    • (I didn’t write this.g)That study is almost certainly wrong, did you read the article? They found one sample and the research has not been peer reviewed yet.

      “Dr Joan Ramon Villalbi of the Spanish Society for Public Health and Sanitary Administration told Reuters it was still early to draw definitive conclusions.

      “When it’s just one result, you always want more data, more studies, more samples to confirm it and rule out a laboratory error or a methodological problem,” he said.

      There was the potential for a false positive due to the virus’ similarities with other respiratory infections.

      Prof Gertjan Medema of the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands, whose team began using a coronavirus test on waste water in February, suggested the Barcelona group needs to repeat the tests to confirm it is really the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

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