Trump Tries to be Helpful, But Fails Because He Made Up Too Much Stuff
On This Day In 2020
In a public health crisis, what you need is a leader who understands the science. OTDI 2020, Donald Trump showed again why he was not that leader.
As Covid was raging, he sat down for an interview with Axios’s Jonathan Swan to explain to America what he was doing to help end the deadly pandemic.
Trump offered a few scientific...gems. Some of the weirder ones:
“Because we do more tests, we have more cases”
“They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is.”
“Death is way down from where it was…. It spiked, but now it's going down again.” [Note: That was simply a lie. Numbers were very clearly going up at that time.]
“You can test too much. Read the manuals… read the books.”
CNN praised Swan for his ability "to meaningfully question the President and not let misinformation and nonsensical statements slide into the interview unchecked. The results were astonishing to watch."
The Axios/HBO Interview
But he didn’t just lie about COVID: There were ~ 20 misstatements flagged by PolitiFact in that one chat alone. Here’s a paragraph comprised of a handful of them.
We’re largely out of Afghanistan. There were 12,000 people at my rally, not 6,000. They’re going to send tens of millions of [illegal] ballots to California. Millions of ballots going, nobody even knows where they’re going. You touch our courthouse, you go to jail for 10 years. African Americans are making more money than they ever made. I did more for the Black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.
And that’s just about half of his lies from that one interview. So here's the problem: Even if he did say some useful things, it's pretty hard to believe the guy about anything if so much of his message is just his own fairyland thinking.
As Vox summarized it, the interview: "began with him telling a dizzying string of lies about his coronavirus response and the state of the pandemic in the country. It ended with Trump making the death of civil rights leader John Lewis about himself. It didn’t go any better in between. ...The Swan interview, which came out just two weeks after Trump’s similarly disastrous performance on Chris Wallace’s show, highlighted the degree to which Trump is unable to defend his record in the face of even mildly challenging questions.
Get Weirder; Dive Deeper
Here's the fact-checking on Trump’s lies from PolitiFact
CNN's review of Swan's skillful interviewing style
The Vox analysis
Video via Roll Call/Vimeo