Eric Trump claimed Saturday that the coronavirus will “magically” vanish after the November election and allow the country to fully reopen – an assertion that has no basis in science and is contradicted by health experts worldwide.
In an interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, Trump suggested the president’s critics were using the pandemic to undermine his father’s rallies, calling it a “cognizant strategy” that would cease once it was no longer politically expedient.
In an interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, Eric Trump suggested the president’s critics were using the pandemic to undermine his father’s rallies. Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPX/ AP
“They think they are taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time,” the younger Trump said. “You watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and November 3. And guess what, after November 3, coronavirus will magically, all of a sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”
He also criticized former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and boasted about crowd sizes at President Trump’s political events.
The Biden campaign pushed back against Trump’s comments, calling them “unbelievably reckless.”
“We’re in the middle of the biggest public health emergency in a century, with almost 90,000 Americans dead, 1.5 million infected, and 36 million workers newly jobless,” said Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield in a statement. “So for Eric Trump to claim that the coronavirus is a political hoax that will ‘magically’ disappear is absolutely stunning and unbelievably reckless.”
She also accused the Trump administration of being “desperate to do whatever they can to throw up a smoke screen to try to conceal his historic mismanagement of this crisis.”
Leading health officials have repeatedly warned that the coronavirus will not go away by fall and that a surge in cases toward the end of the year could be even harder to manage than the current outbreak.
Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said late last month the global spread of the disease made it “inevitable” that the coronavirus would return or linger beyond fall. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Washington Post that a second wave of COVID-19 could be worse than the first because it would coincide with the flu season.
President Trump has acknowledged that the pandemic will remain a public health problem for months. Earlier this month, he said that although he is convinced covid-19 will disappear on its own, it “doesn’t mean it’s going to be gone, frankly, by fall or after the fall.”
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