Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump, along with most of the hosts over at Fox News, worked to downplay the threat posed by the virus, framing it as basically just the flu and accusing Democrats of blowing it out of proportion for political gain. They’ve (mostly) switched up their messaging and left that one behind, but apparently Trump’s middle son Eric didn’t get the memo.
In an interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, Eric said that Democrats “think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool”–his ability to pack huge arenas for his rallies.
“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,” Trump said.
He also accused the media of acting as a “propaganda arm” for the Democratic Party. He claims that the response to the coronavirus is just another attempt to “hurt Trump.”
This is similar to comments Donald Trump has made. In February, he accused Democrats of “politicizing” the virus, calling their reaction to it “their new hoax.”
“They tried to do it with the Russia thing, they tried to do it with the Ukraine scandal, they tried to do it with impeachment. Now they’re trying to do it with coronavirus,” Eric Trump told Pirro.
If #COVID is such a “hoax”, invented to keep @realDonaldTrump from holding rallies…why wouldn’t @FoxNews have @JudgeJeanine & Eric Trump do this interview from their homes? Why not do a face-to-face interview in the studio? https://t.co/YQPBsmUUKI
— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) May 17, 2020
How does Eric Trump reconcile his belief that the coronavirus is a “cognizant strategy” on the part of Democrats and specifically Joe Biden (who Trump claims is “loving this”) with the fact that 90,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S.? He doesn’t, of course. His job is (and has always been) just to go on TV and spew the most inflammatory accusations imaginable and because it’s Fox, his completely callous and baseless claims aren’t going to get any pushback at all.
In a statement, Biden’s communications director Kate Bedingfield said, “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. So for Eric Trump to claim that the coronavirus is a political hoax that will ‘magically’ disappear is absolutely stunning and unbelievably reckless.”
(via Washington Post, image: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
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