Jim Acosta Reveals White House Official’s Jaw-Dropping Explanation for Maskless ‘Potential Super-Spreader’ Trump Crowd

CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta called the maskless crowd at President Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention potential “super-spreaders”  of the coronavirus, and said a senior White House official’s explanation for the lack of social distancing “might blow you away.”

After Trump’s Thursday night RNC speech, Acosta delivered a report from the South Lawn of the White House, where hundreds of maskless revelers had been seated for the festivities. Anchor Wolf Blitzer tossed ti Acosta by noting “You had about 2,000 people sitting very close, and most of them were not wearing masks.”

“Yeah, Wolf, we not only heard a lot of gaslighting tonight, we possibly saw and witnessed some super-spreading from this event,” Acosta said. “And I talked to a senior White House official earlier this evening about all of these people, hundreds of people sitting side by side in the audience, not wearing masks, and the senior White House official brushed off these concerns about the lack of social distancing at the president’s speech.”

Acosta prefaced the quote by saying “And get this, this quote might blow you away,” then revealed the official told him “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.”

“Those are the words coming from a senior White House official about the concerns being raised about this being a possible super-spreader event tonight,” Acosta said.

He went on to say, of the speech, that Trump “repeatedly whitewashed his record on the virus, saying he was focusing on the science and the data, making this false statement, again, at an event where people are sitting shoulder to shoulder without wearing masks.”

He predicted that “The way that this plays tomorrow morning, this speech tomorrow morning, and what we saw here tonight, may not be as important as what we see in a couple of weeks from now.”

“Recall what happened after the president’s rally in Tulsa Oklahoma where you had staffers, you had secret service agents, you had people in that audience coming down with coronavirus,” Acosta said, and recalled what a member of the coronavirus task force once told him “about the president’s grasp of this pandemic: He simply doesn’t get it.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.