Trump Complains to Rally Crowd That Coronavirus Has Made His Reelection So Tough: ‘Now We Have to Work’

President Donald Trump told a crowd in North Carolina that he wouldn’t have “bothered” campaigning in the state if not for an election that has been roiled by the coronavirus pandemic, but “now we have to work.”

Trump held a rally in Winston-Salem Tuesday night, on a day which saw the death toll from the coronavirus surpass 190,000 in the United States.

During a chunk of the speech in which he attacked Democratic rival former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump asked the crowd “How we doing with China? We’ve got the plague… sent by them. I wonder if they did it on purpose, what do you think?”

“I got to tell you, I was sailing to an easy election, this was going to be so easy,” Trump said, then pantomimed telling a secret and added “I probably would have not been here tonight, I would have said ‘No, I don’t have to bother.'”

“This was going to be, now we have to work. Against the guy that doesn’t know where he is,” Trump said.

Trump spoke before a crowd that was not socially distanced, and which demonstrated poor mask compliance.

Since early in the pandemic, Trump has faced criticism for frequently discussing and addressing the pandemic in terms of political cost, and polls have consistently shown overwhelming disapproval of his response to the disaster.

Watch the clip above via NBC News.