WATCH: Trump Boasts of America’s Coronavirus Death Rate ‘If You Take the Blue States Out’

Reed RichardsonSep 16th, 2020, 6:02 pm
 

President Donald Trump praised his own administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic yet again at his daily White House press briefing, but this time he used some cold partisan calculations to claim that the nation’s death toll numbers would look even better “if you took the blue states out.”

At his Monday briefing, the president pointed to slow decline of positivity case rates and hospitalizations before, again, touting the overall federal response to the outbreak, which has taken nearly 200,000 American lives so far.

“If you look at what we have done and all of the lives we saves,” Trump said, before showing an initial fatality projection of more than two million deaths if no mitigation measures would be taken. “We are below that. That was if we did a good job. If not so good, 1.5 million and two million. That’s quite a difference: two million. That’s quite a difference.”

But Trump then began to segregate out states by their 2016 presidential vote or governor’s party affiliation, not-so-subtly criticizing so-called Democratic states and suggesting the higher number of death rates here were the main cause of the country’s elevated fatality levels and were the only thing keeping the

“The blue states had tremendous death rates,” Trump, the President of the United States, said “If you take the blue states deaths out, we are at a level I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.”

In fact, as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler pointed out, of the top 15 U.S. states by total Covid deaths, 8 are run by Democrats, 7 by Republicans.

Similarly, if you examine deaths per capita, the top 20 states are split evenly with 10 “blue” and 10 “red.”

After seeming to parse the deaths of Americans by their state’s political lean, Trump went on to castigate “blue states” like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, exhorting them to “open up” and “let your people have freedom.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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