Chris Wallace Presses Steve Cortes on Trump Covid Response: ‘The President Plays the Panic Card All the Time’
Fox News’ Chris Wallace questioned Trump campaign senior advisor Steve Cortes Sunday over President Donald Trump’s comments to Bob Woodward about the coronavirus pandemic.
Wallace started with some new Fox News polling, taking particular note of how the president “trails [Joe] Biden by a substantial margin” on who people trust more to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
Cortes said the idea that the president mishandled the virus is just a “myth” that’s been pushed by the “corporate media.”
As for the president’s comments to Bob Woodward, Cortes said the totality of Trump’s actions reveals “an exemplary record of crisis management.” He argued that Trump made tough decisions during the fog of war when there was contradictory information coming in, and that his overall management of the virus has been “superb.”
Wallace went back to Woodward’s book and noted how Trump was privately acknowledging to Woodward in early February that the coronavirus is more deadly than the fly while going out at press conference in the following weeks and publicly downplaying the coronavirus by comparing it to the flu.
“Why not level with the American people, Steve?” Wallace asked.
Cortes again went back to the idea that “this was the fog of war,” but Wallace jumped in:
“It wasn’t the fog of war. On January 28th, the president got his presidential daily brief, the top intelligence in the Oval Office. And at that point, his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said, ‘This is the biggest challenge you are going to face in your entire presidency.’ And the deputy national security advisor, Matthew Pottinger, immediately compared it to the Spanish flu, the deadly Spanish flu of 100 years ago. So there was no fog of war there. The word he was getting from his top intelligence and national security people was that this was a deadly pandemic. There was no fog here.”
Cortes insisted there was by pointing to comments made by Dr. Anthony Fauci early on and saying “opinions and views and analyses were shifting dramatically among the scientists, among the politicians this entire time, as we were trying to learn about the virus.”
Wallace noted how the president’s explanation isn’t that it was the fog of war, but that he just didn’t want to panic people. “And one of the reasons that there’s a question about that,” he said, “is because of the fact that the president plays the panic card all the time, especially when he’s talking about Joe Biden.”
He showed footage of Trump saying, “If Biden wins, the mob wins. If Biden wins, the rioters, anarchists, arsonists, and flag burners win,” followed by a Trump campaign ad showing footage of the riots.
“Is that a president who is trying to keep the country calm?”
Cortes said Trump is talking about a “legitimate fear” of what can happen in the country if Biden wins, whereas “what is not helpful would be to tell the American people that this virus is out of control.”
You can watch above, via Fox News Sunday.
