Erin Burnett Plays Brutal Supercut of Trump Predicting Pandemic Will Disappear After Campaign Official Claims ‘He Never Downplayed’ the Virus
CNN’s Erin Burnett opened her Friday evening show with a brutally thorough video fact-check of a Trump campaign official’s earlier appearance on the network in which she said President Donald Trump had never dismissed the coronavirus.
Burnett’s brutal supercut was a direct response to Mercedes Schlapp, who clashed with CNN’s Poppy Harlow hours earlier while defending Trump’s “bold and decisive action” in responding to the pandemic. Burnett was not having Schlapp’s claim that the president “never downplayed” the threat from the coronavirus.
“Nearly 140,000 Americans have died from the virus. At least eight states hitting a record number of deaths this week, and yet the president missing in action,” Burnett said teeing up the segment. “He has not held an event on the crisis in 10 days. The last task force meeting he attended was in April. And as for the task force itself, we were told there would be a briefing on Friday which never happened. Now Trump’s team is saying the president did not do something really, really important that he actually did do.”
After a clip of Schlapp forcefully denying Trump brushed off the virus, Burnett fired with both barrels. “Let’s roll the tape.”
March 10th: “It will go away, just stay calm, it will go away.” As he uttered the last line, the show splashed red text across his image reading “28 Deaths.”
The pattern then repeated numerous times.
April 9th: “There are certain sections in the country that are in phenomenal shape already. Other sections are coming online. Other sections are going down.” – “20,638 Deaths.”
April 29th: “It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone. It’s going to be eradicated.” — “61,690 Deaths.
May 15th: “It’ll go away at some point. It’ll go away. It may flare up. It may not flare up. We’ll have to see what happens.” — 88,669 Deaths
June 17th: “The numbers are very miniscule compared to what it was. It’s dying out.” — 118,363 Deaths.
July 2nd: “And the crisis is being handled, and we are, likewise, getting under control.” — 128,803 Deaths.
“Well, those are not ‘miniscule,’ ‘dying out,’ ‘under control,’ ‘leaving,’ ‘eradicated,’ ‘going away,’ or any of the other words he used,” Burnett pointed out, driving home the wealth of evidence contradicting Schlapp. “He downplayed this. The pandemic has gotten worse and worse. Trump knows it and his entire team knows it.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
