Chris Wallace’s Brutal Top Takeaway From Trump Interview: ‘Doesn’t Seem to Have a Handle On’ Coronavirus Pandemic

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace offered a brutal postmortem on his interview with President Donald Trump, telling Fox News colleague Bret Baier that his main takeaway from the hour is that Trump doesn’t “have a handle on” the coronavirus pandemic — on the policy and the politics.

During a follow-up interview on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Baier led off by asking Wallace “What is your biggest takeaway from the time you sat with the president?”

Wallace didn’t hesitate, telling Baier that “on the biggest issue that’s out there, the coronavirus, that he doesn’t at this point seem to have a handle on the best way to handle it both in terms of policy and in terms of politics.”

“He’s sitting there saying ‘Well, the only reason we have more cases is because we have more testing, all the indications are that yes, testing has increased, but that the spread of cases, the positivity rate, has increased much more,” Wallace elaborated. “And he seems to be at loggerheads with some of his own top public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, like Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC, I’m not sure that’s a winning strategy in terms of dealing with the coronavirus.”

He added that the most recent Fox News poll “shows that the public, I think by 17 points, trusts Biden more than the president in dealing with the coronavirus,” and concluded by saying “It seems to me he’s got to find a way to answer and to deal with that, and to reassure people he’s taking the virus seriously and has a plan for it.”

Wallace also suggested Trump “press further than he has in the past on the idea that it’s good to wear a mask, and that it’s probably a way to at least get some kind of handle on this virus, that might be useful, maybe we wouldn’t see this enormous spike in cases, over 70,000 cases a day now.”

A few hours later, Trump did just that, sending his first tweet publicly touting the wearing of masks.

Elsewhere in the interview, Mr. Wallace praised Trump for being willing to face the extensive grilling and for being a “gentleman” following their tete-a-tete, while challenging former Vice President Joe Biden to take questions more frequently.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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