Trump Bashes Fox News Weekend Coverage as ‘Total Waste of Time’ Minutes After Hard-Hitting Report on Equipment Shortages, Rising Deaths at VA Hospitals

By Reed RichardsonApr 11th, 2020, 7:15 pm
 

President Donald Trump fired another very public shot at Fox News on Saturday evening, slamming its weekend coverage as a “total waste of time” while offering praise to rival network OANN as a “great alternative.” But Trump’s dismissive insult of his otherwise favorite cable network coincidentally came just minutes after its hard-hitting report on how VA hospitals are suffering from testing and equipment shortages and how hundreds of veterans have died from the coronavirus outbreak.

At 5:53pm EDT, not long after posting self-congratulatory tweets from several random C-Span callers, Trump threw a decidedly sharp elbow at Fox while recommending the fledgling right-wing cable channel, One American News Network.

Trump has frequently slammed the network of late over perceived disloyalty, dismissing its polls showing him losing to Democrats, complaining to his longtime confidante Sean Hannity that the network has become too “politically correct” and attacking a Fox News reporter when she confronted him with tough questions. So, what could have set the president off?

Well, just two minutes before Trump’s tweet, at 5:51pm EST, Fox News was finishing up a long segment on how VA hospitals are currently beset with testing and staff shortages in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There are reported 4,000 cases of coronavirus in Veterans Affairs hospitals across the country, resulted so far of at least 200 deaths of our veterans, seven we’re told are VA staffers,” Fox anchor Eric Shawn explained, before revealing that Fox had obtained internal VA emails saying “health workers are short on protective gear in some of those hospitals.”

Shawn also interviewed David Shulkin, Trump’s first VA Secretary, who was fired in 2018 after a controversial travel expenses scandal. Shulkin echoed Fox News’ reporting, commending VA staffers for their hard work but noting that they aren’t getting the support they need from the federal government to properly care for veterans in the agency’s hospitals and nursing homes.

“This is an extraordinary battle that they are undertaking,” Shulkin said. “They are struggling with getting all the equipment that they need, the protective equipment, and you can’t expect the staff to take care of our veterans if you don’t have healthy staff and staff who feels safe in the environments they work in.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News. 

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