Trump Lauds OAN Reporter For Asking About Report on His Playing Down Threat of Coronavirus

“I very much appreciate the question. It actually might have been more of a statement than a question,” President Donald Trump said in response to a comment from an OAN reporter he called on during Saturday’s White House briefing from the coronavirus task force.

It was the second time this week the president called on a personality from OAN, the small pro-Trump outlet with a penchant for conspiracy theories. On Thursday, OAN’s Chanel Rion asked Trump a comically bizarre question about Chinese food that went viral.

OAN’s Jenn Pellegrino took Rion’s place at Saturday’s presser. She asked for Trump’s response to a Washington Post report that “U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen.”

From the Washington Post:

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month, as officials scrambled to keep citizens in their homes and hospitals braced for a surge in patients suffering from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“I love whoever you’re with, that’s such a nice question,” Trump replied to OAN, before denying the Post story, attacking the press, and defending his response to the crisis.

“I think you write very fairly and you write very fair reports,” he told the OAN reporter.

Watch above, via CNN.