Dana Bash Calls Out Trump Knee-Capping CDC Director’s Mask Testimony: What We Just Saw and Heard From POTUS ‘Was Propaganda’

Reed RichardsonSep 16th, 2020, 7:19 pm
 

Dana Bash pulled no punches over President Donald Trump’s unabashed knee-capping of his own CDC director during Wednesday’s White House briefing. Following the press conference, the CNN political correspondent called out the president’s “propaganda” of insisting Dr. Robert Redfield was “mistaken” and “confused” when he made several statements to Congress about mask wearing and Covid vaccines that publicly contradicted Trump.

During his opening statement and later in questions from the press, Trump repeatedly asserted that his CDC director did not understand clear questions about the efficacy of masks and the rollout timeline for any coronavirus vaccine during testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Earlier in the day, Redfield had urged Americans to wear masks, saying that their widespread adoption could drastically lower the coronavirus transmission rate and “was more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.” He also pegged the full inoculation of the entire country from Covid via vaccine to the third quarter of 2021, nearly a full year later than Trump has been promising.

“Dana, it was a pretty extraordinary moment and I am being polite right now,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer said, “to hear the President of the united States suggest on these two very critical, important issues that the head of the CDC effectively is wrong.”

“Wolf, what we just saw and heard from the President of the United States was propaganda. There is really no other way to say it,” Bash said, in a remarkable blunt statement. “It was propaganda, plain and simple. He wants things to be a certain way for his own political agenda and he is saying science be damned. And on both of those issues it was remarkable to see him throw his CDC director under the bus.”

Notably, Trump’s 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, had also hit Trump on this very topic right before the White House briefing. In a speech and follow-up Q & A with the press, Biden criticized the president for dismissing science and politicizing the vaccine process and alluded to a recent NBC News poll that found a majority of Americans no longer trust Trump’s rhetoric about a potential vaccine.

“It is really remarkable,” Bash added. “And the way I see it right now is, the CDC director has two options. Number one, to fall on the sword and try to find a way out of it or to defend science, defend reality, and say ‘I’m not working for you anymore. I can’t work under these circumstances.’ I don’t know what he is going to do. Maybe he’ll come out and say, you know, I misspoke. But it is hard to imagine that because if you watch him like we did today and you just played the clips again, he really understood the questions.”

In fact, Redfield put out a statement on Twitter just moments after Bash’s comments — and it was clear he was not backing down from his testimony and was not going along with Trump’s proffered excuse that he was mistaken or confused.

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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