PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor: Trump Views Questions on Coronavirus Testing as a ‘Personal Attack’ on Himself

PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor said President Donald Trump is trying to avoid responsibility for coronavirus testing because he views tough questions on the matter as a “personal attack” during his White House press conferences.

Alcindor joined Morning Joe on Wednesday to discuss Trump’s evidence-free attacks on mail-in voting, along with the possibility that the president’s support is slipping among senior voters. She eventually moved on to note how Trump has turned the White House coronavirus task force’s briefings into “campaign-style events,” which she explained as “this is the only way he’s able to communicate with the American people” during the pandemic.

“We’ve started to see him to do really interesting things. The first thing I would point out is he’s starting to say that talking about testing is somehow a personal attack against him. I posed that question to him a couple days ago and he said it’s not a personal attack on me but people are talking about this because they want to take me down politically and they’re thinking about the November election as they talk about testing.”

Because expanding testing is “critical” to reopening the country, Alcindor went on to say Trump is aware of that fact and that it might hurt his re-election chances. To that point, Alcindor concluded, “he’s really now trying to push off testing completely to a state issue and not really taking any sort of responsibility for the testing issues that are so ongoing.”

This comes after Trump said a month ago “I don’t take any responsibility” for the inadequate amount of coronavirus tests available throughout the country. Since Alcindor noted that Trump views tough questions as a “personal attack” on himself, she might have been referencing all of the times he got angry with her when she tried to ask him about his administration’s coronavirus response.

Watch above, via MSNBC.

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