do trump's own words count?
Trump, March 13: “I want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website. It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way. We cover the — this country in large part. So the world, by the way — we’re not going to be talking about the world right now. But we cover very, very strongly our country. Stores in virtually every location. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They’ve made tremendous progress. Our overriding goal is to stop the spread of the virus and to help all Americans who have been impacted by this.”
Less than an hour after the press conference, Google tweeted a clarifying statement from Verily, the Google-adjacent company responsible for the screening website.
“This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
On Jan. 22, asked by a CNBC reporter whether there were “worries about a pandemic,” the president replied: “No, not at all. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
On Feb. 26, at a White House news conference, commenting on the country’s first reported cases: “We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.”
On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
On March 7, standing next to President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., when asked if he was concerned that the virus was spreading closer to Washington: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.” (At least three members of the Brazilian delegation and one Trump donor
at Mar-a-Lago that weekend later tested positive for the virus.)
On March 16, in the White House briefing room, warning that the outbreak would “wash” away this summer: “So it could be right in that period of time where it, I say, wash — it washes through. Other people don’t like that term. But where it washes through.”
When asked why he had suddenly adopted a somber and realistic tone about the virus on Tuesday, the president denied that he had changed his mind at all. “No, I’ve always viewed it as very serious,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no difference yesterday from days before. I feel the tone is similar, but some people said it wasn’t.”
At a campaign rally on Feb. 10, Mr. Trump suggested that the virus would be gone by April, a claim he has frequently repeated, even though his advisers had warned him that much about the virus was still not known.
“Anybody right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test,”
the president said on March 6 during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “They’re there. They have the tests and the tests are beautiful.”
On Feb. 29, the president said a vaccine would be available “very quickly” and “very rapidly,” as he praised his administration’s actions as “the most aggressive taken by any country.” His statement about how long it would take for a vaccine to be publicly available
was corrected by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a member of the coronavirus task force, in front of reporters.
