On Saturday night at his much-hyped return to the campaign trail in Tulsa, Oklahoma, President Donald Trump said this about testing for Covid-19:
“When you test – when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people. You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please.”
Which, even by the incredibly lowered standards by which Trump statements are judged, was immediately controversial.
A President admitting that he told his administration to “slow down” the number of coronavirus tests because he didn’t like the numbers going up so quickly is, at best, negligent.
Sensing disaster, his allies quickly insisted that Trump had been joking about slowing the tests down.
“It was a comment that he made in jest,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Monday. “It’s a comment that he made in passing, specifically with regard to the media coverage and pointing out the fact that the media never acknowledges that we have more cases because when you test more people you find more cases.”
(Side note: He wasn’t kidding. Trump, throughout the coronavirus pandemic, had made comments about his unhappiness with the number of Americans who have tested positive. In early March, with a cruise ship docked off of San Francisco carrying a number of Americans with coronavirus, Trump admitted he would rather keep them on the boat because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”)
But let’s just play along. Let’s say that Trump was joking.
That would mean this: The President of the United States saw fit to make a joke about the testing for a virus that has already killed 120,000 Americans – or more than died in World War I – and is projected to kill more than 200,000 by October.
Which isn’t funny. Not even remotely so. Nor would any thinking person – Republican or Democrat – believe that coronavirus (or the testing to detect it) would be the sort of thing that should be kidded about.
The fact that McEnany and lots of other Trump surrogates tried to make the President’s comment about testing somehow better by arguing that he was joking is evidence of just how down the rabbit hole they really are.
The Point: This all being a joke is at least as bad as Trump having been serious about his urgings for less testing. How the hell can the President and his team not see that?
