White House fumbles its story on explaining testing 'slow down'
Source: Msnbc.com
The White House said Trump was kidding when he claimed he wanted to "slow down" coronavirus testing. Given a chance to clarify, he made matters worse.
June 22, 2020, 3:06 PM CDT By Steve Benen
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But the story now seems to be evolving. CBS News reported that Vice President Mike Pence spoke to a group of governors this morning and said Trump's comments about slowing down testing were merely "a passing observation," but not necessarily meant in jest.
Soon after, the president spoke to Scripps Networks' Joe St. George, and the correspondent asked the right question: "Did you ask to slow [virus testing] down?" Trump replied:
"Uhh, if it did slow down, frankly, I think we're way ahead of ourselves if you want to know the truth. We've done too good a job."
This wasn't a trick question. It was just two days ago when the president boasted that he'd directed his team to "slow the testing down." Asked if he'd actually done this, it would've been very easy for Trump to simply echo the line presented by his own White House and say he was kidding. In fact, I largely expected him to explain away the controversy by saying he was being "sarcastic" -- a word he frequently misuses in situations like these.
But the president instead did the opposite, saying quite seriously that he sees value in having his administration do less testing, even as the number of coronavirus cases in the United States climbs higher.
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Read more: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/white-house-fumbles-its-story-explaining-testing-slow-down-n1231781
So, Pence opened his trap about this also.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's clear from this that he is totally serious about what he considers too much testing being a bad thing and all's it does is find more cases
The only humor he attempted was ridiculing testing a 10 year old "with the sniffles who will recover in about 15 minutes", and they find he tests positive, and "that's a case, that's a case" as if that's somehow ridiculous and somehow shouldn't be counted as a case,
and though there may be very little likelihood the 10 year old will suffer and die, there is a substantial chance that he will spread it to someone directly or indirectly who will.
Of course, this is totally incrminating, and this is on top of many other occasions where he's complained that we're doing too much testing and it makes us look bad.
"Uhh, if it did slow down, frankly, I think we're way ahead of ourselves if you want to know the truth. We've done too good a job."
Especially when you're responsible for the deaths of 120,000 people.
