President Donald Trump says he’s too busy to attend virus briefings, according to White House aides. Busy or not, the president has found the time to lambast health experts even as he faces heavy criticism for his lack of a coronavirus response. He also defended his management of the pandemic with several false claims.
The news comes as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the president “continues to deny the severity of the pandemic” after a widely publicized Fox News interview in which Trump, among other remarks, suggested that “young people that would heal in a day†made up many of the new cases.
“Although the next coronavirus legislation is critical to our nation’s recovery, the Trump Administration can and should be taking much more aggressive action to contain the virus,†Schumer wrote in a letter to his colleagues.
“Unfortunately, the President continues to deny the severity of the pandemic, as he did yet again during his interview on Fox News Sunday. He still has no adequate national testing strategy and continues to underutilize the Defense Production Act, wasting valuable time and resources,” he added.
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This isn’t the first time that the president has made headlines for claiming he’s too busy to handle the pandemic.
In May, he said he had “a lot of things going on” that prevented his administration from restocking the national stockpile of medical equipment.
“We started off with a broken system,” Trump said at the time. “We inherited a broken, terrible system. And I always say it, our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.”
Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.
