At Wednesday's coronavirus task force briefing, President Trump sparred with ABC's Jonathan Karl over ventilators. For weeks Karl and other White House reporters have been demanding to know how the government was going to be able to supply all the ventilators our hospitals need for the overwhelming influx of coronavirus patients. Now, when they've exceeded those expectations and we have a surplus of ventilators, Trump observed that the media has gone silent.
"We're now supplying ventilators all over the world because no other country could have done what we did, and you should say that's a great story," Trump instructed the press corps. "Instead, you say Trump was slow - slow, we were so fast. Plus we put the ban on so much earlier when Nancy Pelosi as an example - you don't say this. When she's having her rally in San Francisco in Chinatown in San Francisco nobody wants to say that."
He's right. On February 24, Speaker Pelosi was still encouraging people to come out to Chinatown.
Trump hammered the point home that no matter what he does, the media refuses to give him or his task force credit.
"So if we gave 350 [million people] a test ten times, the fake news media would say, where's the eleventh time?" Trump said. "He didn't do his job. Trump didn't do his job. Because you have a lot of bad reporting out there."
Karl shouted, "that's not true!" a few times.
"You're one of the leaders of the bad reporting," Trump replied.
Trump later suggested that the media is actually "unhappy" that they have extra ventilators because they "never mention it."
A surplus of ventilators is something we should all celebrate.
.@foxandfriends We now have many Ventilators to spare. Thank you to all! https://t.co/brNmQKZ1FL
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2020
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