Reporter Asks Trump If He Should Be Re-elected After COVID-19 Death Toll Exceeds Vietnam War Casualties

New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi asked President Trump at the end of the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing if he should be re-elected because the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths has exceeded the number of Vietnam War casualties.

The United States has 985,443 confirmed Wuhan coronavirus cases with 55,952 deaths, according to John Hopkins University. American servicemember deaths in Vietnam is around 58,000.

"If more Americans died in the last six weeks than the entirety of the Vietnam War, do you deserve to be re-elected?" Nuzzi asked.

"We have lost a lot of people. But if you look at original projections, 2.2 million, we are probably heading to 60 or 70,000. One person is too many," Trump replied.

"We have made good decisions. One was closing the border from China other than American citizens. You can’t say you can’t come back to your country. I think we have made a lot of good decisions. I think Mike Pence and the task force has done a fantastic job," he continued. "Everybody working on the ventilators, the work we have done there is unbelievable. The press doesn’t talk about ventilators anymore. That’s okay. That was a subject nobody would get off of. We are in the same position on testing. We are lapping the world on testing and the world is coming to us, as I said, saying how do you do it. We are helping them. I think we have done a great job. One person is too many."

Nuzzi defended the question on her Twitter account, saying "It wasn’t a gotcha question, it wasn’t designed to provoke, and I appreciate the fact that Trump took it seriously."

(Although he did not, obviously, answer it directly)

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) April 27, 2020