President Donald Trump did not hold an official coronavirus briefing on Thursday. Instead, he took questions from reporters after a White House event about protecting seniors — and, as he did at the official briefings, made a bunch of false and misleading claims.
Asked about his previous compliments for China’s response to the virus, Trump falsely suggested that the compliments had all come before the virus arrived in the US and before he had finalized a trade deal with China. And he dubiously suggested that he had quickly solved coronavirus testing problems, though many public health experts say he was slow to react and that the country is still far from a sufficient number of tests.
Trump repeated some old favorite inaccuracies about his travel restrictions on China and Europe (they weren’t full bans), trade with China (it’s not true that the US had never previously received any money from China) and the Veterans Choice health care program (President Barack Obama, not Trump, signed it into law).
Trump also made a subjective claim that the US’s per capita coronavirus death numbers are “very strong.” The US does not have the worst numbers in the world, but it has done far worse than some other countries — including South Korea, which had its first confirmed case right around the same time in January…
To read the entire article from CNN, click https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/fact-check-trump-april-30/index.html
