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  • 2020-05-06 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Trump Say COVID-19 Deaths Wouldn't Hurt Anyone as Much as Himself? (en)
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  • One of the primary issues that the U.S. federal and state governments were wrestling with during the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic in May 2020 was the trade-off of keeping social distancing and business closure restrictions in place to protect lives, versus the trade-off of ongoing (and possibly permanent) economic harm to individuals, businesses, and the country as a whole. On May 5, 2020, while U.S. President Donald Trump was in Phoenix, Arizona, to tour a medical face mask manufacturing facility there, he was interviewed by David Muir of ABC News about the subject of reopening the U.S.: https://youtu.be/WrPTkaO3IBoShortly after the interview aired, a meme began to circulate on social media holding that when Trump had been asked during that interview what he'd say to people who lost family members to COVID-19, he replied, I would say this didn't hurt anyone as much as it hurt me: Although this meme is vaguely reflective of something Trump said during that interview, it grossly misrepresents both what he literally said and what he meant. According to the transcript of that interview, Trump was asked the following by Muir: We've lost more people now [to COVID-19] than we lost in the Vietnam War. What do you want to say to those families tonight? Trump responded in full as reproduced below: As indicated in the bolded passages above, Trump expressed sympathy for the families who had suffered and lost loved ones to COVID-19, said he didn't sleep night at night thinking about it, and asserted that nobody had taken it (i.e., grappling with the effects of the pandemic) harder than himself. He perhaps undercut his message somewhat by mixing in the anguish of losing loved ones to disease (those people can never ever replace somebody they love) with talk about recharging the economy (I think our economy is going to be raging ... we're going to have something that they're going to be very proud of), but he did not say anything that could reasonably be interpreted as meaning that coronavirus related deaths didn't hurt anyone as much as it hurt me. (en)
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