CNN hosts have done a terrible job of fact-checking guests when they imply President Trump said the coronavirus was a “hoax” – not that the Democrats created the “hoax” that Trump is an incompetent boob who should be fully blamed for the spread in America.
It happened again on Wednesday afternoon, when Anderson Cooper interviewed CNN analyst Carl Bernstein. He claimed to have inside information of, "a narrative, I've been able to get parts of it from people around the president that he has resisted since January, taking decisive action except for keeping Chinese flights and people out of—using the borders as a way to contain the virus."
His unnamed sources relayed that Trump “was in anger, fury, a kind of meltdown for weeks and weeks, lashing out at people he said in meetings were his enemies in the press, in the Democrats, those who don't wish him well were foisting this hoax on the nation and the kind of thing we heard some of when he was on Fox News."
Bernstein then claimed to have inside information of, "a narrative, I've been able to get parts of it from people around the president that he has resisted since January, taking decisive action except for keeping Chinese flights and people out of—using the borders as a way to contain the virus."
If Trump was slow to appreciate the dangers of the virus back in January, what does that make people who called those travel restrictions xenophobic? It was also not just Trump who compared COVID-19 to the flu, but also mainstream media networks and newspapers.
He then claimed that those close to Trump were stunned about just how much he was in denial, "but his resistance and denial, actually, of the danger it posed to this virus is what's so stunned many people around him and they worked assiduously to finally, as happened over this last weekend to get him to capitulate to the kind of measures that needed to be needed to be taken.
Dr. Birx, who has the dual advantage of being a widely respected expert and her field and not being anonymous, on Tuesday said the initial slowness was a result of missing data from China as part of that country's government's cover-up.
Here is a transcript for the April 1 show:
CNN
CNN Newsroom
2:11 PM ET
ANDERSON COOPER: Insiders say it has taken a lot to get the president to openly express concern about the likely impact of the outbreak, the health concern of the impact of the outbreak in the U.S. Political analyst Carl Bernstein joins me now with some take on Trump's response to the looming crisis. Carl you say the President Trump, we saw yesterday, isn't the President Trump of recent weeks. I take-- how do you mean?
CARL BERNSTEIN: Well, I think there is a narrative, I've been able to get parts of it from people around the president that he has resisted since January, taking decisive action except for keeping Chinese flights and people out of—using the borders as a way to contain the virus, but outside of that he has resisted, according to these people, at every turn definitive actions such as he has finally taken and in his resistance, he was in anger, fury, a kind of meltdown for weeks and weeks, lashing out at people he said in meetings were his enemies in the press, in the Democrats, those who don't wish him well were hoisting this hoax on the nation and the kind of thing we heard some of when he was on Fox News. But his resistance and denial, actually, of the danger it posed to this virus is what's so stunned many people around him and they worked assiduously to finally, as happened over this last weekend to get him to capitulate to the kind of measures that needed to be needed to be taken.
