President Donald Trump shared a tweet on Monday morning from a former game show host which claimed that lies about the coronavirus were being spread to harm the economy and influence the 2020 election.
“The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying,” Chuck Woolery wrote. “The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.”
Woolery stated, without evidence, that the supposed lies were “all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back.” The state of the economy is seen as being Trump’s strongest selling point for his reelection this fall.
“I’m sick of it,” Woolery, who has no medical background or expertise, added.
In a second tweet from him, which the president also shared, Woolery said there is “scientific evidence that schools should open this fall.”
“It’s worldwide and it’s overwhelming. BUT NO,” he said.
Woolery’s claim that “everyone is lying,” and Trump’s endorsement of that notion through his retweet of Woolery’s social media post, comes on the same day that The Washington Post reported that the president has told more than 20,000 lies or misleading statements since stepping into the White House.
Trump has made 20,055 statements to the American people, from his inauguration in January 2017 to July 9 of this year, that have not been supported by, or directly contradict, factual evidence, averaging about 16 lies or misleading statements per day. In his most recent 10,000 lies, however, which took place in just the past 440 days, the president has issued about 23 misleading statements or lies per day on average.
Woolery’s tweets that Trump shared to his followers may be referring to statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that initially recommended schools across the U.S. be reopened, based on evidence from Europe that suggested children are less likely to transmit the disease than are adults, per reporting from The Wrap. But the AAP has since walked back those recommendations.
In a joint statement with several teachers’ unions, while still insisting that schools should reopen, the AAP said students should only return to classrooms “in a way that is safe for all students, teachers, and staff.”
“Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics,” they said.
Just last week, Trump decried guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for being too restrictive, calling their recommendations for reopening schools as being “impractical.” CDC Director Robert Redfield said he has no plans to change those guidelines, but to supplement them with additional information sometime this week.
In addition to insisting schools and businesses are safe to reopen, the Trump administration is set to issue statements that aim to discredit other trusted voices on coronavirus that may take the opposite view.
According to reporting from ABC News, the White House will soon begin a smear campaign against Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a member of the president’s own coronavirus task force, who has made many statements countering Trump’s rosy outlook on the pandemic’s spread in the U.S.
Trump and his surrogates will reportedly say Fauci has “been wrong on many things” during the coronavirus crisis, and plan to refer to him as “Dr. Gloom and Doom” in the future, per a statement from a White House official over the weekend.
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