MSNBC host Rachel Maddow urged television networks not to air White House updates on the coronavirus outbreak, claiming “misinformation” from President Trump will “cost lives.”
“I know we ought to be getting used to this kind of thing by now, but I’m not,” Maddow began Friday night. “President Trump today, again, just flat-out wrong in public about this malaria drug that has gotten stuck in his mind, quite some distance from the facts.”
The liberal primetime host was referring to Trump’s claim Friday that the drug they’re hoping to use against the coronavirus is “effective,” but Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House task force quickly walked back the claim, saying it had not gone through a clinical trial and how the FDA previously stated that the drug had not been approved to combat the coronavirus.
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“But the president loves saying things like, you know, ‘There’s a drug we’ve got and it’s very effective. It’s approved already! Everybody’s gonna get it.’ He loves saying things like that because that would be a lovely thing to be able to tell people, unless of course that’s not true in which case telling people a fairytale like that is cruel and harmful and needlessly diverting and wildly irresponsible from anyone in any leadership role,” Maddow said.
“It’s actually wildly irresponsible if somebody said that to you from a bar stool, if any of us could go to bars anymore, but to get that from somebody at the presidential podium? Nevertheless, he keeps doing it.”
“It’s actually wildly irresponsible if somebody said that to you from a bar stool, if any of us could go to bars anymore.”
Maddow, who is best known for promoting the Russia collusion narrative that tied the Trump 2016 campaign to the Kremlin, then listed numerous claims that were made by the president that reports had refuted from the availability of tests, the readiness of the medical ships that are supposed to dock in New York City and in California, to supplies of ventilators and respirator masks.
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“There is a clear pattern here in this crisis of the president promising stuff that he knows America would love to hear but it’s not true. And even stuff that he’s saying that he will do that the federal government will do, he’s not doing,” Maddow told her viewers.
“I feel like we should innoculate ourselves against the harmful impact of these ongoing false promises and false statements by the president by recognizing that when he is talking about the coronavirus epidemic, more often than not, he is lying. Even when he’s talking about what he has done or what he will do, he is consistently lying and giving you happy talk that is stuff that the federal government isn’t actually doing. And it’s making people around the country count on the fact that the federal government is doing that stuff when they’re not.”
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She continued, “And so the sooner we come to terms with that, I think the better for all of us. If it were up to me, and it’s not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite but because it’s misinformation. If the president does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape but if he keeps lying like this every day on stuff this important, all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it’s gonna cost lives.”
