Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is expressing his disapproval of President Donald Trump’s statement that the COVID-19 death toll would be lower if you “take out the blue states.”
Schumer took to the Senate floor on Sept. 17, to blast the president for his comments, “I was planning to address a number of topics, but the president held a president yesterday afternoon that was so callous, so uninformed, so egomaniacal, so divisive, that I am compelled to respond.”
He continued, “We are in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans — far more than the number of Americans who died in World War I.”
Schumer continued to read Trump’s comments from his press conference and said, “Yes, Mr. President, if you don’t count the total number of Americans who have died, you might think it’s not so bad.”
“If you close your eyes and pretend that half the country doesn’t exist, maybe some might think you didn’t do such a spectacularly awful job,” he added.
Schumer then posed a question, “What kind of person looks at the number of dead citizens in the country he is supposed to lead, and in an attempt to glamorize himself dismisses every American who died in a state that didn’t support the president politically.”
“What a disgrace, it’s monstrous,” he added. “What kind of demented person would say that those Americans live don’t count?”
Watch the video below:
"What a disgrace! It's monstrous!"
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 17, 2020
Sen. Chuck Schumer excoriated Pres. Trump while on the Senate floor over his remarks suggesting the U.S. COVID-19 death toll would be more favorable "if you take the blue states out." https://t.co/2SxeLOkMRZ pic.twitter.com/44xwPQdamh
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Trump defended the response to the COVID-19 outbreak and noted that some predictions initially claimed up to 1.5 million Americans could die without mitigation efforts.
“This was a prediction that if we do a really good job, we’ll be at about 100,000 and — 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, and we’re below that substantially, and we’ll see what comes out,” Trump said.
He continued, “But that would be if we did a good job. If the not-so-good job was done, you’d be between 1.5 million — I remember these numbers so well — and 2.2 million. That’s quite a difference.”
The U.S. coronavirus death toll is over 197,000.
He also suggested that the death toll would be lower if deaths from the virus in states with Democratic leaders were not counted.
“If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed,” Trump said.
However, even without the “blue states,” the country would still lead many countries in terms of the death toll.