MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ Fact-Checks Trump’s Monday Press Conference, Calls Out His ‘Screw Ups’ (Video)

The hosts cited Trump’s weeks-long insistence that the virus was “under control” and would go away

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” did a next-day fact-check on President Donald Trump’s Monday press conference Tuesday, pointing out his “screw-ups” and highlighting what he said — and didn’t say — at the briefing.

“There are a couple things that actually upset the president,” said host Joe Scarborough, pointing to recent articles from the New York Times and Washington Post that outline “all the receipts, all the president’s screw-ups.” Those articles, he said, combined with worries about the presidential election against former vice president Joe Biden, led to Monday’s briefing, which set records for length.

“He kept talking about what he did on his toothless China ban at the end of January, which was pathetic,” Scarborough said, reviewing other quotes from Trump in January and February downplaying the coronavirus and calling it “under control.” In March, Trump said he wasn’t “concerned at all” and assured Americans “it will go away.”

“More people have died since then than died on 9/11, that died in both Iraq wars, that died in the Afghanistan war, and the president was saying late into February, quote, ‘I’m not concerned at all,’” Scarborough railed.

“We could read those quotes all morning,” said co-host Willie Geist, rattling off a few more and adding, “There’s no question that he downplayed this for months and months when we should have been ramping up testing, getting PPE into hospitals. That’s just a fact. And none of that was in the campaign video that he played in the briefing room yesterday that left out, effectively, the entire month of February along with portions of March and some of the late January quotations that I mentioned. It wasn’t there.”

Watch the “Morning Joe” segment above.

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