President Trump said Monday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s obsession with his impeachment distracted her from the coronavirus outbreak, hitting back at her accusation that the president “fiddles” while people have been dying.
“Don’t forget, she was playing the impeachment game, her game where she ended up looking like a fool,” Mr. Trump said on “Fox & Friends.” “All she did was focus on impeachment. She didn’t focus on anything having to do with pandemics, she focused on impeachment and she lost. And she looked like a fool.”
The president said her miscalculation “unified our party.”
“My poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been because of her,” Mr. Trump said.
He was responding to Mrs. Pelosi blaming the president on Sunday for not preparing for the pandemic, saying, “while the president fiddles, people are dying.”
“It’s a sad thing. She’s a sick puppy,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s got a lot of problems, and that’s a terrible thing to say.”
The president said he would be speaking by phone on Monday morning with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Moscow’s oil price war with Saudi Arabia, as well as the pandemic and trade issues. He said former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and the FBI’s Russia investigation set back relations between the two nations.
“They would love to be able to do trade with our country,” he said. “It’s been very much hindered by the nonsense that’s been going on Russia Russia Russia, which turned out to be a total hoax, when you look at what happened with [Former FBI Director James B.] Comey and [Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, and you look at all of the things that happened with the Mueller report, the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. And it really stops us from getting along with other countries. It’s an important country that we should get along with.”
The president announced Sunday that he will extend a nationwide voluntary social distancing guidelines through April 30, abandoning his hope of reopening parts of the country by Easter.
“I listen to the experts. We picked the end of April … as the day where we can see some real progress,” Mr. Trump said. “Maybe [by] June 1, we think, it’s a terrible thing to say, but we think that death rate will be at a very low number. If we didn’t do anything, 2.2 million people could have died.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. coronavirus response coordinator, said Monday there could be 100,000 to 200,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. if people follow the guidelines “almost perfectly.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.