President Donald Trump on Thursday argued with an NBC reporter during a White House press conference for the coronavirus task force, denying that his administration was unprepared for the outbreak.
“It could have been stopped pretty easily if everybody had known,” Trump said, according to Raw Story, prompting NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker to reply, “You said you did know.”
Trump said, “It could have been stopped in its tracks,” but “Unfortunately, [China] didn’t decide to make it public.”
Welker continued to push Trump, asking, “You did say a few days ago that you did have a sense that this was a pandemic, so why was the United States not prepared with more tests?”
The president denied that his administration was caught off-guard, saying, “We were very prepared. The only thing we weren’t prepared for was the media. The media has not treated it fairly.”
Trump also chided reporters for “sitting too close” to one another, according to Vox.
“Really, we should probably get rid of about another 75, 80 percent of you,” he said. “I’ll have just two or three that I like in this room. I think that’s a great way of doing it. We just figured a new way of doing it.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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