President Donald Trump is making a "very difficult but very wise" decision to push to reopen the economy, as the United States can't sustain being shut down any longer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday.
"Whenever we reopen, there's going to be the risk that there's somewhat more disease, a different disease starts to spread, something else happens or God forbid you get cancer," Giuliani told Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo. "I mean, life is not without risk. If we want to reduce all risk in life, we just end the economy...We can't let COVID-19 destroy us. And if we stay home, we continue to stay home, it's going to destroy us."
Trump kept the country closed "quite a long time," added Giuliani, who is one of the president's personal attorneys. "Six weeks, the largest economy in the world, shut down, unproductive completely. We can't sustain this any longer."
The former mayor said that beyond the monetary cost of a lockdown, the societal costs were also not counted.
"We have considerably more problems, emotional problems, physical problems, suicide, abuse, something we don't like to talk about but the reality is, we were facing a problem of domestic abuse anyway," said Giuliani.
He also drew comparisons to the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks, when New Yorkers were worried about reopening at a time when they feared another assault.
"A lot of the (business) owners wanted to come back, a lot didn't want to come back," said Giuliani. "Consider this a 50-day terrorist attack. Well, we had to stay indoors so we didn't get hit by the bombs. Now we're more secure. We still may get hit by some bombs but it's less dangerous than it was before. We have medicines for it now. We have some control over it. Now is the time to get started."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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