Donald Trump called Nancy Pelosi a “sick puppy” after the House speaker said the president’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis would contribute to deaths in the US that might have been avoided.
“She’s a sick puppy … that’s a terrible thing to say,” Trump said in a rambling hour-long call-in interview to the cable show Fox & Friends. “My poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been because of her.”
According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, by Monday morning nearly 143,000 Covid-19 cases had been confirmed in the US, with more than 2,500 deaths. New York is by far the state worst hit, with nearly 60,000 cases and about 1,000 deaths.
As the emergency has accelerated, Trump has stepped up his war of words with Democrats and the media, in what critics see as an attempt to distract from the administration’s failings in confronting the virus.
Widespread testing for the virus remains unavailable in the US, healthcare workers and local leaders across the country raise a daily alarm about dire shortages of medical equipment, and state leaders have imposed a patchwork of restrictions – or declined to impose restrictions – in what emergency response experts have described as a vacuum of federal leadership.
In news conferences, Trump has swung between delivering false assurance – that business as normal would resume by Easter – and crediting himself with avoiding what early models showed could be a worst-case scenario of millions of deaths.
In his interview on Monday, Trump told the Fox News hosts he had saved the country from “deaths like you have never seen before”.
Pelosi told CNN on Sunday that “the president’s denial at the beginning was deadly” and said “his delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”
Trump also repeated a baseless claim he made Sunday, accusing states including New York, which has had to erect emergency medical facilities in Central Park and move in refrigerator trucks to temporarily store bodies, of squandering medical equipment.
Trump’s baseless charges drew fire on Monday morning from New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio.
“I find that insulting to our healthcare workers,” De Blasio told CNN. “I find it insensitive.
“What the president should be doing is praising our healthcare workers, not suggesting somehow they’re doing something wrong with the supplies that have been sent. That’s just insensitive and it’s unhelpful.”
Dr Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House taskforce on the virus, said at the weekend the US could see more than a million cases and suffer 100,000 to 200,000 deaths.
As recently as late February, Trump claimed publicly that the virus would simply “disappear”. But on Fox & Friends he credited his administration with avoiding a death toll in the millions.
“That’s a lot,” he said.
Then he told the hosts he had to call the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who recently shuttered his country as it grapples with the virus, while conducting a disinformation campaign of conspiracy theories to shift blame for the virus to western countries, including the US.
Trump indicated that he would move to lift sanctions on Russians and said: “We’ll talk about trade a lot.”
