Quote:Trump never called it a hoax.
It really doesn't matter. Because what he actually said was equally stupid:
Quote:One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
Now, where is there a "hoax"? What exactly is the Democrats' new "hoax"? After all, "a hoax is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth." So where's the "hoax"? The virus turned into a deadly pandemic that's killed over 55,000 USAmericans.
Now Trump's defenders will look at this and say, "he never called the virus a hoax." (Although many of his ignorant supporters, following his lead, did.) But that's overlooking the salient fact that he never explained what this new "hoax" was. Criticism of his administration's response to the outbreak doesn't qualify as a "hoax", especially since the number of people who he claimed were infected at the time — fifteen on Feb 29 — has now grown to over a million cases. That's not a Democratic "hoax", it's a Trump administration failure.
