That’s not true. TrumpQ briefly took credit for shutting things down to save 2 million lives.
Dying on Airplanes
Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing
Issued on: April 1, 2020
THE PRESIDENT: It says 100- to 200,000. Anything — it’s a lot of people, right? It’s a lot of people.
Well, you didn’t ask the other question. What would have happened — because this is the question that I’ve been asking Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx for a long time, and they’ve been working on this for a long time.
The question is: What would have happened if we did nothing? Because there was a group that said, “Let’s just ride it out. Let’s ride it out.” What would have happened? And that number comes in at 1.5 to 1.6 million people, up to 2.2 and even beyond. So that’s 2.2 million people would have died if we did nothing, if we just carried on our life.
Now, I don’t think that would have been possible because you would have had people dying all over the place. This would not have been a normal life. How many people have even seen anybody die? You would have seen people dying on airplanes. You would have been seeing people dying in hotel lobbies. You would’ve seen death all over.
So I think, from a practical standpoint, that couldn’t have been carried out too far. But — but if you — if you did nothing, on the higher side, the number would be 2.2 and maybe even more, and on the lower side, 1.6 million people.