Chris Cuomo criticized President Trump on-air Tuesday night for his continued downplaying of the coronavirus threat, calling it “asinine.”
The CNN anchor — who has been at the forefront of reporting on the pandemic while infected himself — with symptoms include hallucinating a vision of his late father and staying up all night in a sweaty fever — extolled the value of being honest when fighting the virus, then concluded, “The man at the top refuses to change.”
Cuomo played a clip of Trump from his Tuesday night briefing where he was slow to warn the country in January and February because he wasn’t going to “go out and start screaming, ‘this could happen.’”
After the clip, Cuomo hit Trump hard. “That’s exactly what leadership is. Anybody can tell people what they want to hear and make it easy. Then you know what you get? Exactly where we are right now. That was the most asinine statement of leadership I have ever heard and I can’t even dismiss it on the president having a 102 fever like I do because that is clear thinking from him.”
“We’ve got to do better than that. This president must do better than that,” Cuomo added.
From there, Cuomo discussed Tuesday’s death rate of 1,736 — the highest single-day death rate in the country so far — and questioned whether it really does, as leaders have said, signal a “good sign for what is to come.”
Watch Cuomo below.
https://twitter.com/cuomoprimetime/status/1247695571890176007?s=21