We keep reading and hearing in conservative circles an assertion that President Trump didn't call the coronavirus a hoax. He and his supporters claim that the left and the media twisted his words from a Feb. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina.
In fact, this week, the Trump campaign has upped this lie to a whole new level after, on Wednesday, the likely Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, offered to call Trump and discuss pandemic policy. On Thursday, the Trump campaign released a new Twitter ad with video of Biden - doctored to make it look as though Biden says, "The coronavirus is a hoax."
But Biden never called the coronavirus a hoax. The audio is spliced together from two different times that Biden spoke, according to The Hill. Twitter has labeled the fake video of Joe Biden as "manipulated."
The Trump campaign told the conservative-leaning Hill that it did this "to draw attention to what it views as Twitter's double standard in policing political speech."
The Hill writes: "The new Trump campaign video is styled after an ad released by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, which featured misleading audio of Trump describing the coronavirus as a 'hoax.' The president's campaign has flagged multiple Democratic videos for Twitter in which the president is heard calling the coronavirus a 'hoax,' arguing that the content runs afoul of the social media giant's manipulated media guidelines. Twitter has declined to sanction the Democratic ads."
Judge for yourselves. You can find a C-SPAN recording of the South Carolina rally at https://tinyurl.com/ros4bze and tune to about minute 6:06). The C-SPAN site also offers a transcript compiled from its "uncorrected closed captioning." Following his usual rant about Democrats "working to erase your ballots and overthrow our Democracy," our president goes here:
"Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. Coronavirus. They are politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs - How's President Trump doing? They go, not good. They do not have any clue. They cannot even count the votes in Iowa ... One of my people came up to me and said, Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russian. That did not work out too well. ... They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over again. They lost. It is all turning. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. We did something that has been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we could've had a lot more than that. We're doing great. ..."
In the mere 34 days since those self-congratulatory remarks, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus has soared, tripling those of China and doubling those of Italy and of Spain. America now stands at the top of the heap of sickened people with more than a quarter of the entire world's nearly 1 million cases.
Meanwhile, a record 6.6 million Americans have filed unemployment claims as layoffs continue to mount during a pandemic for which the only vaccine remains social distancing and staying home.
Does it really sound like we're doing great?