President Donald Trump said wasn’t joking when he told his Tulsa rally that he ordered a slow down of coronavirus testing across the United States.
“I don’t kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear,” Trump told reporters when they asked him if he was joking at the MAGA rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma when he said he told his officials to “slow the testing down.”
“We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases,” he continued.
White House tried to clean up Trump’s comments after they met with met public outrage. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany dismissed Trump’s claims as a “comment that he made in jest.”
At first, in an interview with CBN News Trump told a reporter he did not order officials to slow down testing, adding that a high number of coronavirus cases would make the U.S. “look bad.”
On Monday, when pressed about the comments again by Scripps Networks, he contradicted himself and the White House officials and did not deny asking his administration to slow down coronavirus testing.
“If it did slow down, frankly, I think we’re way ahead of ourselves if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “We’ve done too good a job.”
McEnany, asked to comment on the situation on Tuesday, did not confirm the seriousness of Trump’s claims, saying he was sarcastic. “He was making a serious point, but he was using sarcasm to do that,” she told reporters.
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