CNN host Don Lemon let viewers in on “a little secret” on Tuesday after President Donald Trump reverted to sharing false information about the coronavirus just days after shifting to what some pundits called a “new tone” on the pandemic.
“There is no pivot. There is no ‘new tone.’ There is no turning over a new leaf,” Lemon said on “CNN Tonight” “There is one Donald Trump, and he never changes. Do not get it twisted.”
“This is a president who, even with almost 150,000 Americans dead, can’t even stay on script to save American lives ― or his own political skin, which is what he really cares about,” he added.
“He just cannot do it because this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.”
On Monday, Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a video pushing an unproven coronavirus treatment and incorrectly claiming that people don’t need to wear face masks. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube removed the clip due to its misleading contents.
Trump also retweeted more than a dozen other posts plugging hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug he’s long hailed as a COVID-19 treatment, despite numerous studies that found it was not only ineffective against the virus but it also had potentially dangerous side effects.
It came just days after Trump demonstrated a more sober tone on the pandemic amid a severe resurgence of coronavirus cases across the country, along with plummeting approval ratings over the president’s handling of the health crisis. Last week, in his first coronavirus task force briefing in months, he finally urged people in the U.S. to wear masks and admitted that the situation would likely get worse before it got better.
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