Trump's Delusional View of the Virus Crisis

At yesterday's press briefing in the Rose Garden, Trump claimed he had a great phone call with state governors, saying, "we had a great call today with governors.  And they were — I actually said, I hope that the media is listening to this call because it was a really good call.  And that was randomly selected — largely Democrats and Republicans in there.  I think, for the most part, they were saying thank you for doing a great job.  And we discussed that at the end of the call.  So it really — people are very happy with what we’re doing."

A great phone call?  You think they were grateful for the job you are doing?  Well, maybe not.  The New York Times obtained a CBC news audio recording leaked from one of the attendees at that "great" phone call.  Here's how it went down:

Dr. Fauci: Do you have any system in place that you feel can adequately identify cases and isolate them and contact trace them, or are the capabilities and resources there that that's not something that you can do, given with what you have?

Governor Steve Bullock (Montana);  Yeah Dr. Fauci, we are trying to do contact tracing, but literally we are one day away if we don't get test kits from the CDC, that we wouldn't be able to do testing in Montana.  We have gone time and time again to the private side of this, the private market, and where the private market is telling us is that it's the national resources that are then taking our orders apart.   Basically, we're getting orders canceled.  That's for PPE, that's for testing supplies, that's for testing equipment.  So, while we're trying to do all the contact tracing, we don't have adequate tests to necessarily do it, we don't have the PPE along the way, and we're not finding markets to be able to do that along the way, or private suppliers.  So we do have to really on the national chain of distribution or we're not going to get it.  But we are doing our best to try to do exactly that-- and like Gallatin County would be an example where we have almost half of our overall state [unintelligible], so we are trying to shift the supplies to really isolate that and do contact tracing, but we just don't have enough supplies to even do the testing.

Trump:  Tony, you can answer it if you want, but I haven't heard about testing in weeks.  We've [been] testing more now than any nation in the world.  We've got these great tests.  And we've come out with another one tomorrow that's, you know, almost instantaneous testing.  But I haven't heard about testing being a problem.

I got news for you, Trump-- you just heard about testing being a problem! Do something about it!