President Trump refused again to promise he would accept the results of November’s presidential election and brushed aside public opinion polls that showed his standing with voters sliding over his handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
In an interview aired Sunday on Fox News, the president also boasted, inaccurately, that the United States had the “best” coronavirus mortality rate and denigrated the government’s top infectious-disease specialist, Anthony Fauci, as the president’s surrogates have done in recent days.
As he did in 2016, Trump declined to guarantee that he would accept the election outcome, saying it was too soon.
“I have to see,” he told interviewer Chris Wallace. “I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no,’ and I didn’t last time either.”
The president added: “I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election.”
Trump brushed aside the many national polls, including new ones released Sunday, that showed a big lead for Joe Biden, his presumptive opponent.
“I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” Trump said in the interview, which was pre-taped last week.
“I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose,” he said. “I don’t lose too often. I don’t like to lose.”
Amid the surging coronavirus outbreak — which has claimed nearly 140,000 American lives, with the rate of new cases at one point last week reaching 75,000 in a single day — Trump hailed his own performance, claiming that the United States has the “best mortality rate.”
Total U.S. confirmed deaths from COVID-19 are the highest recorded for any country in the world, and the U.S. has the seventh-highest rate of fatalities for the size of its population, Wallace told him, citing widely used figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Asked about his repeated downplaying of the pandemic, including his prediction that the coronavirus would one day “just disappear,” Trump refused to back down on his forecast.
“I’ll be right eventually,” he said. “You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again. ... It’s going to disappear. And I’ll be right.”
Asked if he was being proved wrong in real time, with the caseload count increasing in 35 states, Trump replied: “I don’t think so.”
Amid an outcry by public health professionals over derogatory comments about Fauci made by members of his administration, the president described the infectious disease specialist as “a little bit of an alarmist.”
Trump surrogates including his trade advisor, Peter Navarro, have spoken scathingly of Fauci over the past week. Navarro wrote an op-ed a week ago in which he said the scientist had been wrong about “everything.”
The White House also circulated a list of talking points criticizing the 79-year-old head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, White House officials denied a report in the Los Angeles Times that Navarro had acted with Trump’s approval.
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July 19, 2020 at 11:40PM
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Trump won't commit to accepting result if he loses election - Los Angeles Times
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