President Donald Trump told the Daily Caller that some governors made “tragic mistakes” with their policies towards nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.
President Trump spoke with the Caller for more than an hour Friday evening on a variety of issues, including CHAZ, racial inequality, coronavirus, advertising boycotts, John Bolton, China, and the 2020 election.
“Governors made mistakes, they made big mistakes. Certain governors made big mistakes, put people into nursing homes that shouldn’t have been there that were heavily infected. And it spread no different than spreading in a larger area,” Trump said in the interview.
The president referenced the first confirmed major outbreak in the U.S., which occurred in late February and early March at a nursing home outside of Seattle. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Says He ‘Should Be At 100 Percent’ Approval With Black Voters)
“I mean, your first real tragedy was the nursing home in the state of Washington. Governor Inslee. They should have learned from that because that nursing home was wiped out, right? Almost everybody died from that one nursing home, and the governors made mistakes. They made big mistakes. They should not have done what they did,” the president added.
“Now people watch it. You know, we’ve learned a lot about this disease, but, they’ve made tragic, I would call it tragic mistakes,” Trump said. “In particular, certain governors, I won’t get into their names, but certain governors, they didn’t do it on purpose, but they made mistakes.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin participate in the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House on April 21, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Thousands of elderly coronavirus patients died in nursing homes throughout New York, after Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an order mandating that assisted-living facilities admit coronavirus patients.
Cuomo later reversed the policy, and the New York State Department of Health admitted to knowingly omitting an unknown number of coronavirus deaths from its nursing home tallies.
Daily Caller will be publishing additional selections from the interview with the president in the coming days.