Just over a week ago, as the severity of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak was just starting to become apparent, Donald Trump Jr. went on Fox & Friends and said this about Democrats: “Anything that they can use to try to hurt Trump, they will… But for them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness.”
In a new clip from Sunday night’s episode of Axios on HBO, the first son is asked by co-host Jim VandeHei if he has any “regrets” about those remarks.
“Not at all, not at all,” Trump Jr. said, looking down. He stammered a bit as he added, “I think I can talk about it in hyperbole. You know, I don’t know that they want ‘millions’ of people—but you could see them, there was nothing that Trump could do that could turn his response to coronavirus into, ‘Hey, he did a good job.’”
ADVERTISEMENT
After trying to shift blame to The New York Times for an op-ed column headlined, “Let’s Call It Trumpvirus,” Trump Jr. repeated, “I’m entitled to speak with hyperbole and I think that drives home the point of what I’m saying.”
And yet even as he was defending his “right” to accuse Democrats of wishing for mass death, Trump Jr. did finally acknowledge that it was all for political sport. “I don’t actually think that,” he said.
