“It seems like almost every day we get more and more evidence that the Trump administration knew well in advance of the very real threat of a pandemic,” Seth Meyers said in his latest “A Closer Look” segment from home Wednesday night. “And that they both ignored it and lied to the American people about it.”
Despite President Trump’s “repeated claims that no one could have foreseen” the coronavirus crisis, the Late Night host ran down a list of the many warnings the White House received from the outgoing Obama administration in 2017 to the intelligence agencies earlier this year. But Trump seems to have ignored them all.
“In fact, in this White House, if you plunge your head in the sand and ignore reality, you can actually get rewarded,” Meyers said. As the most recent example, he pointed to the appointment of Trump campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany as the new White House press secretary.
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Meyers then played a clip from Feb. 25—more than a month after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the U.S.—of McEnany pretending there was no threat to America.
“This president will always put America first,” McEnany told Fox Business host Trish Regan, who was subsequently fired for downplaying the virus. “He will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here. We will not see terrorism come here. And isn’t that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?”
“If you think going from this to this is refreshing,” Meyers said, putting up photos of Obama and Trump, “then you might not know what that word means. Trump looks like the physical embodiment of the feeling you get when you fall asleep on the couch and wake up in the dark and you don’t know what day it is.”
“The only thing that’s refreshing here is the Kool-Aid you drank,” he added.
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