President Donald Trump on Sunday took time from his COVID-19 fight to check what Fox News was saying about him — and he came up furious at Chris Wallace.
“What the hell is happening to Fox News?” Trump tweeted. He slammed “Mike Wallace wannabe” Chris Wallace and said he’s convinced the Fox News host is “even worse than Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd” of MSNBC. He complained that it’s a “whole new ballgame” now at Fox.
Trump didn’t detail what specifically set him off. But Wallace featured Johns Hopkins health expert Tom Inglesby, who said that had the Trump administration taken earlier action against COVID-19, “we’d be in a much better position” now.
Trump has referred to Mike Wallace, Chris Wallace’s late father, previously when attacking the Fox News host. “One of us has a daddy problem, and it’s not me,” Wallace quipped last year about Trump’s insults. Mike Wallace was a take-no-prisoners investigative reporter for CBS.
Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, referred in his interview with Wallace to a weekend New York Times report that Trump ignored serious warnings from his health experts and waited precious weeks before taking action to contain COVID-19.
“If we’d acted on some of those warnings earlier, we’d be in a much better position in terms of diagnostics and possibly masks and possibly personal protective equipment and getting our hospitals ready,” Inglesby said.
Wallace referred to the Times article detailing a delay of more than a month as “stunning.”
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser also joined Wallace Sunday to discuss data suggesting that the worst of the coronavirus crisis won’t begin to ebb in her city until the end of May.
Wallace asked her if that means she will ignore guidelines and a timetable pushed by Trump, who is aiming for May 1 as the start of a return back to business as usual.
Bowser pointed out that there have been absolutely no stay-at-home guidelines anywhere from the Trump administration, even though his top health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has recommended them.
“We’re going to follow what the data on the ground tells us,” said Bowser. “As we have heard directly, the president hasn’t issued any stay-at-home orders for any jurisdiction in the United States of America.” The “most optimistic modeling points to interventions remaining in place through the end of May,” she added.