In 2020, the President often went to arcane lengths to downplay the pandemic, saying at one point, per NPR, “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” Mike Pence wasn’t much better at providing critical information to Americans. In April, during the first lockdown to mitigate the number of COVID-19 cases, Pence, as leader of the Presidential task force to tackle the pandemic, predicted to Geraldo Rivera, per Fox News, “by Memorial Day weekend we will have this coronavirus epidemic behind us.”
Undaunted that COVID remained, Pence continued to reassure Americans months later. “As we see new cases rising — and we’re tracking them very carefully — there may be a tendency among the American people to think that we are back to that place that we were two months ago,” he said in June of that year, per CNN, when more than 100,000 American had already died from the virus. “That we’re in a time of great losses and great hardship on the American people. The reality is we’re in a much better place,” he said. Pence added that the entire country was reopening after the lockdown, although at least 30 states reported rising cases. What he also didn’t mention was that at least 500 Americans were still dying daily from infection. It was little wonder that during the Vice-Presidential debate later that year, Democrat candidate Kamala Harris declared that the Trump government’s pandemic response was “the greatest failure of any presidential administration,” per CTV News.
