President Donald Trump this week sought to take credit for the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 197,000 residents nationwide. “If you look at what we’ve done and all of the lives we’ve saved. … this was our prediction, that if we do a really good job, we’ll be at 100,000 to 240,000 deaths,” Trump said, standing in front of a pair of graphs at the White House on Wednesday. “We’re below that substantially. We’ll see where it comes out. But that would be, if we did a good job. And that’s despite the fact the blue states had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level.”
Unsurprisingly, the callous remark left Seth Meyers feeling particularly irate. “As someone who lives in one of those states and knows people affected by this virus, I would just like to say, go fuck yourself, you rotting, soulless business ham,” Meyers said on Thursday’s episode of Late Night.
“But sure—if you just take out all the people that died, then you did a great job, dude,” Meyers added. “By the same token, if you take out all his albums, Kid Rock has had a fantastic career.”
Trump and his administration have apparently long sought to keep the national response to the coronavirus pandemic split down political lines. In July, the Washington Post reported the president was swayed to start taking the health crisis more seriously after advisors “began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among ‘our people’ in Republican states.”
That same month, Vanity Fair reported exclusively that Jared Kushner, a senior White House advisor and Trump’s son-in-law, had allegedly scuttled plans for a nationwide coronavirus testing apparatus in part because of where the virus had hit. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” one source said. (The White House denied that claim.)
In public, meanwhile, Trump has frequently admonished blue states. “The Democrat-run states are the ones that are doing badly,” the president said during a town hall this week.