Presidents should always be subjected to tough questions, so I was a little disappointed in Fox News‘ Chris Wallace’s response to a President Trump reaction to one of his questions:
In Sunday’s interview, Wallace noted that new cases had far outpaced increases in testing over the past month. He also confronted Trump about his incorrect and oft-repeated predictions that the virus would “disappear.”
“I will be right eventually,” Trump told the host. “You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again.”
“Does that discredit you?” Wallace asked.
Trump said he didn’t think so. “It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right,” he said. [WaPo]
The problem, of course, is that it’s an open-ended question, although even at that the novel coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-2, may become part of the background population of human-affective viruses for centuries.
But the proper response from Wallace should have been,
Mr. President, how many more Americans will become infected and die before SARS-CoV-2 disappears?
And if the President doesn’t walk away on that question, a splendid follow up would be this:
Do you approve of “magical thinking” in Presidents? Doesn’t that simply lead to governmental paralysis as we wait for God to reach down and snuff out the virus?
That would have been far more revealing?
