CORONAVIRUS/COVID-19/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “I think it’s very important to note that we’ve done it right. We closed up. We were amazing the way our great citizens adhered to what we wanted to do. And we saved, I think, millions of lives. Now we want to be open. We understand the disease much better. Nobody knew what this was; nobody had ever seen it before. There’s been nothing like this since 1917; that’s more than 100 years ago.
But we saved — we saved tens of thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of lives. And now we’re open, and we want to stay open and we will stay open. We’re not closing. We’ll put out the fires as they come out. I call them ’embers’ and ‘fires,’ and whatever you want to call them.”
Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump on Safely Reopening America’s Schools,” whitehouse.gov, July 7, 2020