Sunday's White House coronavirus task force briefing became a battleground once again as President Donald Trump took on CBS's Weijia Jiang and CNN’s Jeremy Diamond following their pointed, snarky questions.
Jiang led off the festivities by attacking the president after he criticized China for not doing enough to contain the spread of the virus. As if the PRC had written the question for her, she said, "...many Americans are saying the exact same thing about you that you should have warned that the virus was spreading like wildfires through the month of February instead of holding rallies with thousands of people. Why did you wait so long to warn them? And why did you not have social distancing until March 16?"
President Trump immediately responded, "Nice and easy, relax. We cut it off. People were amazed. These gentlemen, everybody was amazed that I did it. We had 21 people in a room. Everybody was against it but me. Dr. Fauci said had I not done that, perhaps tens of thousands and maybe much more than that people would have died. I was very early, very, very early and we just saw, you saw Bret Baier making a statement. They had a debate well into February and not even mentioned - it wasn't even mentioned, the Democrats -"
Jiang proceeded to interject so many times thereafter that the president instructed her to "keep your voice down."
Diamond also threw in a doozy: "Mr. President, 22 - more than 22 million Americans are currently unemployed as a result of this. We hit the grim milestone of more 40,000 Americans now having died from the coronavirus. Can you explain, then, why you come out here and you are reading clips and - and - and showing clips of praise for you and for your administration? Is this really the time for self-congratulations?"
President Trump explained that he praised the members of his team because those people have been just absolutely excoriated by some of the fake news like you, you're CNN, you're fake news."