https://www.gq.com/story/trump-hundred-thousand-dead-good-job
But Trump is also working a PR angle. At a briefing on Sunday, he admitted for the first time that the U.S. was facing at least 100,000 deaths, but he did it with a slightly more upbeat spin. "So you’re talking about 2.2 million deaths, 2.2 million people from this. And so if we could hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000. It’s a horrible number, maybe even less —but to 100,000. So we have between 100,000 and 200,000, and we altogether have done a very good job," he said.
He repeated that figure, 2.2 million people dead, 16 times in that one Sunday briefing. That's the total death toll that the U.S. would be facing if absolutely no mitigation efforts were in place, according to a mid-March report from the U.K.'s Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. While Trump is trying to pitch 100,000 deaths as "a very good job," he's comparing it to the 2.2 million estimated deaths that would come from the U.S. doing nothing—not exactly a high bar.
