More lies from Trump about his failure to ramp up testing earlier.
Fact check: Hilton CEO shatters Trump's testing conspiracy theory while sitting beside him
Updated 3:43 PM EDT April 30, 2020
Washington
At a White House meeting with corporate executives on Wednesday, President Donald Trump repeated his conspiratorial suggestion that the media is talking about a lack of coronavirus testing to try to damage him politically.
And then, 31 minutes later, the CEO sitting beside Trump made clear that his claim was nonsense.
Christopher Nassetta, president and CEO of the Hilton hotel company, did not confront Trump explicitly. But Nassetta communicated that more testing is essential to his company's future -- thus shattering the President's absurd
assertion that critical questions about the pace of testing are a mere "media trap."
Early in the White House roundtable, Trump boasted of how well he says his administration has done in supplying ventilators and masks, saying you don't even hear about these issues anymore, and about how well he claims it has done on testing. He added, "And you shouldn't be hearing about testing, but that's the last thing they can complain about, I guess."
Talk about testing is not an anti-Trump scheme. Rather, it's talk about a matter vital to the country's future. Public health experts, who
say the Trump administration was too slow to create an adequate testing system, have emphasized that
conducting far more tests now is critical to limiting the further spread of the virus and safely lifting economic restrictions.
Republican governors and
corporate executives have emphasized the same. When a reporter asked Wednesday if any of the executives present were worried people won't really come back to their businesses until there is a coronavirus vaccine, Nassetta spoke up -- and used the word "testing" three times.
Nassetta said "of course we worry about it." Customers are "desperate" to get back out and travel, he said, but want safety. He continued: "...Our customers are saying they're looking for the government, both state and federal government, to focus on testing so that they understand, you know, what real mortality rates are..."
Nassetta argued that more testing would help customers understand that people who are not elderly or infirm are probably at much lower risk than originally estimated. Then, after touting a new Hilton cleanliness program, Nassetta said his customers "want to know that people are being responsible. Right? They want to know that we are doing the testing, the social distancing..."
