The full transcript of the excerpt below is available at Whitehouse.gov for your review.

THE PRESIDENT: But when you do 14 million tests, you’re going to find more cases. If instead of 14 million tests we did 3 million — like, Germany is at about 3 million; South Korea is at 3 million, and they’ve done a very good job. It’s not a knock, but we’re at almost 14 million. We’re going to be passing 14 million very soon.

So you’re going to have more tests. If we do 3 million, everyone would say, “Oh, we’re doing great,” you know, in terms of cases. We’re going to have more cases. If we did 3 million — maybe that’s what we should’ve done. I said — if I would’ve done 3 million, they’d say, “Oh, they have very few cases. United States is doing well.”

We’re finding a lot of people. By doing testing, you’re finding people. So we’re doing 14, Germany is doing 3, South Korea doing 3, and I think they’re number two and three. So we’re way ahead of everybody. But when you do that, you have more cases. So a lot of times, the fake news media will say, “You know, there are a lot of cases in the United States.” Well, if we didn’t do testing at a level that nobody has ever dreamt possible, you wouldn’t have very many cases.

So we’re finding a lot of cases, and we’re doing a great job once we find them.

Okay, thank you very much.

Q (Inaudible) follow up. How does it compare to a per capita basis? Obviously, the United States is much larger than a lot of these Europeans countries.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.

Q How does our testing compare per capita —

THE PRESIDENT: Sure.

Q — to those nations?

THE PRESIDENT: You want to do that, Deborah?

DR. BIRX: Yeah.

THE PRESIDENT: Per capita.

DR. BIRX: Yeah, our — you know, our testing now, we’re almost up to 4 percent. So some of the state — some of the European countries are at 4 to 5 percent. And I think our goal is to ensure that we can find the asymptomatics. And I think that’s really our focus right now, working with every state to really help them identify where these clusters came from historically, and then proactively going for those clusters, identifying them early, and finding the asymptomatic individuals before. And no one is intending to spread the virus. I always want to be very clear about that. Asymptomatic patient — people don’t know they’re infected. And so, together, we’re really working to find them.

And I think it’s a — it’s a unique challenge, and I think together we’re really making progress.

THE PRESIDENT: And, you know, when you say “per capita,” there’s many per capitas. It’s, like, per capita relative to what? But you can look at just about any category, and we’re really at the top, meaning positive on a per capita basis, too. They’ve done a great job.

“They are warriors aren’t they, when you see them going into those hospitals and they’re putting the stuff that you deliver, but they’re wrapping themselves, and the doors are opening, and they’re going through the doors, and they’re not even ready to go through those doors, they probably shouldn’t, but they can’t get there fast enough, and they’re running into death just like soldiers run into bullets in a true sense, I see that with the doctors and the nurses and so many of the people that go into those hospitals, it’s incredible to see, it’s a beautiful thing to see.”

— Donald Trump, May 15, 2020

Biden/Obama were a disaster in handling the H1N1 Swine Flu. Polling at the time showed disastrous approval numbers. 17,000 people died unnecessarily and through incompetence! Also, don’t forget their 4 Billion Dollar Obamacare website that should have cost close to nothing!

— Donald Trump

Hmmm.

I am wondering why the president is busying himself with stuff that happened 11 years ago. Does any of this matter today? Does it make excuses for his own incompetence when others, more than a decade before him, were also supposedly incompetent?

I might even buy it, if his facts were correct. However:

• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 12,469 people died in the United States from the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, not 17,000.
• Obama’s approval rating also wasn’t disastrous. A poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News over the course of several months in 2009 showed that Obama’s approval rating for his handling of the H1N1 pandemic ranged from the high 60s to the high 50s. I wonder why Trump is brining up approval ratings? If my loved ones are dying alone in an ICU, I really could care less about Trump’s approval ratings, or, for that matter, Obama’s in 2009.
• The “Obamacare” website cost much less than $5 billion.

I wish the president got a grip and realized what people need now in a leader:

• Calmness
• Honesty
• Empathy
• Support
• Relentless work toward mobilizing government resources to help the people
• Guidance based on truth and science
• Unifying and encouraging language

I see none of this in Trump. He seems to be busy fomenting division and blaming others.

How is that helping?

This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.

And they’re constantly trying to come up with a new – people go to a hospital and they catch – they go for a heart operation – that’s no problem, but they end up dying from – from problems. You know the problems I’m talking about. There’s a whole genius to it.”

— Donald Trump, April 11, 2020

Here is a very insightful article by Peter Wehner in The Atlantic, titled:

The Trump Presidency is Over

It shows how the nation has started discounting the federal leadership and taken matters into its own hands. Seeing Trump speak now, every time, I can read it in his eyes. He knows it. Everyone does.