President Donald Trump turned an official coronavirus briefing into a political campaign rally on Wednesday as he offered scattershot thoughts about the Democratic primary race and questioned whether Bernie Sanders had really dropped out.
“He’s going to keep his delegates and he would like to get more? That’s not dropping out,” Trump said of Sanders during the briefing, which was supposed to be about the virus that has killed more than 14,000 Americans. “When you keep your delegates and you want more delegates before you get to the convention — that’s a weird deal going on there.”
Earlier in the day, Sanders had announced that, while his campaign is over, he plans to stay on the ballot in the remaining primaries in an effort to push Joe Biden, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, further to the left on some key issues.
Despite Trump’s confusion, Sanders made clear that his White House aspirations are over. “Vice President Biden will be the nominee,” the Vermont senator said as part of his live-streamed bow-out announcement.
Sanders’ granular presidential race exit wasn’t the only Democratic development that distracted Trump from the coronavirus pandemic.
Unprompted, Trump also used the White House briefing to poke fun at Biden for not yet securing the endorsement of his former boss.
“It does amaze me that President Obama hasn’t supported sleepy Joe,” Trump told reporters, as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. surged above 400,000. “It hasn’t happened. When is it going to happen? He knows something that you don’t know. I think I know, but you don’t know. It will be interesting.”
Trump offered few substantive updates about the COVID-19 outbreak during the briefing, other than professing that his administration is doing a “very good job” and vowing to rescind social distancing guidelines soon because people are supposedly “going stir-crazy.”
The commander-in-chief also didn’t pass up an opportunity to float a political pitch to Sanders supporters who may be hesitant to back Biden in November’s general election.
“I hope that a lot of Bernie Sanders people, just like they did last time, we got a tremendous percentage of Bernie people,” Trump said. “We agree that the U.S. has been ripped off by virtually every country they do business with. The difference is I’ve done a lot about it.”
———
©2020 New York Daily News
Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.