Brian Kilmeade, a host on “Fox & Friends,” pushed back Wednesday when a Trump campaign spokesperson said things were “undoubtedly” better today than four years ago.
“Listen, the president wants to go in there and talk about all the accomplishments he’s done in his first term and how he’s made people’s lives better,” said Hogan Gidley, who recently moved from the White House to become the Trump campaign’s new national press secretary.
“It answers the age-old question — are you better off now than you were before? And the answer, undoubtedly, is yes,” he added.
Kilmeade pushed back on Gidley’s remarks, reminding him Americans are experiencing a public health and economic crisis.
“With the pandemic, now you know the growth is not there,” Kilmeade said. “You know the unemployment [rate] is still 11 percent. So you can’t really say you’re better off than you were three years ago because of, at the very least, the pandemic. So you can’t really say that, right?”
Gidley responded by saying that ”this global pandemic hit all of us, not just here in this country but across the world,” touting the president’s response to the pandemic.
“As of right now, this president’s policy, this president’s decisions, his leadership, has saved almost 2 million lives in this country,” Gidley said, referring to a March study from the Imperial College London that estimated 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus.
“I put that up against anybody,” Gidley added.
So far, the U.S. has had 131,521 deaths from the coronavirus, higher than any other country.
The U.S. is also experiencing new outbreaks of the disease in a number of states, particularly in the South, that have increased concerns that the country is not getting control of the pandemic.
Nearly 3 million people in the U.S. have contracted the coronavirus, by far the most of any country.
Trump has come under criticism over his handling of the virus, and has seen his poll numbers slide. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has built a lead over Trump nationally and in swing states.