Willie Geist: Trump ‘Is Looking for People to Blame’

EXCERPT:

GEIST: "Yeah. You can add in the intelligence agencies of this country, which warned the White House and warned public officials that this was happening in China and it was coming to the United States. Of course, those warnings largely ignored by the White House, unfortunately. And the good news that we hear from Dr. Fauci is that that national death toll number, he believes, will be lower than they initially expected. Remember, when they came out, he and Dr. Birx said it could be between 100,000 to 240,000 Americans dead from Coronavirus. It kind of stopped us all in our tracks. But he says because of social distancing, because now we’re doing things we should have been earlier, that number could be lower. Same thing you're seeing in New York City where the number of hospitalizations is down. The death number is, again, staggering. 779 just yesterday. But, if, the governor says, we continue on this path, of course the danger is people see the numbers and see hospitalizations down, it’s getting better, if they stop behaving the way we’ve been behaving for the last couple weeks, which is responsibly and distancing socially, that it does work. That’s the bottom line. Any doctor you ask says this does work. And Jonathan Lemire, we talked a little bit yesterday about places the President has looked to assign blame. Governors, they should have been ready with their own ventilators. The World Health Organization now. He has a sense that this is bad and worse than he said it was going to be. And he’s looking for people to blame."