CLAIM: Trump said: “Many more people died during his administration of COVID than during my administration.”
VERDICT: MOSTLY TRUE, though Biden was president for longer during the pandemic, which distorts comparisons.
President Donald Trump told Elon Musk during an interview on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday that more people had died from the coronavirus under President Joe Biden than had died under his administration. That is true.
“There were roughly 460,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 up through the end of January 2021, the month when Mr. Biden took over. Mr. Biden has overseen roughly 800,000 deaths since,” the Washington Times noted in July.
Fact-checkers from the mainstream media have struggled to rationalize this reality.
In 2021, the Washington Post noted, ruefully, that Biden had set himself up for such comparisons: “As a candidate in 2020, he commented on what were then 220,000 deaths, saying that ‘anyone that is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.'”
There have been several times that many deaths under Joe Biden.
The Post also noted that more people had died under Trump in a 10-month period than in Biden’s first 10 months. But that, too, is a misleading comparison, since Biden came into office with a vaccine developed under Trump.
As Trump noted in his interview with Musk, the Trump administration bore the “brunt” of the pandemic — when it was still a mysterious illness, and when the media, in an election year, did everything they could to sow panic.
Biden still blames Trump for the economic impact of the pandemic, but it was the media, and Democrats, who insisted on locking down the economy, casting efforts by Trump and other Republicans to ease restrictions as deadly.
Vice President Kamala Harris recently claimed that Biden “got the COVID pandemic under control,” which is at odds with the fact that the U.S. is now experiencing a summer surge of COVID that is on track to be the biggest yet, though hospitalizations and deaths are down.
Moreover, Biden’s policy was so focused on vaccination that the new administration arguably neglected other methods of fighting the pandemic, and found itself short of personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing kits.
What has changed about the pandemic is the presence of a vaccine — which Kamala Harris was skeptical of in 2020 — and the fact that the media no longer politicizes it against the incumbent.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
