Biden campaign calls Eric Trump’s coronavirus comments ‘unbelievably reckless’

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign ripped Eric Trump after the president’s son in an interview on Fox News said the coronavirus would “magically all of a sudden go away and disappear” after the November election. 

The president’s son made the remarks Saturday in an interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro as part of an argument in which he also said that Biden and his campaign thought they had an advantage over President Trump because the coronavirus was preventing the president from holding his signature rallies.

“Listen, Biden loves this. Biden can’t go on stage without making some horrible blunder, I mean even from his basement he’s making awful gaffes every single day, so his campaign is thrilled that he’s not going out there,” Eric Trump said. 

“They think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time,” the president’s son continued. “So they will and you watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3, coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen,” he said.

Eric Trump described the effort as a strategy.

“Make no mistake, to a lot of them Jeanine, to a lot of them, this is a very cognizant strategy that they’re trying to employ,” he said, that was no different from provisions Democrats wanted to include in coronavirus relief bills or mail-in voting, or allowing “illegal immigrants to vote in our country.”

“It is a cognizant strategy and it’s sad, and again, it’s not going to be allowed to happen and we’re going to win in November,” he concluded. 

Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization and the son of the president @EricTrump Trump joins “JUSTICE” tonight to react to my opening monologue and much more. Take a look. pic.twitter.com/bnn6QF2y4j

— Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) May 17, 2020

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager and communications director, said in a statement that it was “absolutely stunning and unbelievably reckless” for Eric Trump “to claim that the coronavirus is a political hoax that will ‘magically’ disappear.”

“The simple fact is that President Trump ignored the threat of the coronavirus for months and has mishandled the response at every step since — destroying the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administrations and leading to countless unnecessary death,” she said.

“Trump’s campaign knows he can’t run on that dismal record so they’re desperate to do whatever they can to throw up a smokescreen to try to conceal his historic mismanagement of this crisis,” she continued.

Eric Trump is an executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

The U.S. has counted more than 1.4 million COVID-19 infections, leading to at least 89,207 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

A number of states have begun to reopen, though public health officials have urged caution, stating that it’s possble that if people do not continue to undertake social distancing practices, there could be new outbreaks of the COVID-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus.