In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that from the start, he has been closely monitoring the global health emergency brought on by the coronavirus. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” Trump said on March 17, adding, “I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”

Of course, only eight days prior to that—on March 9—Trump tweeted a wildly inaccurate comparison between the coronavirus and the flu. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” Trump wrote. “It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

Responded Seth Meyers on Wednesday's edition of A Closer Look on Late Night: “Any time a world-renowned idiot like Donald Trump tells you to think about that, that's your queue to exit the conversation. He's like the dumbest guy at the cocktail party trying to make conversation by telling you something he read on a Snapple cap.”

On Tuesday, the Trump administration finally released official death toll estimates for the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, saying the number could reach 100,000 to 240,000 before it's over. At a press conference that day, Trump said he previously downplayed the impact of the coronavirus to provide Americans some hope. (Trump infamously said he wanted the country to re-open economically by Easter; he has since extended the Centers for Disease Control social distancing guidelines through the end of April.) “I’ve had many friends, businesspeople, people with great actually common sense—they said, ‘Why don’t we ride it out?’” Trump said on Tuesday. “A lot of people have said, a lot of people have thought about it, ride it out, don’t do anything, just ride it out and think of it as the flu. But it’s not the flu. It’s vicious.”

“You're the one who said it was like the flu! Those friends of yours were you,” an exasperated Meyers said in response to Trump's recent remarks. The host also noted how pervasive flu comparisons were at the early stage of the virus' spread.

“The lie that the coronavirus is just like the flu did obvious damage. Do you know how many people heard that and then repeated it?” Meyers said. “Even if you hated Donald Trump and knew not to trust a word he said, everyone had that one friend or relative on the text chain who said, 'Y'know, it's not going to be so bad! It's gonna be like the flu.”

Trump's shift over the last week has been attributed to a desire to win reelection, something Trump has not explicitly suggested himself during press conferences. But this week, when a question about the death toll was brought up, Trump wondered why Fox News reporter John Roberts hadn't asked what would have happened if the government didn't do anything to mitigate the spread. “This is the question I've been asking Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and Dr. [Deborah] Brix for a long time, and they've been working on this for a long time. The question is: what would have happened if we did nothing?” Trump said.

To which Meyers replied: “That is what you did. You did nothing, and you do nothing. You work less than CBD oil.”

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