Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said President Donald Trump’s plan for the country to return to regular business activity soon was based on “notion mongering.”

Mitchell asked, “The president tweeted today, ‘Our people want to return to work.’ He said, ‘They will practice social distance over all else, and senior citizens watched over lovingly. We can do two things together. The cure cannot be worse than the problem. We will come back strong.’ He suggested last night on Twitter and his briefing today that he thinks people should go back sooner than later, which is in contradiction with his own task force, Dr. Fauci and others. What would be your message about whether as reluctant people are to see the economy tank, whether we have to get past this surge, whether we can consider coming back? And it is going to be more than two weeks.”

Pelosi said, “As I said, this is not a time for notion mongering, it is a time for serious, evidence-based, scientific decision making — scientists speaking truth to power. You can look at the examples around the world, and where there was confinement, where people stayed at home — look at China, Wuhan, they didn’t do this early enough 100,000 cases. In Singapore and Hong Kong, where they acted differently, a tiny percentage of that number infected. So when the president said you ask the doctors, they want to shut everything down, I think that was one of his other tributes to science, you can’t go to that place and cost to the economy of many more people getting infected and sick is a bigger cost than what we’ve been seeing now. We don’t want that to happen.”

She added, “What the president is suggesting is really a formula for more uncertainty, more infections, and more harm to the economy.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN