President Donald Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic has cost him the on-air support of one of his most outspoken hometown defenders.

Mike Francesa, the longtime icon of New York sports talk radio, blasted the president on Monday with the type of tirade he typically reserves for the Knicks or Mets — accusing Trump of not funneling enough medical equipment to the current epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.


“We’re watching one thing happen in our city on the 11 o’clock news every night. We’re watching people die, and now we know people who died. And we’re not seeing one or two people die now in our neighborhood. We’re seeing them die by the tens and twenties by the day,” Francesa said, charging that police, firefighters, health care workers and other first responders “don’t have the supplies they need” to combat the public health crisis.

“So don’t give me the MyPillow guy doing a song-and-dance up here on a Monday afternoon when people are dying in Queens,” Francesa added. “Get the stuff made, get the stuff where it needs to go, and get the boots on the ground! Treat this like the crisis it is!”

Francesa’s fiery remarks came after the daily press briefing of the White House coronavirus task force on Monday, during which Trump introduced MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, the Minnesota multimillionaire inventor whose firm is manufacturing cotton face masks in short supply.

In that appearance before reporters, the president repeated his baseless claim from over the weekend that masks at New York hospitals could be “going out the back door,” apparently suggesting that nurses, doctors or other employees were stealing the personal protective equipment.


Trump then called on members of the media to investigate the supposed suspicious activity, a demand met with outrage from Francesa.

“You go investigate that! You have your military, your FEMA investigate that! That’s your job! You’re in charge of this!” he said. “If this is a war, they’re stealing your supplies, what do you do? You tell the media to go investigate it? What, and get back to you in six weeks or two months, as more people die on a daily basis? That’s what’s wrong here. There’s a disconnect.”

Francesa also took aim at the president’s comments on Sunday regarding the projected death toll from Covid-19 infections in the U.S., which the administration expects could result in 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities among Americans.

Trump had said that “if we can hold that down, as we’re saying to 100,000 [deaths], it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100,000 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job.”


“How can you have a scoreboard that says 2,000 people have died and tell us, ‘It’s OK if another 198,000 die, that’s a good job,’” Francesa said. “How is that a good job in our country? It’s a good job if nobody else dies! Not if another 198,000 people die! So now 200,000 people are disposable?”

Francesa, who first emerged as a supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign in spring 2016, has become increasingly disparaging of the administration’s handling of the pandemic in recent days on social media, while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has vacillated between praise and criticism of the president in an effort to ensure federal resources continue to flow to his state.