Neither of Fox’s purported “news”-side anchors in this special, Harris Faulkner or Bill Hemmer, asked Trump to identify exactly what he was talking about or prove the “death panels” charge. In a later segment in the afternoon, Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier commented that Trump had taken that moment to “push back and say the governor could’ve ordered ventilators,” without going into any further details on the specific charges about a number of ventilators or the charge of setting up “death panels.”

However, a review of the actual facts and reports shows that it does not at all appear that there was ever some proposal for Cuomo to buy the number of ventilators he would now need in this extraordinary emergency — and furthermore, Trump has brought this claim up from some of the most disreputable corners of right-wing media.

Judging by the phrasing of Trump’s claim, it appears that he was grabbing this claim directly from the perennially inaccurate right-wing website The Gateway Pundit, which put up a post two days ago with the same headline that Trump read on Fox.

The Gateway Pundit’s post was in turn based on a recent syndicated column by Betsy McCaughey, the former Republican lieutenant governor of New York in the 1990s who also recently appeared in a Fox Nation documentary to declare that “political venom” over Trump's coronavirus response is “more worrisome” than mass panic. (She was previously a frequent right-wing media source for the health care reform debate during the Obama administration and one of the primary pushers of the “death panel” lie.)

Now, in McCaughey’s telling, it’s Cuomo who’s sending a “death officer” to the hospital wards: