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Some CNN viewers had a meltdown on Monday when the liberal network allowed Rick Santorum to compliment President Trump about his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
During a discussion about coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, CNN host John King asked Santorum, a CNN contributor, why the president “gets so mad” when his staffers “tell the truth.” Fauci refused to deny on Sunday that some deaths could have possibly been avoided if the country was shut down back in February, as opposed to mid-March.
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“I think its Monday morning quarterbacking, I think that’s what’s sort of upsetting. I mean, if you look at a time when the commission recommended… there were maybe, what, half a dozen or a dozen people had died in this country from the virus,” Santorum said. “To suggest a dramatic step like that, when it looked like there wasn’t a whole lot of concern would have been a very…unusual thing to do and probably unwarranted thing to do at the time.”
Santorum then said Trump was “ahead of the curve” when it comes to combatting coronavirus, particularly pointing a finger at China over the pandemic.
Many CNN viewers didn’t appreciate Rick Santorum complimenting President Trump‘s response coronavirus pandemic.
“He didn’t get credit for that, got criticized for that. Imagine if he would have done this. He probably would have been criticized for that, too. He just thinks that we need a team that looks forward instead of trying to second-guess everything that was done in the past. No disaster in the history of this country has been handled with aplomb, they’re all tough, they’re all difficult,” Santorum said. “Yes, the president has made mistakes, but he’s also done some good things, and he seems to be on a pretty good footing right now.”
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King then told Santorum that Trump made the right call regarding China, but failed to take urgent steps regarding other aspects of the pandemic, such as ramping up testing.
“Like I said, I don’t think the president gets a perfect score on his response, but he gets some high marks for doing things that were controversial, he gets lower marks for probably not heeding the advice on some things early on but over, what he’s done, he’s broken the glass, he’s allowed the government to function in a way that it hasn’t functioned in a long, long time, to expedite a lot of thing moving forward, from testing to therapies,” Santorum said. “The FDA is working overtime on all this stuff.”
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Santorum’s name immediately began trending on social media as CNN viewers took to Twitter to complain about the network allowing someone to compliment Trump: