Did Trump call coronavirus a hoax? What about Biden? Here’s what the transcripts say
The presidential campaign for Donald Trump released audio Thursday of Joe Biden calling coronavirus a hoax, but did the Democratic presidential hopeful really say that?
In the audio posted on Twitter by @TrumpWarRoom, which is managed by the president’s campaign, Biden appears to say, “The coronavirus is a hoax.”
The audio was intentionally released by the campaign to highlight “Twitter’s double standard in policing political speech,” according to The Hill. The campaign spliced two videos together to make it seem like Biden referred to the virus as a hoax, The Hill reported.
“The media is giving a pass to a pro-Biden TV ad that doctors and deceptively edits audio of President Trump, even though every independent fact checker said President Trump DID NOT call the coronavirus a hoax,” the campaign said in a tweet that featured their own doctored video. “Joe Biden, on the other hand? This sounds authentic.”
In a super PAC campaign ad for Biden released last month, Trump appeared to say a similar remark. “Coronavirus — this is their new hoax,” Trump is shown saying in the ad. PolitiFact called Biden’s ad “misleading.”
During a South Carolina rally, Trump was talking about the virus and claimed it was the democrats’ new hoax.
“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right?” Trump said Feb. 28, according to PolitiFact. “Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing’? They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They don’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
“One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was not a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”
Snopes also confirmed Trump did not call coronavirus a hoax, but the fact-checking service said the president “seemed to downplay the severity of the outbreak, comparing it to the common flu.”
The Trump campaign named California senator Kamala Harris, CNN’s Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, and NBC’s Chuck Todd as high-profile people who “repeated the lie” that Trump called the virus a hoax.
Biden also claimed the president said the remark.
“The president of the United States says it’s a hoax? It’s hard to believe. Even for him it’s hard to believe,” Biden said, according to Politico.
The campaign tried to remove the Biden ad from Twitter but was unsuccessful, according to The Hill. That led to the campaign posting its Thursday ad.
“Twitter has so far effectively instituted a ‘Biden protection rule,’ refusing to apply their manipulated media label to video and audio of President Trump that every independent fact checker says is false,” a Trump campaign official told The Hill.
”This tweet forces the issue and makes Twitter decide. It can enforce its arbitrary rules fairly and equally, or it can have its policy exposed as totally ineffective or a partisan shame. It’s their move.”
This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 9:42 AM with the headline "Did Trump call coronavirus a hoax? What about Biden? Here’s what the transcripts say."