As global markets plunged amid growing fears about the coronavirus outbreak, President Donald Trump and his allies pulled from a familiar playbook Friday and blamed others for the slide.
It's a challenging sell for a president who has lashed his fate to Wall Street like no other.
The president's team responded to the biggest one-week Wall Street sell-off in more than a decade with a deflection strategy, playing down the threat and eagerly parceling out responsibility to Democrats, the media and the entrenched government bureaucracy.
Trump tweeted that The Do Nothing Democrats" had wasted time on impeachment and anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad" while defending his own response, which many Democrats have deemed sluggish and scattershot.
They're doing everything they can to instill fear in people, and I think it's ridiculous, and I think they're very disreputable, Trump later told reporters at the White House before leaving for a campaign rally in South Carolina.
So some people are giving us credit and some people aren't. But the only ones that aren't, they don't mean it. It's political. It's politics."
For them to take a pandemic and seemingly hope it comes here and kills millions of people so they can end Donald Trump's streak of winning is a new level of sickness, the president's eldest son said on Fox and Friends."
The comment drew an immediate rebuke from Democrats, including Rep. John Garamendi of California, who said Trump Jr. should keep his distance after the totally outrageous comment because there would be a serious altercation."
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