President Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Oval Office of the White House on October 2, 2019 in Washington, DC.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will discuss the deadly coronavirus outbreak during a news conference at 6 p.m. ET with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump made the announcement on Twitter after attacking media for “panicking markets” through their coverage of the virus.
The president’s tweet included a reference to MSNBC, which on Wednesday morning played a clip of CNBC’s interview with White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow from a day earlier.
Kudlow said in that clip that the U.S. has “contained” the coronavirus. “I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight,” he said.
Those comments, which came just hours after the CDC warned Americans to start preparing for the possibility of a pandemic, quickly garnered criticism and failed to contain hemorrhaging markets.
Trump in his tweets also lashed out at Democrats, who have criticized the administration’s response to the coronavirus so far, for being “all talk, no action” on the outbreak.
“The harsh fact of the matter is, the Trump administration has shown towering and dangerous incompetence when it comes to the coronavirus,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
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