Since officially destroying this country and everything it stands for along with pretty much any chance he had at a second term in the presidency with his botched, non-response to the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump has taken his habit of deflecting to a whole new level.
Virtually every time the severity of the outbreak in the United States gets brought up in his presence, Trump goes off on a long-winded tangent about some other place in the world that has it so much worse off than we do here in the States — despite the fact that pretty much nowhere actually has it as bad off as we do, thanks to Donald Trump.
But this time, he seems to have picked the wrong country to mess with.
Yesterday, during his Minneapolis rally, Reuters reported on comments Trump made regarding New Zealand and the coronavirus pandemic, in which he claimed that the country is in the midst of a “terrible upsurge” after seemingly beating the virus for the past three months.
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“You see what’s going on in New Zealand?” Trump declared yesterday. “They beat it, they beat it, it was like front page they beat it… because they wanted to show me something.”
“The problem is… big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible. We don’t want that,” he stated.
However, unlike other countries that Trump has tried to throw under the bus, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wasn’t standing for Trump’s attempts to paint himself in a better light at the expense of her country.
“Obviously it’s patently wrong,” Ardern struck back in response to Trump’s comments.
Speaking to the press in comments reported by Reuters, Ardern stated, “I think anyone who’s following COVID and its transmission globally will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands, and in fact does not compare to most countries in the world.”
New Zealand has been the center of praise amid the coronavirus pandemic as their government immediately responded to the outbreak, shutting down borders and enforcing strict lockdown — resulting in only 22 deaths out of their population of around 5 million people, compared to the State’s 170,000 deaths and rising.
In early August, the country was able to celebrate 102 consecutive days without an outbreak, but broke their streak with a small cluster of cases linked to a family of four.
Nevertheless, they’re still FAR behind the United States and Trump’s non-response to the pandemic. And Ardern is not about to allow Donald to make it look like anything else.
Featured image via Flickr – The White House/Wikimedia Commons – New Zealand Government, Office of the Governor-General under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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