‘I think he’s learned that you can’t gaslight a virus…’
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Former Vice President Al Gore said President Donald Trump needs to heed the experts and scientific research that support climate change in the same way that he has with the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump was among the many who initially questioned the severity of the outbreak and encouraged Americans to go about their daily lives until early March.
He has since embraced his new role as a ‘war-time’ president, putting himself front and center at daily press briefings alongside the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force.
Gore praised Trump for his change of heart in the fight against the coronavirus after expressing early skepticism.
“Now, I think the president—to his credit—has been moving away from that,” Gore said in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, according to Raw Story.
“I think he’s learned that you can’t gaslight a virus,” Gore continued. “You’ve really got to pay attention to what the scientific facts are.”
The longtime environmental activist also threw in a plug for his favorite pet cause, drawing a false equivalency between the work of epidemiologists and climatologists whose apocalyptic global-warming forecasts have been notoriously “torqued up,” according to Gore himself.
“And, by the way, we need to do that where the climate crisis is concerned, too, because it’s exactly the same thing,” Gore said.
Much like Gore’s own climate alarmism, coronavirus fearmongering in the media—and even among some publicity-hungry scientists—has run rampant with dire projections that have since been revised and downgraded.
Several outlets have been called out for their misleading or false claims and repeated efforts to smear the president by politicizing the pandemic. Democrats including current presidential contender Joe Biden have used manipulated video to distort his words, as a Washington Post fact-check revealed.
Since declaring a national emergency, Trump has made the virus his top priority and is following the expertise of advisers like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped to establish the White House’s social-distancing guidelines.
Fauci’s recommendations have included restricting groups to no more than 10 people, which many states have now ordered, effectively shutting down a major portion of commercial activity and sending Trump’s historically bullish economy into likely recession.
“And we still have states that have not adopted the kind of policies that Dr. Fauci and the real experts have advised, partly because they’ve made it kind of a political partisan kind of issue,” Gore said, HuffPost reported.
Gore said he sympathizes with Trump supporters who believed the president when he said that the Left’s sensationalist hyping of the coronavirus was a hoax.
“I don’t agree with his policies, but those who follow him—I’m afraid many of them have been misled into thinking that some of his earlier statements about using the word hoax—and he used it in a specialized way—but saying it was going to disappear, those kinds of things,” Gore said. “I feel badly for those who believe that stuff and have not been protecting themselves.”
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.