Don Trump Jr. inadvertently made a strong case for his father to be driven from office: columnist

Reacting to Don Trump Jr. blurting out that the number of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is down to “almost nothing," on Fox News when deaths from the coronavirus topped 1,000 in a day, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent claimed the president's son made a strong case for the ending of his father's presidency.

The oldest son of the president appeared with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday night and went on a frantic rant about the coronavirus -- accusing the media and medical authorities of overstating the dangers of the health crisis that killed almost 230,000 Americans with infection rates surging upward.

“Yeah, these people are truly morons, you know what I mean? I like how they go after Scott Atlas because he’s not an epidemiologist, but Sanjay Gupta now magically is," Trump Jr. said of the CNN medical expert who is a neurosurgeon. "I mean, give me a break, Laura, the reality is this — if you look, I put it up on my Instagram a couple days ago, because I went through the CDC data because I kept hearing about new infections — but I was like, well, why aren’t they talking about this? Oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing, because we’ve gotten control of this thing.”

As Sargent noted, Trump Jr. has taken a page from his father's playbook and is playing the victim to deny responsibility.

"On Fox, Trump Jr. positively oozed with this sort of phony, staged victimization. Media figures are hyping coronavirus as part of a broader effort to deliberately discourage Trump rallies, he and Ingraham agreed," he wrote. "In reality, all of us who practice social distancing are enduring the emotional hardships imposed by it. But in Trumpist mythology, only conservatives and Trump supporters are the victims of efforts to instill it. Public health measures can only be about disrupting the political association of Trump supporters."

The columnist went to add that Don Jr. inadvertently gave undecided voters a strong reason to vote for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, because a Trump victory would mean more of the same when it comes to the mismanagement of the pandemic.

"Indeed, with this whole rant, the president’s son actually framed the stakes of this election quite usefully. He is telling us exactly what reelecting his father stands for: the proposition that the current level of viral spread, sickness, misery and death constitute an acceptable trade-off for resuming total normalcy and reaping the benefits of doing so, as if that were even possible amid pandemic conditions in the first place," he wrote before adding, "Trump and his allies simply don’t think the current levels of cases and deaths are a big deal."

"We already know how Trump will handle the virus, and what it means for our country. We’re living through it right now. His course can only get worse, perhaps much worse," Sargent wrote before warning, "And the president’s son just told us as clearly as we could ask for that if you reelect his father, nothing will change."

You can read the whole piece here and watch video of the president's son below: