President Donald Trump ended Friday’s White House coronavirus daily press briefing with an announcement that he will have a “big decision” coming up and that he can only “hope to God” that it will be the right one.
The president said the decision would be the biggest and most complicated one he will make in his life about when to reopen the economy.
“Staying at home leads to death also and it is very traumatic for this country but staying at home if you look at numbers that leads to a different kind of death. But it leads to death also. So, it’s a very big decision. As I say, it’s the biggest decision I’ll ever make,” Trump said Friday.
Trump took on CNN’s Jim Acosta for naming the daily briefings “happy talk”, telling the reporter this is not a happy talk but the “real deal.”
“These are the saddest news conferences that I’ve ever had. I don’t like doing them it. You know why? Because I’m talking about death. I’m talking about taking the greatest economy ever created,” Trump said.
“There’s no happy talk, Jim,” Trump admonished Acosta. “This is the real deal. And I’ve got to make the biggest decision of my life. And I’ve only started thinking about that. I mean, you know, I’ve made a lot of big decisions over my life. You understand that. This is by far the biggest decision of my life because I have to say okay, let’s go. This is what we’re going to do.”
Confirmed U.S. cases of COVID-19 disease caused by the virus reached 485,000 on Friday and rose by 30,000 to 35,000 cases a day as more tests became available. Over 1,6 million confirmed cases have been reported globally, with the death toll exceeding 100,000
