President Donald Trump said his message to Americans grieving the loss of loved ones to the CCP virus is, “I love you.”
“I want to say ‘I love you.’ I want to say that we’re doing everything we can. I also want to say that we’re trying to protect people over 60 years old. We’re trying so hard,” Trump said in Arizona on May 5.
“I want to just say to the people that have lost family and have lost loved ones—and the people that have just suffered so badly, and just made it—that we love you, we’re with you, we’re working with you, we’re supplying vast amounts of money like never before, we want that money to get to the people, and we want them to get better.”
The new disease primarily causes severe illness in the elderly and people with serious preexisting health conditions like obesity, kidney disease, and cancer.
Trump said no one has dwelled more on the death toll from the virus than him.
“To the people that have lost someone, there is nobody—I don’t sleep at night thinking about it—there is nobody that’s taking it harder than me,” he said.
“But at the same time, I have to get this enemy defeated, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The president was speaking to ABC News after traveling to Arizona to visit a factory making masks and to meet with Native American leaders.
Trump said he aspires to be “a cheerleader for our country” but views himself as being able to take hard decisions, such as the travel ban on foreign nationals from China announced on Jan. 31.
“I want to be optimistic, I don’t want to be mister doom and gloom. It’s a very bad subject. I’m not looking to tell the American people, when nobody knows really knows what’s happening yet, ‘Oh this is going to be so tragic,’” he said.
“I want to be, aside from everything else, and I’m going to use a term, and some people love it and some people hate it, but I love it, I want to be a cheerleader for our country.”
