Pelosi Criticizes Trump After He Tells People to ‘Liberate’ Certain States

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is weighing in on President Donald Trump’s latest criticism of governors — namely the Democratic governors.

In multiple states, where coronavirus cases are more widespread than others, people are protesting and demanding stay-at-home orders be lifted. In multiple tweets on Friday, the president also encouraged people to “liberate” those states.

When asked about the situation on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” Pelosi urged Americans not to “take the bait.” She also believes this is one of Trump’s tactics to “delay in dealing with” the coronavirus response efforts.

“I won’t take the bait,” Pelosi said on Friday evening. “This is another example of the distraction that they want to make from the fact that the President has said that this pandemic was a hoax, and that’s not true. That the President said it will magically disappear, that’s not true.”

She continued, “Again and again, he was in denial and delay in dealing with this. This is just a distraction. Don’t fall for that. Don’t take the bait.”

See Pelosi’s remarks below:

Pelosi went on to discuss what she believes is the problem with Trump’s coronavirus response efforts — lack of factual scientific evidence and data to make sound decisions.

The California lawmaker, who recently penned a note about the importance of truth and testing, also criticized Trump’s leadership insisting that “delaying and denial” have led to a “deadly” outcome.

She said, “I think delaying and denial were deadly. I think they cost lives.”

Pelosi noted that she is speaking out because the American people deserve the truth.

“The reason I’m speaking out and I sent a letter to my colleagues, which I’m overwhelmed by the response I’ve received nationally and from my colleagues, about insisting on the truth is let’s not continue on a path of misrepresentation and falsehoods.”

Pelosi went on to discuss the types of testing needed to definitively plan for reopening the economy.

“Let’s get right to the science, the evidence, the data, and facts. And that’s what we have in our proposal on hospitals, is hopefully, to have testing with the data collection on how racial differences are revealed in getting the facts and the data. That’s so important. And contact tracing, so that we can, once we know who might be infected, what contacts he or she may have had with other people and their own families and the rest.”

Pelosi’s interview follows reports about Trump’s tweets and his defense of his remarks during Friday’s White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.

The president came under fire for tweets that encouraged residents in multiple states to “liberate” those states with Democratic governors, including Virginia, Minnesota, and Michigan.

When asked about the tweets, Trump said that he saw no problem with people protesting despite them disregarding social distancing guidelines which could increase the spread of the virus.

As of Saturday morning, there are over 706,000 coronavirus cases in the U.S., with more than 37,000 deaths.