Democratic Congressman Threatens Trump Jr. with a 'Serious Altercation' Over Coronavirus Comments
Democratic Rep. John Garamendi of California issued a strong threat to President Donald Trump’s eldest son in a live television appearance Friday morning on MSNBC.
Not pleased with recent remarks from Donald Trump Jr. regarding alleged attempts by American leftists to weaponize the global spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) against the Trump administration, Garamendi suggested the president’s son should take a wide berth of him in the future to avoid “a serious altercation.”
“He should not be near me when he says that,” Garamendi told news anchor Hallie Jackson. “There would be a serious altercation.”
“That is totally outrageous. I can assure you that there is not a Democrat or Republican in Congress that wants anybody to be sick,” the 75-year-old Democrat added. “What we are concerned about is the administration’s response to this illness. We’ve known since December that there was an epidemic in China.”
“Don Jr. had better not get anyplace close to me. It would not be a healthy situation,” he later reiterated.
.@RepGaramendi suggests he might beat up @DonaldJTrumpJr
for saying some Dems hope the Coronavirus will spread to make Trump look bad:“He should not be near me when he says that, there would be a serious altercation” pic.twitter.com/6vyYXN6VOh
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 28, 2020
Following suit with a number of prominent Democratic opponents to the president, Garamendi went on to accuse the Trump administration of failing to respond quickly enough to the early stages of the global outbreak, which cropped up last month in Wuhan, China.
Transmissible through human-to-human contact, the new strain of SARS-like coronavirus was believed Thursday to have spread to more than 82,000 people globally and killed roughly 2,700, according to CNN.
Weekend panic over more than 1,000 new case reports in South Korea, Italy and even Iran was, however, said to have impacted global market trends in a dramatic and negative fashion — an economic downturn exacerbated Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s early public warning COVID-19 would almost certainly see wider stateside spread in the coming months.
The president has downplayed such sentiments, according to Politico, requesting Monday that Congress allocate roughly $1.25 billion in untouched capital as emergency funding for executive disease response efforts, which lean on heavy travel restrictions and screening procedures instituted by the administration at the start of the outbreak while American scientists scramble for a vaccine
According to Democrats like Garamendi, whose 3rd Congressional District reportedly has seen the first stateside cases of untraceable community spread, the response has been underwhelming.
“We’ve known since December that there was an epidemic in China,” Garamendi claimed. “We’ve known since that time that there were Americans that were exposed to this in Wuhan and other parts of China. We know that there was a Princess cruise ship with high exposure and cases in Japan.”
“Those people were brought back to the United States, frankly, with very little planning, and very little preparation, and no testing available,” the congressman said.
This from @DonaldJTrumpJr is completely accurate. The Dems first blasted Trump for overreacting to the coronavirus and now are blasting him for not doing enough. The Democrats want a coronavirus outbreak to help them politically. pic.twitter.com/4CV7nAmLL6
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 28, 2020
As of yet, however, the U.S. has recorded just 60 cases of non-fatal coronavirus, according to The Washington Post — leading right-wing personalities such as the president’s son to believe the threat to the U.S. is largely media and political hype, meant to damage the Trump economy.
“There’s no question that the threat of coronavirus can destabilize the market,” Trump Jr. told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. “But the fact that the Democrats are seemingly hoping for this to happen — just like you’ve seen them over the last year pray for a disaster to happen in the economy, meaning people lose their jobs, their mortgages, their livelihoods — so that they can own Trump somehow, is absolutely insane.”
“We’ve seen this play out for four years. Anything that they can use to try to hurt Trump, they will,” he said. “The playbook is old at this point, but for them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness.”
“I don’t know if this is coronavirus or Trump Derangement Syndrome, but these people are infected badly,” the president’s son continued.
Trump retweeted a comment from GOP strategist Andrew Surabian to Jackson saying “it was disgusting” that she allowed Garamendi to “violently threaten” Trump “with ZERO PUSHBACK or condemnation for his outrageous remarks. No one expects an MSNBC host to be objective, but tacitly supporting violence via your silence was beyond the pale.”
Hallie, it was disgusting how you allowed @RepGaramendi to violently threaten @DonaldJTrumpJr, with ZERO PUSHBACK or condemnation for his outrageous remarks.
No one expects an MSNBC host to be objective, but tacitly supporting violence via your silence was beyond the pale. https://t.co/Iuq0mcq6Zq
— Andrew Surabian (@Surabees) February 28, 2020
The Western Journal has reached out to Garamendi’s office for comment but has not received a response.
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