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Hillary Clinton Cracks Coronavirus Joke Aimed at Trump as Pandemic Grows

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As stateside coronavirus cases continued to spike Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in hot water on social media over a controversial joke made at President Donald Trump’s expense.

According to Johns Hopkins data, the United States overtook Italy just one day prior as the global leader in confirmed cases, reporting roughly 81,321 at the time amid increased testing efforts — a development which reinvigorated citizen and media concern surrounding the pandemic.

For Clinton, however, the news had apparently provided an opening for a well-placed jab at one of her 2016 presidential election rival’s most popular nationalist campaign slogans.

“He did promise ‘America First,'” Clinton wrote on Twitter, linking to a breaking New York Times report on the pandemic statistics.

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It was not the first time Clinton seemed to have a laugh at Trump’s expense regarding the ongoing viral outbreak.

Clinton’s Twitter account saw a dramatic increase in activity as the virus began to spread on a global scale throughout late February and early March, coming to a head this last week as presidential addresses regarding the pandemic became daily occurrences.

“Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse,” Clinton told Twitter followers Tuesday.

None of the former secretary of state’s previous commentary had received the response prompted by her Friday remark, however, which left a variety of prominent conservative personalities and users far from amused.

“This is some low bulls— … even for you,” comedian and political commentator Tim Young commented on the original tweet.

Human Events editor Ian Miles Cheong responded similarly, referring to the joke as “beyond the pale.”

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Others were far more cutting in their replies, berating Clinton for a career laden with political scandal and suggesting ill-timed jokes such as the one made Friday had only added to the relatability issues that plagued her failed 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns.

“This is why you aren’t president and he is,” right-wing political strategist Caleb Hull wrote on Twitter.

“Was it America first in Benghazi?” podcast host Joey Saladino wrote. “So glad you are NOT President!”

“I literally called out this misinformation yesterday,” he added, pointing to previous arguments against using total virus cases as the sole or primary metric in measuring national response to the pandemic.

Medical experts had previously warned about the potential for a dramatic spike in confirmed coronavirus cases across the United States, as testing kits became more widely available due to expedited legislative efforts made on a bipartisan basis by Congress in recent weeks, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The cases, many such experts argued, were baked into the cake by now, confirming previously known cases rather than uncovering new ones.

As the third most populous nation in the world, America’s now-100,717 cases are also far more spread out than those in smaller nations like Italy, Spain and Germany.

Reporting the second-most cases globally at roughly 86,000 confirmed, Italy maintains a population roughly five times smaller than that of the U.S. and is more than six times as densely populated, according to the United Nations-powered IndexMundi.

Virus-related deaths within the U.S. pale in comparison to those in Italy and Spain, which reported 9,134 and 4,940, respectively on Friday afternoon.

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Andrew J. Sciascia was the supervising editor of features at The Western Journal. Having joined up as a regular contributor of opinion in 2018, he went on to cover the Barrett confirmation and 2020 presidential election for the outlet, regularly co-hosting its video podcast, "WJ Live," as well.
Andrew J. Sciascia was the supervising editor of features at The Western Journal and regularly co-hosted the outlet's video podcast, "WJ Live."

Sciascia first joined up with The Western Journal as a regular contributor of opinion in 2018, before graduating with a degree in criminal justice and political science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper and worked briefly as a political operative with the Massachusetts Republican Party.

He covered the Barrett confirmation and 2020 presidential election for The Western Journal. His work has also appeared in The Daily Caller.




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