Trump Shares Thoughts on if He Could Have a ‘Do-Over on One Aspect’ of Pandemic

If President Donald Trump could have a “do-over on one aspect” of the coronavirus pandemic what would it be?

That is the question the president was asked during his town hall on Sinclair’s “America This Week.”

“With COVID, is there anything that you think you could have done differently if you had a mulligan or a do-over on one aspect of the way you handled it, what would it be?” Eric Bolling asked Trump in a clip released before the program airs Wednesday.

Trump, however, responded that he would not do much differently.

“Not much,” the president said. “Look, it’s all over the world. You have a lot of great leaders, you have a lot of smart people. It’s all over the world. It came out of China. China should have stopped it, they stopped it from spreading into other parts of China after Wuhan, but China should have stopped it.”

He reiterated, “Not much.”

Watch the video below:

Trump was also asked about face masks and why it has “become such a political football.”

The president suggested that he has “no problem” with masks, before noting Dr. Anthony Fauci — a member of the White House coronavirus task force — said not to wear them at the beginning of the pandemic when there were initial PPE shortages. He has long urged Americans to wear a mask in public to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, previously defended his earlier stance when asked during an interview with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell about advising Americans against wearing masks in public.

“I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct,” Fauci said. “We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm’s way every day to take care of sick people.”

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added that once it “became clear” that the virus could spread by asymptomatic carriers, “that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks.” He also noted that they soon realized they had “enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores.”