What Did Trump Say About Coronavirus Testing? After Staff Claims He Was 'Joking,' Trump Gives His Own Version

Contradicting the explanations of his own administration, President Trump has said Monday that he was not joking at a Tulsa rally when he claimed to have asked for a slowdown in COVID-19 testing. White House staff members, including Vice President Mike Pence and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, had said Trump's remarks were made in jest.

“I don't kid, let me just tell you, let me make it clear,” Trump said, clarifying his stance on the matter when pressed by a reporter. “We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases.”

Trump explained that by testing more, the U.S. would have a greater number of confirmed cases. The comments have been criticized for prioritizing public image over public health.

Further confusing the intent of Trump’s comments in Tulsa was an interview Monday with conservative evangelical Christian religious television network CBN News. When asked whether he ordered his staff to slow testing, Trump denied giving the order but said that he had discussed the “disadvantage” of extensive testing.

“… I think we put ourselves at a disadvantage, I told my people,” Trump explained. “I said, ‘We've gotten so good at testing… We test much more than any other nation,’ so you hear about all these cases. So, instead of 25 million tests, let's say we did 10 million tests. We'd look like we were doing much better because we'd have far fewer cases. You understand that. I wouldn't do that, but I will say this: We do so much more than other countries it makes us, in a way, look bad but actually we're doing the right thing.”

Trump also claimed that extensive testing ends up counting, for example, innocuous cases of “sniffles” in children, which he believes are not dangerous enough to count towards the total number of cases.

He has also recently expressed displeasure at having to count clusters of COVID-19 that appear on cruises which aren’t the “fault” of the U.S.