Former GOP strategist slams Fox News’ Laura Ingraham as a ‘lethal fraud’ for her ‘sycophantic’ defense of Trump

For weeks, far-right pundit Laura Ingraham — like many of her colleagues at Fox News — downplayed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and claimed that the media were exaggerating the danger. Ingraham still views any warnings about coronavirus as an attack on President Donald Trump, even when those warnings are coming from the right. And this week, Never Trump conservative Steve Schmidt is calling Ingraham out for her buffoonery.

Appearing on MSNBC, the former Republican strategist told host Nicolle Wallace (who worked in the George W. Bush Administration in the 2000s and is also an anti-Trump conservative) that the death toll from coronavirus in the U.S. would “exceed the 9/11 totals.” Schmidt explained, “The scale of the tragedy that we’re in the front edge of is really hard to overstate…. And the government has shown itself completely outmatched by this crisis. Where we needed bigness, we got smallness across the board — and the president, I’m sure later today, will once again demonstrate that he is simply not up to this at a moral level, at a mental level, and at a basic competency level.”

When Ingraham saw the MSNBC clip on Twitter, she reflexively rushed to Trump’s defense — dismissing Schmidt as “another irrelevant NeverTrump former Republican ‘strategist’ who sounds like he’s hoping for calamity.” But Schmidt was hardly celebrating the coronavirus death toll in the U.S., and on Twitter, he shot back, “Hey Laura, it is a calamity. It’s a calamity because of the willful, delusional, purposeful denial of this crisis for months by Trump and sycophantic and dishonest propagandists like you. It is the greatest failure in Presidential history and exposes you as a lethal fraud.”

The coronavirus figures reported by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore demonstrate that Schmidt is hardly exaggerating when he uses the word “calamity.” According to the CSSE, at least 41,261 people had died from the pandemic as of Tuesday afternoon, March 31 — including more than 3100 in the United States.