CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: Trump ‘needs to take another cognitive test’ if he believes US is the ‘envy of the world’ on coronavirus

President Donald Trump has continued to insist that no country has had better coronavirus testing than the United States and that the U.S. is the “envy of the world” when it comes to dealing with the deadly pandemic — which, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers, has killed more than 140,700 people in the U.S. and over 607,100 worldwide. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria took Trump to task on June 20, slamming the president for being so painfully out of touch during the pandemic.

When Trump was interviewed by Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Friday, July 17— an interview that aired over the weekend — he bragged about taking a mental acuity test and challenged former Vice President Joe Biden to take the same test. But Zakaria told CNN’s Brianna Keilar that Trump’s ludicrous claims about the United States’ coronavirus response are hardly a demonstration of his intellectual fitness.

“The truth is, Brianna, you don’t need to talk to experts, you don’t need to talk to leaders — all you have to do is look at the numbers,” Zakaria told Keilar. “If the president thinks that the United States is doing well in the coronavirus pandemic compared to the rest of the rich countries in the world, the advanced world, he needs to take another cognitive test. Because the United Sates is basically at the bottom of the heap. The United States, roughly speaking, has ten times the number of daily deaths that Europe has. Many European countries have a few hundred cases every day; Florida alone is up to 10,000 cases a day. So, we’re not just doing worse; we’re doing worse by an order of magnitude — and the data makes this absolutely clear.”

Watch the video below: