Fact check: At his first coronavirus briefing since April, Trump repeats a handful of classic false claims

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/21/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-briefing-july-21/index.html

In his first coronavirus briefing since April, President Donald Trump got a little more accurate about the state of the pandemic in the US -- but also continued to make some of the same false claims and promote some of the same misleading narratives of his previous moments in the White House briefing room.

Trump, reading from prepared remarks, acknowledged a "concerning rise" in cases in the South (he had previously dismissed the sharp increase as mere evidence of how many people are being tested) and said the situation will get worse before it gets better (he had previously claimed, as late as June, that the virus was dying out).

But Trump's new tone, like previous Trump new tones, did not last long.

He continued to boast that the US has done many more tests than other countries, ignoring the fact that many peer nations did so much better controlling the virus that they haven't needed to keep conducting so many tests.

He continued to say that the virus "will disappear," declining to acknowledge the inaccuracy of his previous suggestions that it would disappear without much harm to the American public -- or the possibility that it will take years for the virus to be eradicated, if it goes away at all.

And Trump repeated some of the specific false claims we and others fact checked repeatedly in earlier stages of the crisis: his claim that he inherited "empty cupboards" of supplies and ventilators, that he shut US borders to China and Europe, and that governors do not need anything from the federal government.