Trump Gives Least Reassuring Answer Possible on Hantavirus Spread |
Trump Gives Least Reassuring Answer Possible on Hantavirus Spread
Is the Trump administration prepared to respond to the hantavirus outbreak?
President Trump was asked about the recent outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship, and his answer was not reassuring.
Speaking to press outside of the White House Thursday evening, Trump was asked if he had been briefed on the virus, and after calling the ABC News reporter who asked the question “fake news,” he said that yes, he had been. The reporter then asked what the president had learned in those briefings.
“Well, I think you’re going to be told everything, and you already have, uhhh, it’s very much, we hope, under control. There was the ship, and I think we’re gonna make a full report about it tomorrow. We have a lot of people, it’s a lot of great people are studying it. It should be fine, we hope,” Trump said.
The reporter then asked if Americans should be concerned that the virus was going to spread.
“I hope not. I mean, I hope not. We’ll do the best we can,” Trump responded.
Q: Have you been briefed on the hantavirus?TRUMP: Yes I haveQ: What have you learned?TRUMP: Ahhh -- it's very much we hope under controlQ: Should Americans be concerned it's going to spread?TRUMP: I hope not. We'll do the best we can. pic.twitter.com/6Kjz1Tw33M— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 8, 2026
Q: Have you been briefed on the hantavirus?TRUMP: Yes I haveQ: What have you learned?TRUMP: Ahhh -- it's very much we hope under controlQ: Should Americans be concerned it's going to spread?TRUMP: I hope not. We'll do the best we can. pic.twitter.com/6Kjz1Tw33M
Trump’s answer didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, especially considering how badly he handled the Covid-19 pandemic in the last year of his first term as president. His Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., happens to have laid off all of the cruise ship inspectors in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program last year. The Trump administration also cut funding to study the hantavirus last year.
Trump has not given any detailed information on how he’s going to handle the recent outbreak. Let’s hope that this virus somehow gets contained, because if it spreads in the U.S., we’ll have an even worse pandemic.
Trump Suffers Two Brutal Court Losses in Less Than 24 Hours
The courts have delivered major blows to two of Trump’s signature policies: tariffs and the “anti-woke” crusade.
President Trump suffered two resounding legal losses on Thursday, as two separate federal judges decided that his 10 percent global tariff and DOGE’s anti-woke grant terminations were unlawful.
In a 2–1 decision, the Court of International Trade determined the president’s global tariff—announced in February after the Supreme Court rejected his “Liberation Day” tariffs—is unlawful due to his misrepresenting Section 122 of the Trade Act. Trump tried to claim that the phrase “balance-of-payments deficits” in the law is the same as a “trade deficit.” It is not, the court ruled.
“It is clear that Congress was aware of the differences in the words it chose,” the majority opinion explained. “The Government argues that in today’s world, the current account is the proper component for identifying a balance-of-payments deficit.… Problematically for the Government, and as discussed herein, Congress in 1974 identified the settlement, liquidity, and basic balance deficits as ‘balance-of-payments deficits.’”
It is unclear what the next steps are, although the tariffs were set to expire near the end of July.
Trump’s second loss came as a federal judge stated what we all already knew—that Elon Musk’s DOGE “blatantly used” race, gender, sexuality, and other markers to decide which grants and opportunities to kill.
“Treating Black civil-rights history, Jewish testimony about the Holocaust, the oft-forgotten Asian American experience, the shameful treatment of the children of Native tribes, or the mere mention of a woman as a marker of lack of merit or wastefulness is not lawful,” U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon wrote. The decision is a win for nonprofit organizations that had been under threat of or had already lost funding due to the DOGE cuts.
Trump has yet to comment on his legal defeats.
WTF Happened With Trump’s Meeting With Brazilian President?
Donald Trump and Lula were supposed to have a public meeting. Instead, we got three hours of radio silence.
Donald Trump was scheduled to meet Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—usually referred to as Lula—at 11:15 a.m. Thursday in front of the press.
That did not happen, and for three hours, media members stood around wondering where the hell the two leaders of the largest countries in the Western Hemisphere were.
At 2 p.m., NewsNation reported that Lula had left the White House after meeting with Trump for about two hours. “This was a meeting that was supposed to be opened up,” host Nichole Berlie said. “But that did not happen.... We’ll have to see what the White House says.”
NewsNation reporter Kellie Meyer, stationed outside the White House, said it may have been Lula who was responsible for the secrecy.
“The president of Brazil said he wanted to wait until after the two met to then meet with the press in front of the cameras,” Meyer said. “They had lunch, and now we learn that he is leaving. He will speak to the press at the embassy, but he won’t be doing it here alongside President Trump. We do know that the two didn’t quite see eye to eye coming into this meeting, so maybe it is no surprise that they may not be going in front of the cameras.”
Lula is a leftist, and he and Trump have had an unsurprisingly contentious relationship over the years. Trump has repeatedly expressed support for Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing........