'Let’s do this': Ex-Republican calls Elise Stefanik's bluff on 'are you better off today?'
Former Republican strategist Tim Miller is calling New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik's bluff after she tried to claim that people aren't better off today than they were four years ago.
The comment drew hefty criticism from people who remember the horrors of the pandemic, fights over toilet paper, panicked shoppers washing grocery bags and a clueless public desperate for accurate information that could help protect them.
Miller came with notes, prepared to call her out for a claim he said was so inaccurate that his first reaction was, "AYFKM?"
"At this point in 2020, a few hundred Americans were dying every day from COVID. By April 2020, that number would be over 2,000 dead per day," he recalled in his Bulwark column, including the graphs showing the daily death rate in 2020 and early 2021.
He put it in context by citing the total number of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the entirety of the war: 6,817.
Then there were Trump's inaccurate or outright weird statements about the virus.
ALSO READ: 0-for-1,668: Senators extend their streak of never punishing other senators
“A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in," Trump claimed on Feb. 10, 2020.
The Street recalled that between Feb. 20 and April 7, the stock markets around the world crashed. In the United States, a three-day period resulted in a selloff "so severe, circuit breakers were activated on the New York Stock Exchange that temporarily halted trading."
That hasn't happened since the crash in 1987.
Miller then recalled that on April 23, 2020, Trump wondered if injecting people with bleach or shining ultraviolet lights “inside the body" would cure everyone.
Then there's the crime wave. Miller recalled that, "2020 represented the largest increase in the murder rate in American history."
Read the full details of the "hellscape" Miller said existed in the U.S. four years ago here.