To understand why Trump thought this minor flub was better-known than it is, it helps to know that it has been mentioned five times by Sean Hannity on his Fox News show in the past two months, most recently on Monday, and featured repeatedly in the host’s tweets and online columns. While Biden did mistakenly refer to the swine flu virus as “N1H1″ during a debate in March, the order of the two halves of the term used to describe the virus - referring to subtypes of two proteins on its surface: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) - is unimportant. “Who would have thought this was going to happen? That’s over 100 years ago.” It could have been up to 100 million people were killed in - that was the Spanish flu - 1917,” the president told the workers who distribute personal protective equipment to hospitals. It was at this point that he once again misstated the date of the flu pandemic that killed his grandfather. Got very poor marks.”Īfter claiming that the lack of personal protective equipment in the federal government’s national stockpile this year was entirely the fault of the Obama-Biden administration, even though he has been in charge of it for the past three years, Trump boasted that he was now replenishing supplies for the next outbreak. “But during the H1N1,” Trump resumed, “and that’s the swine flu - and it was a pandemic in ’09 that was not well handled, at all. The president then looked back down at his prepared text and continued reading from the point where he had begun to trip over the name of the virus before catching himself, and pivoting to attack Biden. “He said ‘the N1H1.’ I said, ‘Isn’t it the other way around?’ They said, ‘Yes, sir, but he said it, so it doesn’t make any difference.'” “Remember?” Trump asked the workers, as though referring to a moment they would all be familiar with. Hearing no response from the dozens of workers gathered in the Allentown warehouse, he answered his own question: “Sleepy Joe Biden.” “‘N1H1,’ who says that?” Trump asked the audience at what was supposed to be an official presidential event related to the coronavirus crisis but he treated as a de facto campaign rally. He then looked up and apparently ad-libbed, “… H1 - now you know who says that, right?” “Most of the N95 masks were distributed during the… N1…” Trump read, twice pausing awkwardly as he came to the scientific name for the virus. Looking down at the podium as he read the remarks, Trump claimed that the Obama-Biden administration had depleted the national stockpile of masks during the response to the swine flu pandemic in 2009. That contradiction was on full display on Thursday, as Trump began his hit on Biden only after he appeared to stumble over his prepared text. But the fact that the nearly 74-year-old president also frequently mangles, mispronounces or badly misreads words himself - and is willing to say things that make no sense to cover his stumbles - makes it bizarre for him to argue that Biden’s verbal slip-ups are proof that the former vice president is suffering cognitive decline. Trump’s strange inability to recall the most basic historical fact of the 1918 pandemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in its first year, including his own grandfather, gets weirder by the day.
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