"And they [US media] never talk about COVID … when you see 25,000 people walking down 5th Avenue or walking down a street of a Democrat-run city you never hear them saying ‘They’re not wearing their mask,’" Trump told his supporters in Tulsa.
He pointed to the fact that many of the Black Lives Matter protesters engage in vandalism and destroy private property.
"When I say the looters, the anarchists, the agitators, they say ‘What a terrible thing for our president to say!’ … But you don’t hear them talking about COVID, to be specific COVID-19, that name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it the Chinese virus," Trump said.
The US president stressed that he saved "hundreds and thousands of lives" amid the spread of the coronavirus by closing the US borders to China and Europe earlier than others had proposed.
According to Trump, 25 million people have been tested for COVID-19 in the US, which is why the total number of confirmed cases is high.
"So I said to my people slow the testing down please," Trump said, dismissing a lot of the registered COVID-19 cases as "sniffles."
The Saturday rally in Tulsa is Trump’s first since March, when the COVID-19 lockdown started in the US.
The United States has the highest number of COVID-19 cases registered out of all countries (more than 2.2 million) and the highest coronavirus death toll (over 119,500 COVID-19 fatalities), according to data from the Johns Hopkins University. The mass protests sparked by the death of George Floyd have ignited fears of a sharp rise in the number of coronavirus cases in the US.
