Washington: US President Donald Trump has made his first public appearance since he was tested positive for the novel coronavirus earlier this month, during an event at the White House, according to media reports.
During Saturday’s event at the South Lawn which featured “remarks to peaceful protesters for law and order”, the President addressed the attendants from the Blue Room Balcony.
The gathering was in conjunction with a previously planned event organized by controversial conservative activist Candace Owens’ group Blexit, a campaign to urge Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party.
“The homes and churches and businesses of Black and Hispanic Americans have been looted. You know that. They’ve been vandalized and burned by left-wing fanatics, total bad people. They know what they’re doing.
“Yet (Democratic presidential nominee Joe) Biden likes to call them epeaceful protesters,'” The Hill news website quoted Trump as saying.
In his address, he also claimed that “Black and Latino Americans are rejecting the radical socialist left”, and “they’re embracing our pro-jobs, pro-worker, pro-police. We want law and order; we have to have law and order and pro-American agenda”.
The President also mentioned his Platinum Plan, which was unveiled last month and includes platforms such as making Juneteenth a federal holiday and prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization.
Trump said that the plan will “bring back new jobs, like at a level that you’ve never seen before, increase capital, increase money coming into the Black community, into the Hispanic community”.
Regarding his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, he said: “I want you to know our nation’s going to defeat this terrible China virus, as we call it.
“We are producing powerful therapies and drugs, and we’re healing the sick, and we’re going to recover.
“We had it going, and we really had it going, and then the plague came in from China, but we’re getting rid of that, and we’re rebuilding it, and it’s going to be better than it even was before.”
Meanwhile, updated memo issued by White House physician Sean Conley on Saturday night has cleared Trump to return to an active schedule, CNN reported.
“This evening I am happy to report that in addition to the President meeting the CDC criteria for the safe discontinuation of isolation, this morning’s COVID-19 PCR sample demonstrates, by currently recognized standards, he is no longer considered a transmission risk to others,” Conley wrote in the memo.
But the physician did not mention when did Trump last tested negative for the virus.
Conley wrote that Trump was 10 days from the onset of symptoms, has been fever-free for “well over 24 hours” and after diagnostic tests, “there is no longer evidence of actively replicating virus”.
The doctor, however, did not explain what “advanced diagnostic tests” the President had received, adding that he will continue to monitor Trump “as he returns to an active schedule”.
The President is scheduled to hold at least three in-person rallies this week, beginning on Monday in Florida.
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