“It’s going away”

Trump held a rally at a mega-church in Phoenix on Tuesday -- a rally that featured zero masks and no social distance -- where Trump declared that the coronavirus is magically "going away."

That was incorrect, of course, but it was also a lie.

According to NBC News, the White House is aware the virus isn't "going away." Ahead of Trump's rally on the same day in the same city, the White House documented that Phoenix is the hottest "hot spot."

In Trump's telling, the deadly pandemic isn't really a serious threat to the public and rising infection rates are simply due to increased testing. "It's going away," he said Tuesday at an event in Phoenix.

But on the same day, the coronavirus task force produced an internal document showing that Phoenix had the highest number of new cases among the 10 metropolitan regions where the week-over-week change in infection rates spiked the most. Arizona's biggest city had recorded 13,169 new cases over the previous seven days, accounting for a jump of 149.2 percent over the previous week's infection rate.

The task force records also show that big surges have been recorded in Texas — around San Antonio, Houston, Corpus Christi, Lubbock and College Station — and in other population centers across the U.S., from counties in the Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa regions of Florida to Atlanta's Fulton County, Joplin, Missouri's Newton County, and California's San Joaquin Valley.

Trump said it was "going away" on Tuesday and the United States recorded 45,000 positive cases yesterday, far surpassing the previous peak set in April.

Vice President Mike Pence held a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House this afternoon where he proudly declared that we've "flattened the curve" even though the curve is trending higher than it ever has.

This is the problem for Republican governors who just today had to order some businesses to shut down again. The leaders of their political party in the White House are telling people the virus is gone and that leads people to believe they no longer need to wear a mask or practice social distancing. It's a bad example with deadly consequences.

The death toll of Trump's gaslighting is far greater than zero.

If anyone has been infected at Trump's two recent mask-free rallies, they'll be hitting the hospital in the first two weeks of July.