President Trump says he’d love to have the country “opened up” by Easter

President Trump said Tuesday during a Fox News virtual townhall that he wants the country’s economy re-opened by Easter amid questions over how long people should stay home and businesses should remain closed to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Speaking from the Rose Garden alongside others on his coronavirus taskforce, Trump said he "would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter." The holiday this year lands on April 12.

Trump argued he doesn’t want “to turn the country off” and see a continued economic downfall from the pandemic. He also said he worries the U.S. will see "suicides by the thousands" if coronavirus devastates the economy.

"We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off,” Trump said during the interview.

Trump added: “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We don't call up the automobile companies and say stop making cars. We have to get back to work.”

Here’s more from ABC 7:

With lives and the economy hanging in the balance, President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is hoping the country will be reopened by Easter, as he weighs how to refine nationwide social-distancing guidelines to put some workers back on the job amid the coronavirus outbreak.

As many public health officials call for stricter, not looser restrictions on public interactions, Trump said he was already looking toward easing the advisories that have sidelined workers, shuttered schools and led to a widespread economic slowdown.

“I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” he said during a Fox News virtual town hall.

The U.S. is now more than a week into an unprecedented 15-day effort to encourage all Americans to drastically scale back their public activities.

“I gave it two weeks,” Trump said during the virtual town hall from the Rose Garden. He argued that tens of thousands of Americans die from the seasonal flu or in automobile accidents and “we don’t turn the country off.”

“We’ll assess at that time and we’ll give it some more time if we need a little more time, but we need to open this country up,” he added. “We have to go back to work, much sooner than people thought.”

“With lives and the economy hanging in the balance…” Don’t you love the ominous tone ABC News takes on this with Trump? And they love to pit him against other health officials:

“As many public health officials call for stricter, not looser restrictions on public interactions, Trump said he was already looking toward easing the advisories that have sidelined workers, shuttered schools and led to a widespread economic slowdown.”

They write as if Trump’s going rogue and doing something that’s going to harm the country. But Trump is clear that he’ll make an assessment at the time to extend this if needed.

He’s not wrong. You can’t just keep businesses closed or running on fumes indefinitely. To do it for a few weeks is one thing. To do it for months would be catastrophic for the economy. And now that we have drugs that appear to be very effective at fighting coronavirus, it’s time to look at getting people back to work and church.

But the reason they writing about this in such a negative light is because the media and Democrats are preparing to pounce on Trump when he starts lifting restrictions and loosening guidelines on the country. They are still desperate for Trump to lose in November and everything else they’ve tried has failed. Now if they can turn this crisis against Trump, somehow, someway, they can use it against him during the election. That’s what is really going on here and as soon as Trump begins trying to “open up” the economy, they’ll start blaming him for more and more deaths.