Administration of Donald J. Trump, 2020 The President's News Conference September 10, 2020 The President. Thank you very much. Wow. We have some big ones today, huh? This is a room, all loaded up. Wow. Paula Reid [CBS News]. Jonathan Karl [ABC News]. Phil Rucker [Washington Post]. Hi, Phil. How are you? Kaitlan [Kaitlan Collins, CNN]. We've got the all- stars. A lot of all-stars today. You too. Q. Alex Alper, Reuters. The President. You too. That's good. Well, that's fine. Thank you very much. In the past 4 months, we've added 10.6 million jobs, including 643 [thousand]* manufacturing jobs and 658,000 construction jobs. It's far beyond expectations. We've experienced the smallest contraction of any western nation, meaning we've been affected less than any other Nation—western nation—and probably, almost, I think you can put us in—I just saw some numbers—I think you can put us into just about any category anywhere. And the fastest recovery by far. And that's anywhere. Nobody has recovered like we're recovering. If we followed Joe Biden's strategy, we'd shut down the entire country after just having set records on growth. And we also did have tremendous retail growth, as you probably noticed. We're witnessing the fastest labor market recovery from an economic crisis in our history. By contrast, the Obama-Biden administration had the slowest, weakest, and worst recovery in American history, as you know. We continue to make progress in our fight against the China virus. New weekly cases have declined by 44 percent since July. Deaths declined by 20 percent compared to just last week. It's going down very rapidly. Really rapidly. This is in contrast to nations in the European Union, which have recently experienced a sharp increase in cases. They're having a very big spike over there. We're, hopefully, beyond our spike, and we'll see, but we're doing very well all over our country. In the past 5 weeks, per capita cases doubled in France; surged to over 300 percent in Spain, which I've been hearing about and speaking to some of the leaders of Spain, and they are having a hard time; and increased more than 400 percent in Italy again. And as you remember, I stopped— I put a ban on people coming in from Europe after the ban I imposed on China, Wuhan—but because of Wuhan primarily, because that area was very infected. We also put a ban on Europe. So Spain is being heavily impacted, France, and 400 percent in Italy. Yesterday European nations experienced 50-percent more deaths than the United States. And you don't hear these things. You don't hear these statistics. But the United States has done really well. Very proud of everybody that worked on this. And I really do believe we're rounding the corner. And the vaccines are right there, but even—not even discussing vaccines and not discussing therapeutics, we're rounding the corner. We already have therapeutics out there, by the way, which are having obviously a very big impact, because you look at that, you look at the way people are recovering, it's so much better than in the past before we knew about the disease and had anything to fight the disease. * White House correction. 1 On schools, as part of our science-based approach, we want schools to safely open and stay open. Children are at extremely low risk of complications from the virus. Less than 0.2 percent— 0.2 percent of the coronavirus deaths have occurred in those under the age of 25, and most had underlying conditions where there was a problem. There is no substitute for in-person learning. According to a recent study, student progress in math decreased by half and—using online education compared to in-person or campus education. So, online, we think of so many things online and how great it is; there's nothing like being in the classroom. That's what we've learned from this whole ordeal. According to the CDC, school closures disproportionately harm low-income and minority children, as well as those with disabilities. And I think you see some slides behind me that are very new, very current. It's also crucial for colleges and universities to stay open. And we hope that they do indeed stay open, and we want to see Big 10 football. We hope it's coming back. We have a lot of the colleges that we're talking about, they want to come back. We hope that Michigan agrees. We hope that—and I know the Governor will have a lot to say about it. We hope she approves it. But we have a couple that—Maryland is another one. We hope the Governor puts a little pressure on so that we can have it, but I have a feeling they may do it. They may do it without having everybody, but I think they're going to have maybe Michigan, maybe Maryland. We have a couple of States that might not participate. But people are working very, very hard to get Big 10 football back, and I'm pushing it. And it will be a great thing for our country and the players. And the coaches want to do it really badly. The players are missing—they only have so many years of this. And the players are missing a big opportunity, including the chance, in some of the cases—they have some of the best players, college players in our country, and they want to get into the NFL, and they want to make money in the NFL, and they're not going to be able to do that too easy if you don't get to see them play. It's much safer for students to live on campus—and low-risk young people would—rather than the alternative. It's—the alternative is no good—than going home spreading the virus to high-risk Americans. It's—they want to be on campus. They want to go back to school. And the parents want them back in school, maybe more so than they want to be back in school. And they want them back safely, and they want to go back safely, but they have to go back. Based on the recent data from more than 20 colleges, not a single student who tested positive for the virus has been hospitalized. So that's a lot of people. That's a lot of students. Not one has been hospitalized. As we continue to follow the science-based approach to protect our people and vanquish the virus, Joe Biden continues to use the pandemic for political gain. Every time I see him, he starts talking about the pandemic. He's reading it off a teleprompter. I'm not allowed to use a teleprompter. Why is that, Phil? They ask questions, and he starts reading the teleprompter. He says, "Move the teleprompter a little bit closer, please." I don't know, I think if I did that, I'd be in big trouble. I think that would be the story of the year. When I took early action in January to ban the travel and all travel to and from China, the Democrats and Biden, in particular, called it "xenophobic." You remember that? Joe was willing to sacrifice American lives to placate the radical-left, open-border extremists. And we saved tens of thousands of lives, probably hundreds of thousands of lives. And we saved millions of lives by doing the closing—and now the opening—the way we did it. Joe's decision to publicly attack the China ban proved he lacks the character or intelligence or instinct to do what is right. Now Biden has launched a public campaign against the vaccine, 2 which is so bad, because we have some vaccines coming that are incredible. Scott was telling me about some of the things that are happening, and it's very exciting, Scott. Thank you for being here. But you don't want to have anything having to do with, for political purposes, being an antivaxxer. You don't want to be talking about the vaccines in a negative way, especially when you see the statistics that we're starting to see. They're incredible, actually. Biden is perfectly happy to endanger the lives of other people by doing something that he thinks is going to help him politically, because his polls are getting very bad. They're getting very shaky. This was an election that was going to be very easy, very quick, and then the China virus came in, and I had to go back to work politically, unfortunately. I had to devote more time politically than to the other things we do, which are very important for our country. But I had to go back to work. And it looks like we're going up very rapidly, more rapidly than the media wants to admit. And Biden has had to go out. He's gotten out of his basement, and he's working. Let's see what happens. But we've got to talk about how great these vaccines are if, in fact, they're great. And I think you're going to see numbers that are going to be very, very impressive. The approach to the virus is a very unscientific blanket lockdown by the Democrats—that's what they're talking about—which takes all of these incredible statistics, records, and it throws them out the window.