‘Mass murder on a national scale’: New advert attacks Trump’s comments on virus testing

President said he’d asked officials to ‘slow down testing’ at rally on Saturday

A new political advert has called Donald Trump’s attitude towards slowing down coronavirus testing down “mass murder”.

The video advert from political action committee MediasTouch hit out at Mr Trump’s most recent claims that asked “his people” to “slow the testing down” at his campaign rally on Saturday, branding the president’s attitude “mass murder on a national scale.”

The one-minute video compiles a number of clips of Mr Trump and other officials discussing testing, with footage from his latest rally juxtaposed with interviews of aides and scientific advisers.

The clips feature’s some footage of Mr Trump at his first campaign rally in three months in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he called the process “a double-edged sword”.

“Here’s the bad part: when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please,” Mr Trump said at the rally.

A number of Mr Trump’s officials rebuked media coverage of the comments, insisting that the president was joking and that the tone was “tongue in cheek”.

However, the president reasserted his view and contradicted some of his closest aides’ statement’s that the comments were in jest.

“I don’t kid,” Mr Trump told reporters on Tuesday as he left the White House for a trip to Arizona, again calling Covid-19 testing a “double-edged sword” because more testing reveals more positive cases.

Top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci undercut Mr Trump’s claims on Tuesday, insisting that health policy advisers had not been told to slow down testing.

“None of us have ever been told to slow down on testing. That just is a fact,” Mr Fauci told a House committee.

Conservative anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project also used the president’s testing comments against him in its latest video.

“The most deceptive, lying president in history finally told the truth,” a voiceover in the spot said. “Somehow, it was more shocking than all his deceptions,” the video said.

Across the US, at least 26 states recorded daily increases in the number of coronavirus cases compared to last week.

More than 2.3 million people in the country have been infected with the novel coronavirus, the most of any country in the world, with a death toll of more than 120,000.

Worldwide there have been almost 9,200,000 infections of the novel coronavirus disease and almost 500,000 deaths.

The Trump campaign has not yet replied to request for comment on the advert.