Presidential Fallacies Fueling the COVID-19 Pandemic

This is the third essay in the series that will encompass lessons drawn from current events and circumstances that teachers can incorporate in their writing and reading curriculum. These lessons are tested in my own classroom and will sometimes include some stories from my own teaching adventures.

Every day, the President gets up to debrief the country on the latest pandemic news. However, audiences quickly found that the briefings were not a source of credible information. They became fearmongering sessions full of outright lies and several fallacies.

Here are just a few examples and how they are affecting our lives in the coronavirus pandemic. For more, check out the series.

Fallacies are statements created from a nugget of truth that manipulated to reach a false conclusion. Fallacies are not harmless, they do damage. Each fallacy here is divided to show the nugget of truth and the damage done by fallacy. For some, the damage from the President’s fallacies has been devastating.

The Red Herring

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing. And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion.”

In a March 6 briefing, Trump blamed the delays on his predecessor Barack Obama. It’s not the first time, but this time, the statement not only deflected blame from…