As the country’s official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surpassed 100,000 on Wednesday evening, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed to President Donald Trump’s notable silence about the grim milestone and that he instead retweeted Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs praising him as the “arguably the greatest president in our history.”

On CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront, the host discussed the tragic, breaking news of the Covid-19 death toll growing to six figures, and then asked Collins, the network’s White House correspondent, to explain how Trump was treating the news.

“This is America. The country that the whole world always has and should be looking to as a leader. We are leading now, in deaths,” Burnett pointed out. “Kaitlin Collins has been traveling with the president and is in Florida where the president was today for the delayed astronaut launch. Any reaction from the president tonight on this grim milestone?”

“Not yet, Erin,” Collins explained. “The president came here hoping to hit a much more positive milestone, talking about what was going to happen with the first American spacecraft to launch in nine years. Instead, he’s returning back to Washington, hitting this very grim and painful milestone for a lot of people of 100,000 deaths here. As you noted, it’s not only a number that the president said he didn’t think we’d ever hit, he thought it was a death rate of coronavirus would be lower than this.”

Collins went on to note the stunning absence of any discussion of the coronavirus victims on Trump’s social media feeds, noting that the president’s only reference to the pandemic of late was to defend his response by saying the death toll could’ve been 15 to 20 times worse had he chosen to not take any action at all — a absurdly unrealistic course of action.

“The president has used his Twitter feed in recent days to promote conspiracy theories about certain anchors, to air his grievances with Twitter, other claims that he was making,” Collins said. “It comes as experts behind the scenes who say this is far from over. You saw Dr. [Anthony] Fauci on CNN earlier offering a sober analysis of what he says he believes is to come in the next few weeks, Erin. And still, so far no mention of the death toll from the president, though he did just quote tweet a Fox News anchor, Lou Dobbs, saying that he was ‘the greatest president’ ever.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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