Eric Trump claims coronavirus will 'magically go away' after the election because it's all a hoax to stop Trump rallies

Despite finding time to tweet and retweet dozens of times about everything from "OBAMAGATE!" to his approval ratings, the president wheeled out his son Eric to do his bidding on live TV yesterday.

Eric Trump, who has no official ties to the administration, appeared on Fox News with Jeanine Pirro last night, and proceeded to start ranting about how coronavirus is basically a Democratic hoax to keep his father down.

This isn't exactly a new assertion. The president has famously blamed everyone from the Chinese government to Barack Obama for the current situation, while continuing to praise his own action despite the US having the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world by a long shot.

Now it seems Eric is in on the action too. Here it is, in his own words:

Listen, Biden loves this. Biden can't go on stage without making some horrible blunder. Even from his basement he's making awful gaffes every single day, so his campaign's thrilled that he's not going out there and they think they're taking away Donald Trump's greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time.

While the Biden point isn't altogether inaccurate, it does seem a bit rich considering the level of misinformation and nonsense the president spouts on a daily basis.

So they will – and you watch – they'll milk it every single day between now and [election day] November 3rd, and guess what? After November 3rd coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.

Where to begin with this one... firstly it would be nice to know how exactly the Democrats are "milking" anything. Perhaps by calling for scientific expertise to be listened to? Or by pointing out the ludicrous nature of the death toll figures coming from Trump's own administration?

It's not exactly beneficial for the Democrats to see lockdown continue until the election anyway, given the party has a much harder time getting supporters to actually vote (in part due to Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression laws), and while the public's focus is on the pandemic it will be much harder to push focus to other talking points.

Anyway, he continues:

They're trying to deprive him of his greatest asset, which is the fact that the American people love him, the fact that he's relatable, the fact that he can go out there and draw massive crowds. Joe Biden can't get 10 people in a room. My father's getting 50,000 in a room. And they wanna do everything they can to stop it.

According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump's approval rating has actually dropped by over 3 percentage points since he peaked at 45.8 per cent at the end of March. Within a month it had dropped to just 42.6 per cent.

As for the "50,000 people in a room" figure, Eric is presumably referring to his father's rallies, which the administration has repeatedly been accused of inflating attendance figures for.

All in all, it was a pretty outrageous rant littered with misinformation and conspiracy theories. He even went so far as to say that if people could get abortions (you know, life-saving medical procedures undertaken by healthcare professionals), they should be allowed to pack into polling booths to vote. Makes perfect sense.

While it's easy to get carried away with the farcical nature of all this, we should remember what's at stake.

People are dying and the president's son is claiming the whole thing has been exaggerated in order to make his father lose an election.

These truly are extraordinary times.