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‘Possible there will be some’ COVID-19 deaths as country reopens: President Trump

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Trump tells ABC News reopening the country will cost American lives — and says it’s worth it anyway.

President Trump sat down with ABC News anchor David Muir in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 5, 2020, and made an admission most presidents would avoid on camera: reopening the economy will kill people. “It’s possible there will be some, because you won’t be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is,” Trump told Muir. “There’ll be more death.” He didn’t walk it back. Instead, he framed it as the price of getting the country moving again.

• Trump told ABC’s David Muir that reopening “will possibly, probably” cause more coronavirus deaths, saying “there’ll be more death” as restrictions lift.
• The interview came as U.S. COVID-19 deaths topped 71,000 and confirmed cases passed 1.2 million.
• The White House was separately weighing whether to wind down the coronavirus task force by late May or early June and hand oversight back to federal agencies.

The Interview in Phoenix

Trump made the trip to Arizona as part of a broader push to show the country restarting, and the ABC News sit-down was blunt in a way his public briefings rarely are. Pressed by Muir on the human cost of lifting stay-at-home orders, Trump didn’t dodge. “It’s possible there will be some because you won’t be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is,” he said, before adding the line that made headlines within minutes: “there’ll be more death.”

“We have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon.”

That was Trump’s closing argument to Muir — not a denial that lives were at stake, but an insistence that the economic shutdown couldn’t continue regardless. It’s a different tone than the daily task-force briefings, where the administration had leaned heavily on curve-flattening language. Here, the president essentially told the country the tradeoff up front.

The Numbers Behind the Decision

The timing mattered. When Trump spoke to Muir, the U.S. had recorded more than 71,000 COVID-19 deaths and over 1.2 million confirmed cases, figures that had climbed steadily even as more than half the states began loosening restrictions on businesses, restaurants, and public gatherings. Several states had already moved to reimpose or tighten rules where case counts spiked, a tension playing out state by state that’s covered in reporting on states imposing stricter coronavirus restrictions even as others pushed to reopen.

Public health models circulating at the time warned that premature reopening could sharply accelerate daily death rates, a concern echoed in coverage of a coronavirus model predicting a jump in the death toll. Trump’s comments to Muir effectively confirmed the administration understood that risk and was proceeding anyway, betting that the economic damage of continued lockdowns outweighed the additional fatalities.

The Task Force Question

Behind the scenes, the interview landed amid internal White House discussions about phasing out the coronavirus task force itself, with officials eyeing late May or early June as a target to shift day-to-day management back to the CDC, HHS, and other traditional federal agencies. The idea was to signal a return to normal government function — but it also meant scaling back the visible, centralized command structure that had defined the White House’s pandemic response since March.

That move would come as school districts, employers, and governors across the country were already grappling with their own reopening timelines, weighing health risk against the economic and social cost of staying closed — the same debate playing out in coverage of school boards debating reopening in the following weeks. Trump’s ABC interview gave that debate its clearest presidential framing yet: reopen, accept some additional deaths, and treat it as the unavoidable cost of restarting American life.

Muir’s interview aired that same night on ABC, and the “there’ll be more death” line became the headline instantly — not because it revealed new modeling or new science, but because it was Trump saying, on the record, what public health officials had been implying for weeks without ever putting it so plainly.