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Trump's Treasury Secretary Just Made the Most Cringey Freudian Slip in an Interview and Now 'Freudian' Is Trending
Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images

President Donald Trump's handling of the virus that's killed over 250 thousand Americans is one of the defining criticisms of his tumultuous four years in office.

Throughout every stage of the virus' outbreak, the President has downplayed its severity and spread misinformation on how to prevent it. As early as February, the President admitted to journalist Bob Woodward in a recently released interview that the virus was far worse than "even your strenuous flus." Publicly—as recently as early October—Trump lied that the virus was not much worse than the flu.

He dismissed his own administration's guidelines to wear masks, which are proven to slow the spread of the virus. This mobilized hundreds, potentially thousands, of his supporters to oppose mandates requiring them, insisting that these are an effort to exercise control over Americans.

He floated questionable or even lethal options for a cure, such as injecting bleach or ingesting the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine.

Fortunately, two separate trials of a vaccine for the virus have shown promising results and introduced the possibility of a return to some sort of normal as soon as April of next year.

Trump's Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, tried to express optimism on the distribution of a vaccine, but instead, he only succeeded in an unfortunate Freudian slip.

Watch below.

Mnuchin said:

"Again, we're working on mass distribution of the virus."

It wasn't what Mnuchin meant to say, but there's more than a little truth to the statement.

The very day Mnuchin made this comment, multiple people in the White House—including Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani—tested positive for the virus.

Not only did Trump himself contract the virus at the end of September, but so did First Lady Melania Trump and dozens of others who work at the White House, largely thanks to the super spreader event at the Oval Office that month celebrating the nomination of now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

But it wasn't just the White House sphere that's experienced widespread infection.

A study at Stanford University found that Trump's persistent rallies packed with thousands of supporters throughout the pandemic led to 30 thousand cases of the highly contagious virus.

So when Mnuchin said the White House was working on mass distribution of the virus, people agreed he accidentally told the truth.



"Freudian" soon began trending on Twitter.



If the Trump administration's goal was to achieve mass distribution of the virus, it's more than succeeded.