ASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration formally announced Wednesday that it is launching a "Manhattan Project-like effort" to cover up more COVID-19 cases and deaths than China.
"This will be like the Manhattan Project times a thousand," President Trump said in making the announcement. "Never before has anyone responded to a cover-up not by exposing it, but by doing it bigger, doing an entirely newer, bigger cover-up, so it's just another way we're making history, and you know the numbers are too high, so we're going to bring them down, and we're going to have to have a cover-up to do it."
Administration officials said Trump was attracted to the concept because experts have routinely expressed skepticism about China's numbers, but have never definitively proven them wrong.
"The president's thinking is, 'If the Chinese can hide all these cases, we can hide even more,'" said an anonymous high-level official.
While it's unclear precisely what shape the effort may take besides blatantly doctoring the official numbers, President Trump has hinted for months that he would strongly prefer to obscure the nation's true COVID-19 statistics. The anonymous administration official suggested that Trump has inquired into such tactics as deleting news stories from the internet and launching a new Trump-brand internet to replace the current one.
"This project is real and it's going to change the world," the official said. "You know he's serious about this because he added it to Jared's portfolio."
