Trump made the remark during a press conference about the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the 10 million unemployment claims across the preceding two weeks, Trump claimed that the economic side of the crisis was “artificial” because of forced business closures.

Trump’s message to the 6 million people who filed unemployments claims in the last week is that “it’s an artificial closing. It’s not like we have a massive recession or worse. It’s artificial because we turned it off … we will probably do more.” pic.twitter.com/FGVi6xIvbq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 2, 2020

The day of his remark, the United States reported a total of over 278,000 cases and 7,000 deaths.

The week prior, Trump bragged about his press conferences’ TV ratings.

Washington Post – Over 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in March as economy collapsed
Politico – ’No words for this’: 10 million workers file jobless claims in just two weeks
Fox Business – Unemployment claims spiked to new record last week, with 6.6M Americans filing for aid
Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)