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Trump to coronavirus victims: 'I feel your pain because I've felt your pain'

The president told a crowd in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that he "felt like Superman" after getting an experimental drug treatment for Covid-19 and that he's now "immune."
Image: Donald Trump, US-VOTE-TRUMP
President Donald Trump at a Make America Great Again rally as he campaigns at John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport in Johnstown, Pa., on Tuesday.Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

A pumped-up President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he "felt like Superman" after he got his experimental drug treatment for Covid-19, and he pulled a page from the Bill Clinton playbook, telling people suffering from the coronavirus: "I feel your pain."

"To everyone fighting to recover from the virus, I feel your pain because I've felt your pain," Trump told a crowd of thousands packed onto an airport tarmac in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

"We will beat this virus together," Trump said before polling the largely maskless crowd about who's had the virus already.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

"Who's had it? A lot of people, a lot of people. You're the people I want to say hello to, because you're right now immune. You're right now immune. They say that. You know, they hate to admit, because I had it. In the old days, they said you had it, you're immune for life. Once I got it, they give you four months. Anybody else but me, you're immune for life."

Doctors have said repeatedly that they are unsure how long people who have had the coronavirus might have immunity to it. In mid-August — long before Trump tested positive — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that immunity could last at least three months, but it stressed that much was still unknown. Earlier Tuesday, an 89-year-old woman in the Netherlands was reported to have died after being reinfected with the virus.

Trump, once again, insisted at the rally that the country is "rounding the corner" on the virus, which has infected over 7.8 million people in the U.S. and killed over 216,000.

Trump, who was hospitalized this month after having tested positive for Covid-19, declared himself "cured" after he was treated with an experimental antibody drug cocktail. Trump said Tuesday that "I felt like Superman" after the treatment, "whatever the hell it was."