Not only does Trump feel no sympathy for the 225,000 Americans who died of coronavirus (so far), he thinks that doctors across America have inflated the death rate to make him look bad.

The Boston Globe reports:

Dr. Abraar Karan, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had just finished a 15-hour shift Saturday night when he opened Twitter and saw a video of President Trump on the campaign trail, parroting a roundly debunked conspiracy theory that hospitals have been inflating COVID-19 deaths for financial gain.

At a rally in Waukesha, Wisc., on Saturday, Trump said “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they report that their patients died of COVID-19, as opposed to other preexisting conditions or comorbidities. “Think of this incentive,” the president said, insinuating as he has before that the death toll from the virus is not to be trusted. He then falsely claimed the pandemic, which has killed more than 226,000 Americans, is “going away,” even as the country approaches a third wave of infections.

“When I got out and I saw that, I found it extremely insulting and frustrating,” Karan said of the president’s comments. “This is somebody who just got taken care of by doctors, who just benefited from our medical system — presumably on taxpayer money — and he’s coming out criticizing the health care profession in what seems like a politically motivated attempt to further downplay the seriousness of the virus.”

Trump’s baseless accusations that doctors are overcounting COVID-19 deaths have sparked a surge of criticism from the American medical community. In a statement issued Sunday, the American College of Emergency Physicians called the president’s assertions “reckless and false.” The American College of Physicians, which represents internal medicine doctors, denounced the president’s allegations as “a reprehensible attack on physicians’ ethics and professionalism.” The Council of Medical Specialty Societies said Trump’s claims “promulgate misinformation that hinders our nation’s efforts to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control...”

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said Trump’s suggestion that doctors are falsifying COVID-19 deaths is not only demeaning — to health care workers, to those who have died from COVID-19, and to their families — but nonsensical.

“You have to believe a few things for this conspiracy theory to make sense,” Jha said. “One is you have to believe that all the doctors, all the nurses, and all the health care executives are morally corrupt. Second, that you can do widespread fraud across the entire system and no one is really going to pick it up and that there would be no repercussions to this. You would just have to believe things that are so clearly not true.”