Eric Trump accuses Democrats of "milking" coronavirus lockdowns to win the election

Eric Trump suggested on Fox News Saturday that Democrats are "milking" coronavirus lockdowns in order to "deprive" President Trump of campaign rallies and hurt him in November's election.

What he's saying: "They think they are taking away Donald Trump's greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time. You watch, they'll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen."

The big picture: Eric Trump's comments echo claims made by the president at a campaign rally in February, in which he called Democrats' criticism of the administration's coronavirus response "their new hoax."

• Eric Trump accused the media of acting as a "propaganda arm" of the Democratic Party, telling Fox News' Jeanine Pirro, "They're doing it for one reason: They want to hurt Trump."
• "They tried to do it with the Russia thing, they tried to do it with the Ukraine scandal, they tried to do it with impeachment. Now they're trying to do it with coronavirus."

By the numbers: As of Sunday morning, the U.S. has reported more than 1.4 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 88,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

The other side: Biden campaign spokesperson Kate Bedingfield said in a statement, "We're in the middle of the biggest public health emergency in a century, with almost 90,000 Americans dead, 1.5 million infected, and 36 million workers newly jobless, so for Eric Trump to claim that the coronavirus is a political hoax that will ‘magically’ disappear is absolutely stunning and unbelievably reckless."