'Unfathomable': Trump administration's SCOTUS filing to end Obamacare is 'crazy', Pelosi says

As even his health officials focus on testing, president says: 'And our mortality rate is among the best countries in the world – meaning, people that die'

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday called the Trump administration's Supreme Court filing "in the dark of night" asking the justices to terminate the Affordable Care Act, pushed through Congress by the Obama administration, "crazy" and "unfathomable."

The White House's move comes as cases of coronavirus are spiking in a number of Sun Belt states that were deep into the re-opening process. She called the filing "an act of unfathomable cruelty."

The California Democrat spent much of her weekly press conference sharply criticising the president and his administration, saying of Donald Trump: "Well, I don't think he understands anything." She also said his administration has failed with its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ms Pelosi noted that during the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump vowed to "negotiate like crazy" to bring down health care costs.

"That's a good description of his actions [since]," she said.

Her comments came the morning after the Trump administration submitted the 82-page document late on Thursday arguing that the ACA was unconstitutional after Congress, then under Republican control, eliminated tax penalties for not purchasing health insurance in 2017. The high court has twice saved the law, known as "Obamacare," with Chief Justice John Roberts, put on the court by then-GOP President George W Bush, siding with the liberal justices to keep the law on the books.

Meantime, the speaker also slammed Mr Trump and his team's response to the coronavirus, saying the president should wear a mask in public and drop his suggestion that the country slow testing for the respiratory disease.

To her, the answer to locate and isolate the virus is "testing, testing, testing," he mantra for several months. While Mr Trump is talking about slowing testing, his top health officials say they have not been told or pressured to do so, and are planning to continue ramping up testing.

"And now with the spikes we are seeing, the president is saying slow down the testing. Others say he was joking," Ms Pelosi said before noting: "He doesn't say that."

"This is not a laughing matter," she told reporters. "It is a matter of life or death."

For his part, Mr Trump seems mostly focused on the latter – and on getting the economy open again. He continues to have a singular re-election message: The economy was strong before Covid-19 and he would like to rebuild it with a second term.

"But the fact is that there's never been a thing like this. We've done 30m, almost. We'll be there probably today or tomorrow. Thirty million tests. And when you do tests, you have cases," Mr Trump said during a Fox News town hall that aired Thursday night. "But what they don't say is there are fewer deaths than there have been. Way, way down. And our mortality rate is among the best countries in the world – meaning, people that die. Because a lot of these tests, it's a case, it's a kid, doesn't even know.

"In some cases, it's people that didn't even know they were sick. Maybe they weren't. But it shows up in a test," he added. "So they'll say 30m tests. Now you have a big percentage of that. But other countries do very few tests, so it shows they have very few cases."

A majority of Americans object to the president's response to the Covid-19 outbreak, including a majority of Republicans.