[nl]

The quote is:

“Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus," and, "One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. And this is their new hoax.”

It's hard to parse that, but a reasonable interpretation is to say "this" refers to coronavirus. Notably he didn't say "criticism" at all, and referring to "politicizing" as a hoax doesn't make grammatical or logical sense (which of course doesn't mean it isn't what he meant. He said "the impeachment hoax", and he was impeached so clearly his interpretation of "hoax" is different to the normal interpretation).

Either way, I wouldn't say it's misinformation.

[odshoifsdhfs]

Not american here, so didn't read/listen to this, but in all honesty, I would read the last part not as 'calling' the corona virus a hoax, but that democrats were using the corona virus as an attack, as they did with russia or the impeachment (not passing judgement about russia/impeachment, just I would read that as an attack on democrats and not as they calling COVID a hoax)

[nl]

(Not American either)

My initial reading was that he meant the severity of the virus is a hoax (which goes along with his "the flu kills more people" narrative).

Your reading sort of makes sense if "hoax" was a synonym for "attack". It's not, but Trump seems to use it as one, so yes I could see that could be what he meant.

It's interesting, because we end up in situations like this where you can try to read into it what he meant but that really requires guessing!

[gwright]

Trump has been using "hoax" to refer to the false attacks on him for long before COVID-19 was a thing.

[nl]

The Verge has got good, non-political coverage of the issue. Needless to say it isn't clear cut:

Trump surrogates said after the rally that he wasn’t calling coronavirus a hoax. “He was referring to the way he had been treated by the opposite party … in terms of taking every opportunity to bring him down,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams on SiriusXM’s The Black Eagle with Joe Madison. And you can argue that Trump is limiting his claim to Democrats arguing he’s not prepared for the coronavirus. But the speech simply compares coronavirus to the “impeachment hoax” (which Trump describes as a “perfect conversation” that Democrats twisted into something negative), so it’s also easy to argue that Trump is saying the coronavirus itself is similarly overblown.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/3/21163388/facebook-fact-che...

[gwright]

It isn't hard to parse at all. He has been using the word "hoax" to refer to false narratives and accusations for months if not years. He is clearly pushing back on the criticisms as being false, as being a "hoax".

There is also the fact that his actions don't make any sense at all if it were true that the President thinks the outbreak is a hoax.

[nl]

Trumps's actions at the time (28 Feb) were things that indicated exactly that he thought coronavirus wasn't a threat and would go away soon:

Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.... Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. And again, we’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought.

and

So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

I really think he is using "hoax" as a synonym for "bad" and is referring to coronavirus, criticisms of his response and the Democrats all at the same time.