President Trump, having stopped dismissing the threat of the coronavirus and calling criticism of his laggard response "their new hoax," has begun insisting everybody was shocked.
"It's something that nobody expected," he has said.
Conservative pundits have picked up this revisionist history. "Armchair Quarterbacks Try to Rewrite History on Coronavirus," argues National Review's David Harsanyi. "Generalized 'Trump didn't take this seriously enough!' stuff is ignoring the timeline, wherein every major Democrat didn't take it very seriously until early March either," insists Ben Shapiro.
One example of a major Democrat who took this seriously would be Joe Biden, who, as the party's presumptive presidential nominee, is arguably themajor Democrat. Biden wrote an op-ed on January 27 warning that Trump had left the country unprepared to handle the coronavirus outbreak, and proposing steps to counter it. One of his main advisers, Ron Klain, wrote an op-ed making similar points five days before that.
The primary defense made of Trump is to compare his laggard response against the straw-man alternative in which the only alternative was to close down everything three months ago. "Now we're going to act as if politicians were negligent for failing to try to lock down the entire economy in early January?" writes Harsanyi mockingly.
Obviously, there were numerous steps available short of a total lockdown.
Indeed, the massive lockdown was only necessary because Trump failed to take any advance steps, like mobilizing an effective testing system, stockpiling masks and ventilators, and reconstituting some kind of structure to replace the pandemic response team he dismantled in 2018.
The "nobody could have known" defense memory-holes the fact that Democrats and Republicans were fiercely debating whether the government should be doing more in the very recent history. Trump's stance, which he repeated constantly, was that the coronavirus had been contained, was likely to fizzle out, and would not be very harmful. The whole Republican position for weeks was that Democrats and the media were "doing everything they can to instill fear in people," as Trump put it.
The Conservative Political Action Conference featured Mick Mulvaney, Trump's chief of staff, assuring everybody the virus was being overhyped to scare people into blaming Trump. (Trump probably suspected this because Republicans had used this exact strategy to whip up hysteria against President Obama before the 2014 midterms.) "This is not Ebola. It's not SARS. It's not MERS. It's not a death sentence; it's not the same as the Ebola crisis," Mulvaney declared. "The reason you're seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president," Mulvaney said. "That's what this is all about."
Some Trump defenders have focused their ire on Joe Scarborough, who mocked Trump for failing to respond until it was too late. Scarborough "set off much controversy by claiming, 'Everybody saw this [the coronavirus crisis] coming in early January.' Would have been stronger argument if he had said or tweeted something about the virus threat back then, but he did not," argued Byron York. "As far as I can tell, in the entire month of January, Morning Joe didn't reference the coronavirus once to his 2.6 million followers on Twitter," complains Harsanyi. "Imagine the thousands of lives Scarborough could have saved if he had only shared his insight."
Well, okay. We can agree that neither the president of the United States nor the cast of Morning Joe took the necessary measures to protect the country from a deadly pandemic. If the election turns on the theme "Scarborough failed to keep us safe," then perhaps Trump's record won't look so terrible. However, I would strongly urge American voters to look for an alternative to both Trump and Scarborough.
Because the person who is running against Trump at the moment very much did see the coronavirus disaster coming.
Jonathan Chait, New York Mag, April, 1, 2020
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April 2, 2020
Voices4America Post Script. Here is a summary of Donald (“I take no responsibility”) Trump’s position.
The Orange Incompetent has also blamed Obama. When will he blame Joe Biden?
Who gives a damn! Joe Biden is a decent, empathetic, fact driven intelligent person. Yes, in January, he was already worrying about an approaching Pandemic.
#TrumpOwnsEveryDeath #RememberInNovember
Want more about who knew:
n annual intelligence report that has been postponed without explanation by President Donald Trump's administration warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic, two senior government officials who have reviewed a draft of the report tell TIME.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was scheduled to deliver the Worldwide Threat Assessment to the House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 12 and the hearing has not been rescheduled, according to staffers and members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The DNI's office declined requests for a comment on the status of the report. Democratic staffers say they do not expect the report to be released any time soon.
The final draft of the report remains classified but the two officials who have read it say it contains warnings similar to those in the last installment, which was published on January 29, 2019.
The 2019 report warns on page 29 that, "The United States will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support."
(Source, Time mag, The Trump Administration Is Stalling an Intel Report That Warns the U.S. Isn't Ready for a Global Pandemic, March 9, 2020)
Here is the New York Times summary of Pandemic warnings that went unheeded.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html?referringSource=articleShare
