In early March, when the United States had just crossed double-digit coronavirus cases, President Donald Trump stated at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta: “And the whole situation is — the testing has been amazing, actually. What they’ve been able to produce in such a short period of time…I heard it broke all rating records, but maybe that’s wrong. That’s what they told me. I don’t know. I can’t imagine that.”
That is an encapsulation of how the President has dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic. To say that President Trump’s coronavirus pandemic response is awful is a vast understatement. It predates two years ago, in which he declined to renew the CDC’s pandemic response team in 2018 by cutting funding by 80%. Fast forward to early March, calling the coronavirus a “hoax” and “only the flu” is perhaps the scariest misstep in this horrific presidency. As the President would often say in his off-the-cuff press conferences, his COVID-19 response has been a “total disaster.”
If I remember correctly, the President’s job is supposed to be comforting the American public during terrible times and not skyrocket the public into mass hysteria. But the latter has been the case for the past three months. As always, Trump uses his go-to defense mechanisms: Blaming Barack Obama for the Ebola virus (in which there were only two American deaths out of eleven cases) and the Democrats for something of massively epic proportions that he could have prevented three months ago, among others. When Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is facepalming at a press briefing, there’s something seriously wrong.
Almost 500,000 cases in the U.S, with just under 20,000 deaths, six-figure worldwide deaths and a million worldwide cases later as of this writing, there are still people out there that are going against what medical experts are saying and taking Trump’s medical advice like gospel, particularly about hydroxychloroquine, which he is boasting of it as a wonder treatment despite medical experts saying it probably isn’t an effective method of treating COVID-19.
As several states declared public health emergencies in rapid succession after the tri-state area locked down, Trump went on his confidant Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and touted his medically illiterate misinformation on the disease by saying, with the network, not surprisingly, touting it as “owning the media.” These are the standards several people have with “news.” Unfortunately, those people don’t know any better.
According to the Washington Post, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had briefed Trump about the virus outbreak in Wuhan, China on January 18th, but, on Trump’s own accord, he interrupted Azar before he could say anything about the virus and transitioned to discussing his continual federal crackdown on vaping (which, as of February 18th, has only caused sixty-eight deaths in twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia, according to CDC statistics).
On February 28th, Trump said “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” On March 11th, two days before he finally declared the virus a national emergency, he said, “I think we’re going to get through it very well.”
