Donald Trump Says 'People' Knew Coronavirus Was Bad Early On and 'People' Didn't Want to Talk About It
The president has repeatedly said governors and states are taking the lead on our national response to the coronavirus pandemic. This is both completely unworkable—states have found themselves competing against each other for resources, which are in short supply because of the federal government's failure to adequately respond—and blatantly self-serving: like his attempt to rope in various CEOs, the goal here is to spread the blame around and keep as much of it as possible away from the president. Leadership! The buck stops that-a-way. "I don't take any responsibility at all." But even if we grant Donald Trump that his administration is just a "backup" here—despite a simultaneous claim that he has Absolute Power—it raises a fairly important question: why does the national media spend every day covering briefings from a coronavirus backbencher?
The answer, of course, is that we've turned the process of self-government into a television show. Both the president and the media—in particular, cable news—are fully complicit in approaching all of this like Monday Night Raw. That's why CNN called one of these exhibitions a "propaganda" session in a chyron and...kept covering them live. They were right, of course: the briefings are merely an opportunity for Trump to put on an elaborate show of Being In Charge while rejecting all responsibility, as well as the essential reality that he downplayed the crisis week after week, squandering time we could have used to mitigate the damage and possibly shorten the time our economy was shut down.
Not if you ask him, though. At Thursday's brainrot, he suddenly claimed that nobody told him about all this and he's very upset about it.
Trump says he's angry he wasn't told there was an epidemic: "And I was angry, because this should have been told to us. It should have been told to us early. It should have been told to us a lot sooner. People knew it was happening and people didn't want to talk about it." pic.twitter.com/XgWWaXAWTF
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 16, 2020
This is just completely ridiculous. It's probably a fumbling attempt to further his new strategy: loudly attacking China and the World Health Organization to distract from his complete failure in leading the American response. China did lie about, and attempt to coverup, the outbreak in Wuhan and the country at large. The WHO has demonstrated some willingness to spin for China. And yet almost nobody was more eager to buy what China was selling than one Donald J. Trump. Politico gathered the receipts, like this one:
Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days … Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!
That was on February 7. Clearly, Trump was aware this was "happening." He was aware as far back as November, when ABC News reports "U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region." Even if you grant that the picture was still murky back then, by January the intelligence community was reporting that China was misrepresenting the scale of the threat and that the virus could become a pandemic. And yet throughout the month of February, Trump did next-to-nothing to prepare the country, even as the virus spread well beyond China's borders. The federal government did not move to ramp up our ability to test for the virus on a wide scale, it did not move to acquire a supply of masks and PPE and ventilators. In fact, Trump spent that time downplaying the threat, suggesting the number of cases would go to zero miraculously.
That is to say, it was Donald Trump who "didn't want to talk about it." As usual, when he says many people are saying something, he means he's saying something and wants it to be true—or at least, he wants enough people to believe it that it might as well be true. And now he's determined to open up the country when people who actually know things say we need to double or triple or testing regime before that can responsibly happen. If you're keeping score at home, Trump is both claiming the Absolute Power to force states to open up if he wants and trying to shift any blame for the outcome onto governors and CEOs. And based on the history, he might just get away with it.
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