House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Wednesday made the case that President Donald Trump "downplayed" the seriousness of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. She cites families being evicted because they can't pay their rent, yet the president signed an Executive Order that prohibits Americans from being evicted. And this isn't the first time she's ran with this false narrative.
"There are millions of kids who are food insecure, millions – maybe 14 million – in our country, food insecure. He has nothing for that. There are families who'll be victims of eviction because they can't pay the rent. They don't care about that. In terms of attacking this virus, which will enable us to open up our schools and our economy, that's just not – that's science – and that's not where they're coming from," Pelosi said.
According to the speaker, the feds need to do more than "send a check" by addressing "kitchen table needs of the American people."
Trump and Republicans downplayed the deadly threat of the #coronavirus. Moscow Mitch decided to take a 'pause' rather than help the American people with a strategic plan.
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) September 9, 2020
Don't be misled. Their failure and denial are costing lives. pic.twitter.com/cC3qyP9QhW
President Trump halted flights from China on January 31st. It was something that Pelosi repeatedly criticized, saying the he "fiddled" to take decisive action.
"This is such a very, very sad time for us so we should be taking every precaution. His denial at the beginning was deadly. His delaying of getting equipment to ... where it's needed is deadly and now I think the best thing to do is prevent more loss of life rather than open things up because we just don't know," she explained. "We have to have testing, testing, testing," Pelosi said back in March. "That's what we said from the start."
.@SpeakerPelosi says the President downplaying the severity of #coronavirus is “deadly."
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) March 29, 2020
“As the President fiddles, people are dying. We just have to take every precaution.” #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/y8bFNbaPJy
When it became apparent that Pelosi was wrong to hit Trump over "not doing enough" when he halted those flights, the speaker changed her tune. Suddenly she ran with the idea that stopping these flights was no big deal.
“… Actually, tens of thousands of people were still allowed in from China. So it wasn’t as it’s described, as this great moment,” Pelosi told CNN's Jake Tapper in April. “There were Americans come back, green card holders coming back, but there were tens of thousands.”
After Democrats criticized China travel ban, Nancy Pelosi now says it should've "shut the door" on the re-entry of Americans. pic.twitter.com/kADsqbQ48Y
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 26, 2020
What's amazing, however, is that Pelosi was trying to get people to visit San Francisco's Chinatown early on in the virus. In fact, Fox News' Chris Wallace asked Pelosi about that, point blank, during an April interview.
"If the president underplayed the threat in the early days, Speaker Pelosi, didn't you as well?" Wallace asked.
"No," Pelosi said, smiling. "What we were trying to end the discrimination, the stigma that was going out against the Asian American community. And, in fact, if you look, the records show that our Chinatown has been a model of containing and preventing the virus so I have confidence and our folks there thought it was necessary to offset some of the things that the president and others were saying about Asian Americans and making them a target, a target of violence across the country."
Wallace pressed back, asking the speaker if she was playing into that perception by walking around without a mask, telling people that it's "perfectly safe" to be out in public, that "there wasn't a threat generally."
"No, I was saying that you shouldn't discriminate against Chinese Americans, as some in our administration were doing by the way they were labeling the flu," Pelosi explained.
Fox News' Chris Wallace calls out Nancy Pelosi for promoting tourism during the coronavirus pandemic. pic.twitter.com/yg4Tgt12ln
— TV News HQ (@TVNewsHQ) April 19, 2020
Pelosi has a lot of nerve to imply that she took the Wuhan coronavirus seriously from the get-go. If she did, she wouldn't have encouraged people to visit Chinatown. Even if she wanted to put a stop to so-called "racism," she could have reminded people that Asian Americans are not responsible for this pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party is. People don't have to go attend parades or eat in Chinatown to appreciate their Chinese neighbors. Encouraging tourism wouldn't halt racism, assuming it existed. If anything, it encouraged people to gather in large crowds when this virus is known to be highly contagious.
When Trump announced he halted flights from China what did Democrats do? They continually chided him for making the decision, especially because he went against the World Health Organization's recommendations.
A bipartisan, bicameral agreement was made on a Wuhan coronavirus relief package and what happened at the last hour? Pelosi came in and blew the whole thing up. Instead of focusing on relief for Americans across the country, she was hellbent on pushing a far-left agenda. She wanted to attach non-coronavirus-related items to the bill, like offsetting airline emissions by 2025, upping the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and providing a bailout for the United States Postal Service.
If anyone needs to do some self-reflecting, it's Pelosi.
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