All narratives have been exhausted against Trump. Yes, the liberal media did a top-notch job destroying the market, removing trillions of dollars, and wiping out the retirements of millions of Americans (with a smile on their face), but Trump’s approval numbers have never been higher. In a Gallup poll, 60 percent of Independents and over a quarter of Democrats approved of how the Trump administration has responded to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. And it’s no coincidence that when these new polls numbers for Trump hit, the networks wanted to skip broadcasting the daily press briefings on the Wuhan coronavirus. Now, we have a new narrative and its one that stems from the conspiracy pile: Trump knew but didn’t do anything or something. Yeah, it’s ‘FDR knew about Pearl Harbor’ but for the 21st century. It’s insane. Let’s start with the first salvo, which is that Trump knew about the Wuhan virus in November. ABC News ran with it and it was fake news:
Has @ABC’s @JoshMargolin retracted or corrected his ridiculous story yet? https://t.co/mUr8okYqSB
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) April 9, 2020
Newsbusters once again was on the case, surgically dissecting the latest anti-Trump media ICBM launched into the stratosphere, which once again shows why the media’s trust is in the toilet. If ABC News being slapped down by National Center for Medical Intelligence last week for their trash reporting wasn’t enough, they tried to latch onto The New York Times’ latest attempt to blame Trump for the outbreak. The liberal media watchdog noted something that makes it look like as if these clowns messed up the timelines as well [emphasis mine]:
Leading into the report on Easter Sunday’s Good Morning America, co-anchor and actress Eva Pilgrim boasted of “the scathing new report on Trump administration's failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.” “The New York Times finding that the White House wasted vital time in the early days of the crisis that may have cost American lives,” she declared.
Correspondent Rachel Scott began her report by repeatedly chiding the President’s comments about how the virus exploded unexpectedly…
“But a new report from The New York Times claims the president repeatedly brushed off early warning signs from the intelligence community, top advisers, and health officials,” Scott touted. But as we’ll see, the accusations made by the liberal rag made no scene when faced with the facts.
The first piece of evidence of the President’s alleged inaction was a conversation he supposedly had with a top health official. “According to The Times, Health and Human Secretary Alex Azar sounded the alarm about the possibility of a pandemic on January 30th call with the President, but his concerns were dismissed,” she said.
The claim Azar was “dismissed” was ridiculous because January 30 was the same day the Coronavirus Task Force was created and travel from China was banned on January 31. It seemed Scott was trying to obfuscate the timeline of events.
Here’s the NYT piece [emphasis mine]:
Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.
Even after Mr. Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.
Wait, so did he dither, or did Trump take drastic action? It cannot be both. In January, Trump curbed travel from China, no small action, and created the task force. But it looks like once again that China gets a pass. They get a pass on strong-arming their doctors trying to raise awareness, ordered their scientists to destroy samples containing evidence of the virus back in December, disappeared medical workers and vloggers who documented the condition on the ground in Wuhan, and told the World Health Organization that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, which undoubtedly caused a lot of nations to let their guard down. It’s WHO, right? Yeah, they’re also in China’s back pocket, buying the director-general election in 2017. But these people hate Trump and if they think this narrative will stick with them bungling the timelines and ignoring the National Center for Medical Intelligence because ‘orange man…bad,’ then please go on ahead. You’re only making it easier for Trump to win re-election. In March, The Washington Post tried to get this narrative going, saying that there were intelligence reports from January and February indicating a likely pandemic. It also said, “the intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies.”
That’s not saying much. As long as the virus is around, the chance of pandemics will always be there. As long as the viruses mutate, undergoing antigenic drifts and shifts—there will always be a threat of a pandemic. You can have masks stockpiled, ventilators stockpiled, and personal protection equipment stored, but we’re unlikely to stop the spread of some new disease from coming here. The virus remains the greatest threat to man’s dominance on this planet—hands down. And you see the pushback to some of the containment measures set in place with COVID-19, you really think containing the spread of any new virus on the horizon will be possible? No. but I digress.
Blaming Trump for COVID-19 coming here is outright outrageous that will only be taken seriously by the most afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. The only good outcome from this is that these clowns will be given a false sense of security because these idiots will believe anything the Times doles out. In the meantime, over 550,000 cases of this infection have been recorded in the US, with over 22,000 dying from it. Nearly half of all cases are in the New York City area, where Bill de Blasio failed to shut down the city even when presented with evidence of an outbreak on March 10. He auctioned off the ventilators stored by former Mayor Mike Bloomberg. So, if there is blame, point the fingers at New York’s woke political class. They’ve earned it given they’re ground zero for this outbreak.
Editor's Note: Want to support Townhall so we can keep telling the truth about China and the virus they unleashed on the world? Join Townhall VIP and use the promo code WUHAN to get 25% off VIP membership!