Feb 26: "And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."
Mar 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. ... The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect, right?"
Mar 13: "We have 40 people right now. Forty. Compare that with other countries that have many, many times that amount. And one of the reasons we have 40 and others have — and, again, that number is going up, just so you understand. And a number of cases, which are very small, relatively speaking — it's going up. But we've done a great job because we acted quickly. We acted early. And there's nothing we could have done that was better than closing our borders to highly infected areas."
Mar 24: "I think Easter Sunday — you'll have packed churches all over our country."
Mar 24: "We begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel."
What about these quotes imply "we're taking this seriously"? He's still mocking folks for wearing masks and is holding public rallies where people aren't wearing masks or distancing to this day.
That article is from 2020-03-12. By that day, we had a total of 40 deaths and 1.5k confirmed cases. It was pretty obviously spreading within the US at that point, and just closing the borders wasn't going to stop it. Headlines for context:
> Trump Appears More Concerned With Closing Borders Than Testing For Coronavirus
> The president has characterized the pandemic as a “foreign virus” and suggested that banning people from other countries is key to fixing the outbreak at home.
> On January 31st. 2020, Trump announces travel restrictions from China. On February 2nd (and for about a month after that) various officials from New York as well as Nancy Pelosi are on video telling the public that there is nothing to this virus, that they should continue life as normal, get on the subway, buses, trains, go to work, restaurants, festivals and entertainment venues. You can find the governor, mayor and director of health of New York making these statements as well as saying and implying that Trump was something between crazy, racist and hateful for sounding the alarm.
Facts matter indeed! Please do a google search as it sounds like you were completely checked out from news in the USA during February 2020 and have got your impression from politicized propaganda later on.
Trump downplayed the coronavirus that entire month and the democrats, while mildly sounding the alarm, followed his lead and repeated his theories that people shouldn’t take action.
* Trump Jan 30, 2020 “ "We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we're working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it's going to have a very good ending for us … that I can assure you,"
* Trump February 10 “ I had a long talk with President Xi — for the people in this room — two nights ago, and he feels very confident. He feels very confident. And he feels that, again, as I mentioned, by April or during the month of April, the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus,"
* February 24 “ The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!"
* February 26 “ And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done,"
The Nancy pelosi in Chinatown comment you reference took place on February 24, the same day Trump said there was nothing to worry about and Covid was completely under control. They were actually in sync! https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...
> Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
Let's not forget that President Trump's order for closing the borders with even just the source nation of the contagion was labeled by the incoming President-elect as xenophobic[1]:
>> "We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency."
"It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month. And, if not, hopefully it will be soon after that."
— Trump, 2020-03-31
That's long after human-to-human transmission was confirmed. So, no, you can't blame the WHO there.
> Right. He could easily just make decisions without the Democrats using everything in their power to stop him.
...Uh okay? Since when has Trump cared what Democrats thought? Again, why did he not attempt to close the South Korean border if he cared so much? I'll tell you why: it's because Trump was just looking for an excuse to close the border to a country he already didn't like. He never cared about the virus, only about his personal agenda.
“And how long would that take?” Trump asked. The CEO said it would take months and then head into phase three. “All right. So you’re talking within a year.”
“A year to a year and a half,” Fauci again clarified.
“Well, but, Lenny is talking about two months, right?” Trump said, incorrectly referring to Schleifer’s August estimate.
“A little — a little longer,” Schleifer again clarified. “A little longer.”
“A couple of months, right?” Trump pressed. “I mean, I like the sound of a couple of months better, I must be honest with you.”
...
Soon, Trump returned to his preferred months-long timetable. Asked by a reporter whether he’s comfortable with this taking longer than that, Trump again sounded as though he hadn’t heard everything the CEOs and experts had just told him.
“I don’t think they know what the time will be,” Trump said. “I’ve heard very quick numbers — a matter of months — and I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number.”
Ah yes, "warned", by assuring us that the virus was no worse than the common cold, and we were rapidly "turning a corner", and that it would just "go away on its own".
> wanted to close the borders
If he really wanted to, what stopped him? He was clearly fully capable of closing borders, given that he did close the border to China (too late) and Europe (also too late). Where was the closure to South Korea when the virus was spiking there?
If that is somehow supposed prove the WHO mishandled the pandemic, then the administration who is withdrawing from the WHO has been absolutely criminal in their handling of this disease.
February 28: "When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
— Trump, at a coronavirus task force press briefing
March 5: “Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled.”
— Trump tweet.
March 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.”
— Trump, while visiting CDC headquarters in Atlanta. This was false. In fact, at this time testing capacity was about 75,000 nationally, according to the CDC.
March 10: "This was unexpected. … And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
— Trump, to reporters at the U.S. Capitol
Trumps's actions at the time (28 Feb) were things that indicated exactly that he thought coronavirus wasn't a threat and would go away soon:
Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.... Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. And again, we’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought.
and
So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.
I really think he is using "hoax" as a synonym for "bad" and is referring to coronavirus, criticisms of his response and the Democrats all at the same time.
In 2018 the people in charge of the program were forced out, and Trump repeatedly (unsuccessfully) sought to cut the CDC budget (and the administration is currently still advocated for budget cuts after declaring an emergency, but who knows how long before this guy is thrown under the bus[2])
This was widely condemned but I don’t remember much media coverage. In 2019 a bipartisan group of experts petitioned the president to reinstate those positions and not to cut funding[0], and recently at the start of the outbreak in February senators wrote a letter to the head of the NSC to please appoint people for the pandemic preparedness roles[1], but so far nothing.
>I don't understand all the negativity and downvotes around Trump's actions.
Because Trump is a moron enabled by a political class that displays outright contempt for the public, who completely mismanaged his government's response to this crisis, mislead the public as to its severity, and deflected responsibility for his actions.
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 7: “We’ll hold tremendous rallies...I’m not concerned at all.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.”
March 9: “This blindsided the world.”
March 10: "Our CoronaVirus Team has been doing a great job. Even Democrat governors have been VERY complimentary!"
March 11: "I am fully prepared to use the full power of the Federal Government to deal with our current challenge of the CoronaVirus!"
March 12: "108 countries are dealing with the CoronaVirus problem, some of which we are helping!"
March 13: "To this point, and because we have had a very strong border policy, we have had 40 deaths related to CoronaVirus. If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!"
March 13: "Today I am declaring a national emergency. Two very big words."
March 13: "No, I don't take responsibility at all."
> President Trump tweeted Monday that the "decision to open up the states" following shutdown measures taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus lies with him, not governors.
Feb 26: "And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."
Mar 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. ... The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect, right?"
Mar 13: "We have 40 people right now. Forty. Compare that with other countries that have many, many times that amount. And one of the reasons we have 40 and others have — and, again, that number is going up, just so you understand. And a number of cases, which are very small, relatively speaking — it's going up. But we've done a great job because we acted quickly. We acted early. And there's nothing we could have done that was better than closing our borders to highly infected areas."
Mar 24: "I think Easter Sunday — you'll have packed churches all over our country."
Mar 24: "We begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel."
What about these quotes imply "we're taking this seriously"? He's still mocking folks for wearing masks and is holding public rallies where people aren't wearing masks or distancing to this day.
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