I always wonder what it was that (I don't want to get into politics in detail here) that made Trump respond almost allergically to the news about COVID early on in 2020. There's nothing about him or his general 'platform' that meant he had to reject any news about it at all outright and dig in his heels until it was too late.
He could have even fed his own authoritarian inclination and declared his own great patriotic war on COVID / made it all about him in a way. Had he done so I wonder if he still would be president ...
But he made his call. Was it because he wanted to just reject any 'bad news' or maybe it was more like you're describing? Whatever it was, he perhaps saw it as a status / power play on him in one way or another.
I really don't know but it is an interesting explanation for people's responses at times.
How did you manage to read what I wrote to mean I was blaming Trump for COVID-19?
I am blaming him for taking Obama's legacy of stability and growth and destroying it for short-term profit. It would be a tragedy if he did not have to answer for that before the primary elections.
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.
Personally while it was a bit painful watching Trump (try to) speak in his typical style yesterday, I thought it was extremely compelling to see the lineup of CEOs from Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Quest, Labcorp, Roche, etc. each of them announcing their support and dedication to serving their communities and fighting COVID.
“While any other day we are competitors, today we all have a common competitor, and that is COVID” was a beautiful line.
It’s emblematic of the US approach (I won’t say a Republican approach) to instead of showing a lineup of government officials to show a lineup of corporate officers saying that they are making this their mission.
My own political leanings gives me more faith seeing these CEOs commit yesterday to fighting this than anything the CDC or the FDA could announce.
So I personally give the Trump Admin a lot of credit for orchestrating that, and I’m excited to see them deliver on their promises in the next couple weeks. I think they moved quickly to close the border with China, and then we lost precious weeks when the CDC failed.
Certainly I would not expect any Administration to revamp FDA guidelines on testing before it became clear they were an obstacle. Overall we’ve moved incredibly fast in getting to a National Emergency declaration (e.g. compared to H1N1).
Honestly it may have been his “9/11 moment” and I thought he nailed it. Not with eloquent speech to be sure. But in the actions being taken.
> Bad things happened but the quality of life is similar to pre-trump presidency (as long as you are willing to discount for covid’s impact on the world).
As I posted earlier… I see President Trump's tweet from 7:19 AM - Mar 27, 2020 — after chatting to President Xi — now refers to "the CoronaVirus" and "the Virus".
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.
Would be interesting to see how this was built - I've been watching the daily Coronavirus task force updates and I think I have a pretty good sense of the various Trumpisms, and I didn't get the same feeling from this.
> Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know the CCP preferred.
This sounds super far fetched. When Covid began to spread the democratic candidate wasn't chosen yet and this theory completely relies on the Trump administration to completely screw up in the eyes of the public. I don't have a high opinion of Trump, but the US government is a lot larger than him.
And then if they're caught it turns the entire planet against them. It sounds like a massive risk just to get rid of a somewhat annoying president 4 years early, it's not like he was threatening war or anything like that.
"I think the greater point is that we all watched nearly all of US government and all of US media take the opposite side to the Trump administration on this purely on a political basis."
That's what you wrote. I'm not distorting anything. You seem to want to limit Trump's responsibility to his communication skills. He owned COVID, it was his administration, his Cabinet, the GOP controlled Senate, his CDC where he installed a leader that had huge question marks even before the pandemic. It was assigning his son in-law to the COVID task force. It was his touting quack solutions because he lacked the critical thinking to actually listen to medical professionals.
"Prior administrations" had issued warnings about the potential for this type of pandemic. Warnings that were ignored. (Echoes of 9/11).
You can claim I'm distorting your message, but your message is incoherent and ignoring the facts.
It was certainly better than Trump calling the disease a hoax concocted by the his political opponents including the media, so whatever problems WHO may have on COVID-19 response, Donald Trump is in no position to criticize.
> Because it was not something entirely unpredictable..
To the point that as part of the Obama-Trump transition, a literal playbook was created for pandemics, with Coronaviruses (MERS-COV, SARS) explicitly mentioned:
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