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Politicized Pandemic

"Jerry Falwell Jr. is nothing if not loyal to President Donald Trump.

This past week, a few thousand students and professors returned to Liberty University’s main campus in Virginia despite the widening coronavirus pandemic. Even though many of the classes will be held online, students have been invited to come back to their residential halls and the faculty has been told to report to work on campus.

Falwell defended his decision by insisting that '99 percent of [students] are not at the age to be at risk and they don't have conditions that put them at risk.'

That, of course, is factually untrue: young people are not immune. Indeed, last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said more than a third of U.S. patients ill enough to be hospitalized were ages 20 to 54. And of course, even young people who do not become seriously sick can pass the disease to others.

But the science isn’t the point. The public show of loyalty is, and there are few supporters who are more fervently and reflexively loyal to Trump than Falwell. It is a revealing and dangerous moment: What could have been an opportunity for national unity has instead become an occasion to open new political schisms and deepen old ones. Decisions that would normally be made on the basis on apolitical scientific fact are increasingly driven by tribal loyalties.

None of this is strictly new, because much of Trump’s base has cultivated a contempt for expertise, combined with a disdain for the media and the warnings of the scientific community. But this time, our political divisions could be deadly."

Trump dismissed coronavirus pandemic worry in January — now claims he long warned about it

President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday he has believed the coronavirus outbreak was "a pandemic, long before it was called a pandemic" — but in January, he explicitly played down concerns when asked about it.

"No, not at all," Trump told CNBC in a Jan. 22 interview on CNBC when “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen asked him if there were worries about an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China becoming a "pandemic."

"It’s going to be just fine,æ Trump assured Kernen during the interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"We have it totally under control."

Fact check: Trump tries to erase the memory of him downplaying the coronavirus

Washington (CNN) — The somber President Donald Trump of Monday's press conference bore little resemblance to the Trump who had relentlessly played down the coronavirus over the previous two months.

Trump was asked Tuesday about his change in tone. He responded by claiming that his tone hadn't changed much at all.

"I mean, I have seen that, where people actually liked it. But I didn't feel different," he said at a White House press briefing. "I've always known, this is a real -- this is a real -- this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do was look at other countries...no, I've always viewed it as very serious. It was no difference yesterday from days before. I feel the tone is similar, but some people said it wasn't."

The acid test of Trump's maverick leadership has come – can he save himself?

David Smith Last modified on Wed 18 Mar 2020 06.55 EDT

The president's response to the coronavirus pandemic has been 'haphazard', from a cascade of false statements to a public address that fueled anxiety

With his back to the wall, Donald Trump turned to perhaps the only people that truly impress him: not health experts or scientists but the titans of corporate America.

Confronted by a global pandemic he cannot bully, insult or out-tweet, the president paraded chief executives at the White House in the hope they could dig him out of a hole partly of his own making.

Retailers such as CVS, Target, Walmart and Walgreens – household names in America – will provide "drive-thru" testing for the coronavirus, Trump promised, while Google was developing a national website to offer guidance.

This, however, came as a surprise to Google. The tech giant denied it is doing any such thing.

The bizarrely misleading claim was indicative of Trump’' mishandling of a crisis different in magnitude from any he faced before. The former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment did not send markets into free fall, force mass closures of schools and sporting events or potentially put millions of lives at risk.

The acid test of Trump’s maverick leadership has finally come.

Trump says he always felt coronavirus was a pandemic. He didn’t talk that way

In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump aimed to reassure the public. Now, he has called for a 15-day push to shut down transmission.

"By making shared sacrifices and temporary changes, we can protect the health of our people and we can protect our economy," Trump said in a March 17 press conference.

When a reporter asked if there had been a shift in tone, Trump shot back.

"I've always known this is a real, this is a pandemic," Trump said. "I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."

Trump re-emphasized that point in a tweet the next morning.

"I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning, including my very early decision to close the ‘borders’ from China," Trump tweeted March 18.

Trump and his administration acted to keep the virus out of the United States, but his words in public downplayed the threat for many weeks.

‘We Didn’t Know About It’: Trump Denies Ignoring Coronavirus Pandemic Warnings

te House briefing, President Trump denied a report from the Washington Post that said U.S. intelligence reports in January and February warned of a coming pandemic by the COVID-19 coronavirus, saying, "We didn't know about it" until it "started coming out publicly."

A reporter for the right-wing One America News Network asked President Trump, "What do you say to the Washington Post" regarding the report published late Friday night about the president's delayed response to the coronavirus.

Without addressing the substance of the report, Trump said: "I think the Washington Post covers us very inaccurately, covers me very inaccurately. I think it’s a disgrace, but it's the Washington Post and I guess we have to live with it."

But Trump later didn’t necessarily deny anything in the story, instead confirming that he relied too heavily on the information coming from China President Xi Jinping, saying he wished “China would have told us more about what was going on in China long prior to us reading about it. . . . I wish that they would have told us earlier that they were having a problem."

When asked when he first learned that the virus would be a problem—which first propagated in December—Trump said that it was around the time he started closing entry (on January 31, 2020, after the first cases of the coronavirus were confirmed in the United States after 10,000 cases in China, Trump signed a proclamation suspending entry of non-U.S. citizens who had recently visited China into the country).

The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies were warning Trump and his administration of the dangers of the coronavirus in January and February, when Trump was publicly downplaying and even denying the potential threat of the virus, calling it a “hoax” at a February 28, 2020, rally in South Carolina.

“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” a U.S. official told the Post. “The system was blinking red.”