First, I take it your position given that you asked this question is that it is your position that he made no mistakes, that he handled the epidemic flawlessly?
The remarks below, iit seems to me, were mistakes:. (Recall that the epidemic was already so bad in China by Jan, 23 that Wuhan on that date was sealed.)
Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
. Jan. 30: “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.”
Feb. 10: “We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.”
Feb. 23: “We have it very much under control in this country.”
Feb. 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!”
Feb. 26: “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.”
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.”
Feb. 26: “I think every aspect of our society should be prepared. I don’t think it’s going to come to that [school closings], especially with the fact that we’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.”
More than 20,000 Americans have died since then. Not all of that is the president’s fault, but I reject this worshipful attitude that he can do no wrong, ever.
If people in the CDC told him that there was nothing to worry about, he should have not just blindly accepted what someone in the permanent bureaucracy told him, but should have investigated what the global rate of growth was, what it had been in previous epidemics, and not just assumed “We’re America, I’m Donald Trump, and so it’s impossible for this to be a serious problem.”
He dropped the ball on this one for a long time, although by mid-March he seemed to finally accept that it was bad. Had he accepted this earlier, it might not have been so bad.
My argument is that he shouod have taken it smore seriously earlier, and shouldn’t have been a slave to what the bureaucrats were saying, especially since there was a lot of knowledge about how epidemics can go, and about Chinese lies, by late January.
So I have done what you asked, now it’s your tturn. Why do you think Donald Trump on this matter is beyond criticism? What can you point to that made the epidemic turn out as well as could have been possible? Why was Pres. Trump flawless, subject to no reasonable criticism? I will ask for hard evidence in this regard.
Great response.
Mistake defined:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mistake
Statements aren’t “mistakes.” Not a single one of these things is an action.
However, each item stated was correct at the time and validated by his staff and others.
China lied, the WHO and CDC didn’t spend time validating or preventing what apparently wasn’t happening in their own eyes. Trump acted off our country’s experts.
So, give us things he did that were wrong at those times. A mistake requires choosing poorly from options. He had only one option from his experts and he took it.
For another example: It is not a mistake to drive your car to work and get randomly shot to death. That is a accident of fate that cannot be predicted or chosen from.
I think those were statements to calm the markets. Fauci as late as February 29th was saying there was no problem. Do you think a President Bush, Clinton, Obama, Romney or McCain would have closed down the country in February? Think about it. Close down the country? It has never been done before. During one of his press conferences afterwards I remember Trump even talking about how unbelievable it all was.
Your post is great. My only point of mild disagreement, is that had he accepted it earlier and we got lockdowns etc when there were a handful of cases in later Feb, before the DJIA took a dive, he'd have been called a worrymonger and racist because this was all part of his China hate etc.
Now, leadership means making a call regardless of the press, internal and external. There are tons of people and business leaders who'd have howled at half of the measures we have now being taken around Feb 17. And, in reality, if these measures WERE taken early and stopped what we see now, on the good side we likely wouldn't have the medical and economic carnage we have now. However, since we aren't clairvoyant we'd never have seen this saga we have now, and he'd likely have lost a lot of business support -"he killed the economy and we had less deaths than Iceland" they'd say.
This is a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't type of saga. He shut off travel to China in late Jan and he was called names; now they say he should have done it sooner and he's called names (by the same people). I'm willing to cut him a little slack on that point. But he clearly was a Flubro in Jan and Feb - and to be fair, so we're lots of people and so were the data - let's be hones, kids. His words are his words and ya gotta own your own words. We don't grant Neville Chamberline take-backsies.
I don’t believe Trump was wrong initially that this is not something that should freak us out. Only after the left got ahold of it as an agenda driven wedge, did it turn into ‘something’. This virus is NOT a threat to us; it is the satan following freaks in our gov or who are counseling our gov, that are bad.
Second, Trump is dependent on people counseling him; he can’t do everything. His one fault, IMO, in this, is allowing lefties to be placed in a position of power to counsel him. I think Pence is who keeps recommending these bad apples. I know for a fact he plugged fauci.
Maybe Mark Meadows will bring a breath of fresh air into the equation.