Free Republic

But to believe some of the claims from Trump and Republicans one would have to imagine that President Barack Obama in 2014 helped seed money into bat research, which within several years would result in a global virus that escaped from a lab — either as a bioweapon or by accident — and spread around the globe. One would have to come to the firm conclusion that not only was the virus developed in a lab — something experts have said is nearly impossible given the virus's features — but that Americans helped cover that up, and that President Biden...

WASHINGTON - By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president - and the coronavirus the enemy - the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation. It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and...

Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode. But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to the spiraling global crisis, he made no explicit mention of the California case and its implications — and falsely suggested the virus might soon...