While coronavirus panic sets in across the country, it’s interesting to look back over the previous few weeks and see the reaction after the Trump administration took steps to stem the tide and stop infections from reaching our shores. The current narrative is that Trump has “bungled” the response (there’s no real evidence of that), thereby threatening his re-election, because that’s all this is really about to them.But that wasn’t always the narrative. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that the media were chastising Trump for doing too much to battle coronavirus in the United States. How biased are our media? The following thread illustrates it perfectly.
It’s just unbelievable. Trump took very early steps, before the first infection stateside, to stop the flow of the virus into the country. What did he get for his trouble? A myriad of op-eds proclaiming that containing the virus was actually hurting the containment of the virus. None of it made sense, but it wasn’t meant to make sense. It was simply a way to start an orange man bad narrative. Now that we have infections in the United States, they’ve flipped the narrative and claim Trump hasn’t done enough. There was never any winning for him in this situation. The media were simply not going to allow it.
The truth is, the government is not magic. I’m actually fairly disappointed with a lot of conservatives whining about the current response, as if the feds have secret factories ready to pump out supplies to meet any pandemic at a moments notice. No President has the ability to stop an infectious disease from spreading. It’s not possible to contain something like that. You can only manage it. One of the cornerstones of conservatism is realizing that the government kind of sucks. It can’t do things fast and efficiently and no amount of “leadership” will change that. The response to H1N1 was painfully slow under Obama. The response to Katrina was sloppy under Bush. It’s not because they were incompetent and “bungled” things, it’s because there’s only so much the federal government can actually do.
Trump has done everything in his power to this point. Things will get worse before they get better. Conservatives, of all people, should understand the limitations here instead of playing into them.