Blame Trump for What He Actually Did Wrong on Coronavirus

Trump is to blame for plenty regarding our lackluster Coronavirus response and indeed, I've said as much before. Evidence exists that he ignored the threat early on (other than suspending travel to China) and he clearly downplayed it for way too long. He has given conflicting and often just weird public comments while not taking responsibility for anything and not showing much leadership at all.

That being said, the Left has blamed Donald Trump for a bunch of things that are not true regarding this whole thing in their typical, hyperbolic, slobbering-at-the-mouth style.

Claim 1: Trump Called the Virus a "Hoax"
So right off the bat, no, Trump did not call the Coronavirus "a hoax" despite this being endlessly repeated by liberals. The left-leaning fact-checker Snopes gave the claim "a mixture" before admitting that in fact, no, Trump didn't say the virus was a hoax. "Despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax." 

Yes, the word "hoax" should never have been said anywhere close to a discussion on Covid-19, but it's still quite clear that Trump was calling the Democrats' claims he was ignoring the virus a "hoax." Here's exactly what he said,

"Very dishonest people. Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
​
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early. We went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified." [Italics mine]

The context is obvious, although bragging about only having 15 cases at the time looks pretty stupid now.

​Claim 2: Trump and the Republicans Cut CDC Funding
For this one, Trump and the Republicans deserve some blame. They recommended the CDC's budget be cut. But it never was.

As the AP notes, "Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased."  So blame him for recommending cuts if you want, but nothing came of it. 

By the way, the requested cut for 2019 was 12 percent; big, but by no means not draconian.

Claim 3: Trump Abolished the White House Pandemic Response Team
This one gets floated around the most it seems. Even I believed it for a while before reading Tim Morrison's article in The Washington Post expressly denying the charge. And he was there when it happened. 

And so what was this "it" by chance? Well, here's how the very-unfriendly-to-Trump Washington Post explained "it" in a subsequent article trying to elucidate what happened,

The office — as set up by Obama — was folded into another office. Thus, one could claim the office was eliminated. But the staff slots did not disappear and at least initially the key mission of team remained a priority. So one can also claim nothing changed and thus Biden’s criticism is overstated. The question that cannot be answered — at least perhaps until a congressionally mandated commission examines the U.S. preparation for this crisis — is whether a separate directorate would have had more clout to bring the issue immediately to the president’s attention…” ​

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton thought there was too much redundancy and so he folded the pandemic response team together in with another unit on bioterrorism. This may seem like an odd choice to you. And it is. But John Bolton is a warmongering freak, so it makes perfect sense he would think that such a choice made sense.

Was this odd choice a good idea? I sincerely doubt it. But it's a far cry from eliminating the office.

Claim 4: Trump Turned Down WHO Test Kits
In the end, the buck stops with Trump. So the incredibly slow rollout of Coronavirus test kits falls on his shoulders. The mistakes, however, were directly made at the fully-funded CDC. The first tests were contaminated and didn't work so they had to be scrapped, leading to a severe delay. Then came some really bad decisions Trump should have overruled. 

As Reason Magazine notes,

...officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.

But what about those fully-functioning WHO test kits? 

Well, they didn't really exist. The test kits were actually German and the CDC decided to make its own instead of replicating the German one. Kits that the WHO did have were supposed to be for underdeveloped countries without such research and manufacturing capacity.

From the Left-leaning Politifact,

While it might seem odd that the Trump administration shunned the WHO’s coronavirus test protocol, it’s normal for countries with advanced research capabilities to want to develop a measure that they trust. 

"I don’t know if WHO agreed to sell the kits to us, but it should never have been something we needed to do given our technological expertise and the fact we would have ‘taken kits from low- and middle-income countries’ that otherwise could not make or afford them," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in an email. 

It’s also unlikely, Mores said, that the WHO offered to sell kits to the U.S., because that’s not normally what the organization does...

...But the U.S. would never have needed complete kits from WHO. Even if it had adopted the WHO testing approach, it already had access to all the necessary materials... The U.S. chose to use its own test, rather than the one circulated by WHO. Other nations, such as China, Japan and France, also developed their own tests. Multiple public health experts said that is not unusual. 

None of this means Trump has done well, of course. Something just bugs me about self-righteous indignation over false or wildly exaggerated claims. After all, I'm plenty critical of Obama, but he never actually claimed entrepreneurs didn't build their own companies.

​I guess truth is the first casualty in war, partisan politics and clickbait articles. And I guess I wish it just didn't have to be that way.