Trump Youth leader Charlie Kirk is trying to get a new coronavirus talking point going, and Donald Trump is eager to help: But what about the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu”? Specifically, what about the Obama administration’s allegedly botched response to it?
Kirk is spreading lies, but he got a Trump retweet and Rudy Giuliani signed on to the effort to make Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response look less bad by lying about Obama’s H1N1 response.
“This is your daily reminder that it took Barack Obama until October of 2009 to declare Swine Flu a National Health Emergency,” Kirk tweeted. “It began in April of ‘09 but Obama waited until 20,000 people in the US had been hospitalized & 1,000+ had died. Where was the media hysteria then?”
Facts: President Obama declared a public health emergency in April 2009, when there had been just 20 cases of H1N1 confirmed in the U.S., and no deaths. A funding request followed two days later. In October, when there had been 1,000 deaths, Obama declared a national emergency.
(See, there are two different kinds of emergency: a public health emergency, and a national emergency. They trigger different possibilities for action. Obama declared one more or less immediately and the other six months later.)
The thing is, what if Obama had botched H1N1 response? Would that excuse Trump to do the same with coronavirus? “No reason to do better this time! It’s all just a competition with Obama, right? And a tie is as good as a win in this case, because it’s not like lives are at stake or anything!”
This is what one of the bright young things of the far right is offering up to defend Trump’s public health failures: Obama screwed up, too (which he didn’t, at least in the specific way alleged), and that means the media should lay off Trump rather than expecting him to, oh, say, do better. No wonder Trump loves that message. And between Kirk, Trump, and Giuliani, this message has about 50,000 retweets.
