I just saw Trump answering shouted questions on the South lawn. He said a lot of stupid stuff, as always, but I just want to address one statement he made, with a follow-up question I wish the press had asked. He said, as he has several times recently, “What happened should never never have happened. China should have informed us that they had a problem.” (A direct quote, transcribed by me.)
Leave aside that Trump repeatedly praised China’s response. Leave aside he should have known anyway. Assume he’s telling the truth and China was less than candid (which in fact appears to be the case). My question would have been, “Mr. President, if they had informed you they had a problem, if they were completely transparent, what would you have done differently?”
I imagine his answer (bending over backwards to put it in the best light) would be that we could have kept out travelers from China much earlier (his only response until mid-March), and we would have had more time to prepare — more PPE, ramping up testing capacity, building and distributing ventilators, and maybe even contact tracing. That would certainly have been the best response. And it might well have lessened the virus’s impact in the U.S., perhaps even have reduced the need for social distancing and kept the economy from falling off a cliff.
Sounds good, right? But let’s think about that for a minute. Trump certainly knew “they had a problem” no later than the end of January, because that’s when he put his travel ban in place. In addition, there were numerous press reports, for example, showing that China was building emergency hospitals to cope with the virus in Wuhan at the end of January/early February. So even if Trump’s response was delayed until the end of January solely due to China’s perfidy, he should have started taking those actions no later than then. Did he? We know he didn’t. All we got was happy talk and bullshit — it’s 15 people, soon going down to zero; it will disappear like magic in April when the weather gets warm; anyone who wants a test can get one; it’s the new Democrat hoax. Trump didn’t take any of the steps he supposedly would have taken earlier, had the Chinese been transparent, even after it was indisputable that there was a problem.
So why not? Probably because Trump didn’t want to do anything to spook the market or suggest there was a problem. So if Trump answered my question truthfully, he would say “Nothing.”
Of course, he wouldn’t answer truthfully — he would say what I discussed above, that he could have taken proactive steps to mitigate the damage. But that would trigger just one more follow-up question: “Then why didn’t you take those steps once it became clear there WAS a problem? Why did you dick around for the entire month of February and part of March before you took this seriously?”
There is no good answer.
PS — I realize the above is giving Trump way too much benefit of the doubt; he in fact knew (or should have known) there was a problem much earlier, regardless of the Chinese government’s lack of candor. It’s been widely reported that our intelligence community was warning of the pandemic risk even back at the end of 2019. They put it in the Presidential Daily Brief at least 12 times in January. But the point here is that, even ignoring those very inconvenient facts, and taking Trump’s statement at face value, he’s full of crap.
I’ve got to be offline for a couple of hours, but will respond to any questions or comments when I get back.