Of Course Trump Made It Worse

Donald Trump is an aspiring magician. He and only he can change the past.

Having declared the coronavirus a hoax, for about a week now he's been declaring that he's been on the case the whole time. After all, he blocked people coming from China, something he'd be happy to do any damn Wednesday, so clearly he always knew what a challenge we faced.

Who knows? Maybe he'll pull it off. But it's important to name the truth because Trump is still asking us to trust him to keep us safe. He is not keeping us safe. He's not. So why should we open things up on Easter due to his opinion? God didn't raise Jesus from the dead for that.

Our first major failure involved testing. We failed to track and contain the virus by aggressively testing people who might have come into contact with it. Welp. Trump turned down the test offered by the World Health Organization.

Now why did Trump do that? One option is that he hates all international alliances, especially the United Nations. A second is that Jared Kushner's brother runs a company that produces tests, though that argument is a little shaky. Another option is that Trump never wanted to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat. Remember how he didn't want cruise ship passengers allowed to disembark because of the numbers? Remember all the false promises of quick tests?

Now, this is petty. The Washington Post reports that the G-7 failed to issue a statement on the pandemic because the Trump administration insisted on calling it the Wuhan virus. I suppose a G-7 statements means about as much as my opinion on black matter, but that says a lot about where the Trump energy is leaning.

We've also learned that Trump should have known what was coming.

• When Trump came to office, he inherited the coronavirus protocol developed by the Obama administration. 
• Just last year the Trump administration ran a months-long epidemic scenario game with premises very like the situation we're experiencing. And just days before this epidemic broke, a similar simulation was designed to alert the Trumpies.
• If anybody'd been paying attention, intelligence agencies were alerting the Trump administration that the coronavirus threat was severe--all the way back in January.

If Trump's magic trick works, we're a society of fools. Perhaps the best efforts to bring the truth to public attention are coming from true conservatives, who have known Trump as a fraud from the beginning. Here are a couple of their ads.

Share widely.

This too.