Trump complains Democrats are blaming him for coronavirus
President Donald Trump accused congressional Democrats early Friday morning of unfairly blaming the coronavirus’ threat to Americans on his administration, tying the global health epidemic even closer to domestic politics.
“So, the Coronavirus, which started in China and spread to various countries throughout the world, but very slowly in the U.S. because President Trump closed our border, and ended flights, VERY EARLY, is now being blamed, by the Do Nothing Democrats, to be the fault of ‘Trump,’” the president wrote on Twitter just after midnight.
In another message roughly half an hour later, Trump suggested Democratic lawmakers had been “wasting time” on other legislative priorities and efforts to denigrate Republicans as the coronavirus outbreak proliferated.
“The Do Nothing Democrats were busy wasting time on the Immigration Hoax, & anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad, while I was busy calling early BORDER & FLIGHT closings, putting us way ahead in our battle with Coronavirus. Dems called it VERY wrong!” Trump wrote.
That post mirrored a similar tweet the president issued Thursday evening but later deleted, in which he charged that Democrats were “wasting their time on the Impeachment Hoax” as he sought to implement preventative measures to combat the coronavirus.
Of course, the Senate earlier this month acquitted Trump of two articles of impeachment. It was only less than a week earlier that the administration in late January had declared the coronavirus a public health emergency — announcing it would close the border to foreign nationals who had recently been in China and instituting a mandatory two-week quarantine for U.S. citizens returning from the epicenter of the outbreak.
Trump also railed against the “fake news” during a White House event Thursday for allegedly negatively characterizing his administration’s response to the coronavirus, and claimed he was accused of being a “racist” for restricting travel from Asia while leaving U.S. borders open to affected countries elsewhere.
The president’s various complaints regarding Democratic criticism and media coverage of his management of the coronavirus come as he has broadened his administration’s response to the crisis in recent days, even while continuing to downplay the risk it poses to the U.S. amid dire warnings from health officials.
Trump on Wednesday revealed that Vice President Mike Pence would oversee the government’s response to the outbreak — taking over the supervisory role from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who insisted he would still chair the White House coronavirus task force.
Pence on Thursday then named a global health official, Ambassador Debbie Birx, as the “White House coronavirus response coordinator,” who will report to the vice president but serve on the task force that Azar leads.
The shuffling of responsibilities follows bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill against the administration’s emergency funding request to fight the coronavirus, which both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have slammed as insufficient to stave off the threat.
Meanwhile, the first patient likely to have contracted the coronavirus within an American community was diagnosed Wednesday in California, and Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday the state was monitoring 8,400 for possible infections. Only 40 of more than 100 public health labs in the U.S. are currently able to diagnose the coronavirus due to a faulty test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
