President Trump and Coronavirus

Ian Macfarlane

Conrad Black

No matter what ravages the virus causes elsewhere, if it never gets to general municipal shutdowns in the United States, the administration will be able to claim a victory. 

"The attempt to hang coronavirus around the neck of the president is a movement that has gone from a standing start to neck-snapping speed, as opportunities to discredit Donald Trump in the American media generally do.

"He was criticized for acting early in restricting access from potentially vulnerable countries, and after for having short-changing the relevant government agencies, even though that didn’t happen. Even the brickbat-wielding Washington Post has had to make the point that, in fact, Trump increased the allocations to public health and disease control authorities. 

"The more civilized antagonists of the president start by acknowledging that many people who become infected will not even be aware of it, and among those that are diagnosed the mortality rate is around 3 percent. Given the sources for these comforting assurances, I suspect their motives are not so much to placate concern as to lower the threshold at which it may be asserted that the administration is responsible for unnecessary deaths.  

"We are already seeing the beginning of a process reminiscent of the media treatment of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981. “America Held Hostage” was the subtitle of ABC News’ special 11:30 p.m. features news program, and each day was an extension of American humiliation. The incidences of the virus will naturally be announced every day, with the implication that they were avoidable, and the numbers of fatalities will be presented with the implicit message that if the federal government had been more prudent, they would not have occurred. 
"When precautions taken are fully effective, the authority is usually derided for imagining a crisis and wasting money on it; when the best of precautions cannot stop a problem from happening completely, the authorities were “negligent.” The death watch has already been mounted, and any assurance from the president or his spokespeople that everything is under control and that the country is ready is dismissed out of hand as overconfidence and an effort to use boastfulness to inspire complacency. Thereafter, any incidences of the virus are cited to puncture the supposed complacency of the regime. " . . .  More...