Donald Trump Jr. spent his Friday morning babbling on Fox & Friends about Democrats’ supposed ambition to have the Coronavirus come to the United States and kill “millions” so they can stop President Donald Trump’s “streak of winning.” As should go entirely without saying — that is a completely ludicrous and utterly baseless argument that has no relationship to the reality of either the situation in general or Democrats’ behavior in particular. But Trump Jr. rushed headlong into this absurdity anyway, and the hosts just sat back as he accused an entire political party of crossing their fingers in hopes of mass death.
What kind of effect is this going to have on the attitudes and behavior of Trump’s base? Will Trump supporters start campaigning against the “Coronavirus-carrying Democrats” now? Will Trump tweet the allegation? At this point, if Trump Jr. literally wore a tinfoil hat during his appearances on Fox, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the net result of his appearance. He railed, referring to Democrats:
‘We’ve seen this play out for four years — anything that they can use to try and hurt Trump, they will. Anything he does in a positive sense… they will not give him credit for. The playbook is old at this point. But for them to try and take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness. I don’t know if this is Coronavirus or Trump Derangement Syndrome, but these people are infected badly.’
Watch:
Don. Jr was just on Fox & Friends accusing Democrats of hoping coronavirus "comes here and kills millions of people so that they can end Donald Trump's streak of winning."
Absolutely insane. pic.twitter.com/Fq5eAUIsnq
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) February 28, 2020
Again — there is no shred of evidence even remotely suggesting that a single prominent Democrat “hopes” Coronavirus “kills millions” just so they can stick it to Trump. Where’d Trump Jr. get this idea of a fantasy of mass death? From himself?
In reality, Democrats and even some Republicans have together been clamoring for a more direct and forceful response to the creeping Coronavirus situation. The Trump administration put in a request for $2.5 billion in emergency funding, only half of which is slated to consist of actual new money — and Democrats want to increase the sum. Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have been insisting on competent professionals getting tasked with responding to the Coronavirus in the U.S., rather than inexperienced religious extremist Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump announced as the chief virus response coordinator just this past Wednesday.
The examples could go on and on. Trump himself is the one who has proposed significant cuts to the budget of the Center for Disease Control and whose administration completely eliminated the National Security Council position of senior director for global health security and biothreats, whose job description included dealing with situations like potential pandemics.
Flashback: There is no one in the White House tasked specifically to oversee a coordinated government-wide response in the event of a pandemic, since the post of senior director for global health security and biothreats on the NSC was eliminated last May. https://t.co/kOQK8XVI9j
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 26, 2020
His administration also reportedly sent in staffers to deal with quarantined Coronavirus sufferers without proper precautions in place — and now a community-transmitted case of the virus has been reported for the first time, and it’s in the vicinity of that evidently bungled quarantine.
