Even in the midst of a global pandemic, President Donald Trump is refusing to give up his penchant for angry ranting against his political opponents. At a Saturday afternoon press conference that was supposed to be about the administration’s Coronavirus response, he freaked out over a report that The Washington Post had published the day before outlining internal administration warnings about the then-potential Coronavirus pandemic that had been, apparently, ignored. He’s consistently claimed that he and his team have, supposedly, actually always taken the Coronavirus seriously — but we can all see what they’re doing! Trump didn’t even name a response task force until about a month following the beginning of public news about the virus.
This Saturday, a reporter with the far-right One America News asked Trump:
‘What do you say to The Washington Post?’
Trump glibly replied:
‘Well I love whoever you’re with, cause that’s such a nice question. I think the Washington Post covers us very inaccurately, covers me very inaccurately. I saw the story. I think it’s a disgrace, but it’s the Washington Post, and I guess we have to live with it. It’s a very inaccurate story.’
At that point, a reporter — not the original one — tried to chime in with a follow-up question, and Trump pointed at them and pompously asserted that they needed to be quiet.
He continued:
‘From many people, I get a lot of credit for closing our country very early to a very heavily infected country — China, unfortunately. I wish China would have told us more about what was going on in China long prior to us reading about it, even though the news isn’t exactly disseminated. As you know, China kicked The Washington Post out of China, and they kicked The New York Times out.’
Watch:
Trump takes a loaded question from far-right OANN goading him into bashing the Washington Post and does so while also praising OANN pic.twitter.com/iTVQbCLrOL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 21, 2020
To be clear, China kicked out the publications that Trump mentions just days ago. The move was the latest step in a lengthy back-and-forth between the two countries over contingents of journalists from the “other side” in the respective locales. Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department slapped five Chinese news outlets with the designation of official government entities, which placed them under stricter scrutiny, and helped spark the hassle.
The point of the timing is that Trump can not point to the recent journalist expulsions as an excuse for why his administration did not act more comprehensively long ago. The Trump administration had the information; classified briefings among various high-level officials unfolded long before mass public concern.
Trump keeps returning to the point that he restricted travel from China during the early days of the outbreak, but one perhaps helpful step doesn’t erase the long list of other spots in which his team has failed. It’s been months since the virus first emerged in the U.S., and testing and supply issues are still a problem, buried under the delays enacted while Trump was trying to convince observers that concern over the virus was a Democratic “hoax.”
As one official put it to The Washington Post:
‘Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.’
And here it is. No surprise.
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn't get him to do anything about it,” this official said. ‘The system was blinking red.’” https://t.co/RgflWwERYZ
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 21, 2020
