“Could the coronavirus be the magic bullet to kill off the Trump presidency?” So begins an article at Fox News that promptly answers its own question:
Desperate Democrats certainly hope so; they imagine the spreading disease will knock confidence and our robust economy for a loop, undermining President Trump’s best argument for reelection.
“After three years of hateful and harmful ‘resistance,'” the article’s author, Liz Peek, goes on to note, “this is a new low for Democrats.” Maybe so, but the more $64 question is whether the ploy will work.
So far, it doesn’t appear to be. Even the Associated Press, no friend of conservatives, acknowledges that Democrats are “distort[ing] coronavirus readiness.” In a fact check, the AP writes:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Democratic presidential contenders are describing the federal infectious-disease bureaucracy as rudderless and ill-prepared for the coronavirus threat because of budget cuts and ham-handed leadership by President Donald Trump. That’s a distorted picture. For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget.
He’s proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.
This should come as no surprise since, as we saw from the impeachment charade, Democrats are big on heaping blame on Trump for “crimes” he hasn’t committed.
AP’s fact check also shoots down the claim there has been a “steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease,” under Trump, underscoring the fact that “that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.”
Speaking of events that predate Trump, congressional Democrats and the media seem to have lost sight of the fact the nation was in a similar predicament not that long ago. As Marc Thiessen noted in the Washington Post in an October 2014 op-ed titled “Ebola and Obama’s crisis of competence”:
Ebola may not be a widespread health crisis in the United States just yet, but it is creating a crisis of another kind — a crisis of confidence in the competence of the federal government.
Many Americans were shocked to learn that when Ebola-infected doctor Craig Spencer returned to New York City from Guinea, took a three-mile run, visited a coffee stand, ate at a meatball restaurant, traveled on three New York subway lines, met friends at a Brooklyn bowling alley and used an Uber sedan to return home, he was not violating the U.S. government’s Ebola protocols.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructs health workers returning from West Africa to monitor their health for 21 days and that “during the time that you are monitoring your health, you can continue your normal activities.” Only after a health worker’s temperature reaches 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit does the CDC advise that he or she go to a doctor, “limit your contact with other people” and “avoid public transportation.”
Continue your normal activities? It is simply unbelievable that this remains the official federal guidance for people who were exposed to the Ebola virus — especially after the CDC just came under fire for telling Dallas nurse Amber Vinson (who had been exposed to Ebola and had a 99.5-degree fever) that she was safe to fly on a plane with 134 passengers aboard because her temperature had not yet reached 100.4 degrees.
This is the same CDC whose sage advice the Left is now claiming — falsely — that Trump is ignoring.
