How can you be wrong about everything and still keep your job?
Time for a little review of Trump being wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong and wrong again.
Trump Feb. 27: The outbreak would be temporary:
“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” (FALSE)
Fauci Feb 29
: “as the next week or two or three go by, we’re going to see a lot more community-related cases.” (TRUE)
Trump: Pharmaceutical companies are going “to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon.”
The truth: The president’s own experts told him during a White House meeting with pharmaceutical leaders earlier
that same day that a vaccine
could take a year to 18 months to develop. In response, he said he would prefer if it took only a few months. He later claimed, at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, that
a vaccine would be ready “soon.”
Trump: “I’ve always known this is a real—this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic … I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”
The truth: Trump has repeatedly downplayed the significance of COVID-19 as outbreaks began stateside. From calling criticism of his handling of the virus a “
hoax,” to
comparing the coronavirus to a common flu, to worrying about letting sick Americans off cruise ships because they would increase the
number of confirmed cases, Trump has used his public statements to send mixed messages and
sow doubt about the outbreak’s seriousness.
Trump: This kind of pandemic “was something nobody thought could happen … Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.”
The truth: Experts both inside and outside the federal government sounded the alarm many times in the past decade about the potential for a devastating global pandemic, as
my colleague Uri Friedman has reported. Two years ago, my colleague Ed Yong explored the legacy of Ebola outbreaks—including the devastating 2014 epidemic—to evaluate how ready the U.S. was for a pandemic. Ebola hardly impacted America—but
it revealed how unprepared the country was.
An unfinished compendium of Trump’s overwhelming dishonesty during a national emergency
www.theatlantic.com