On ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, 2020 Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden said President Donald Trump should have stopped air travel from China sooner in the effort to battle the coronavirus pandemic, adding that 45 nations had already blocked “China personnel from being able to come to the United States.”
‘We have to move more rapidly’
Commenting on President Trump’s approach to the crisis, former vice president Biden said, “I would tell him what we went through a similar crisis, you have to move swiftly. We have to move more rapidly.”
“You have to implement the Defense Production Act, empower a supply commander, create, you know, a Defense Production Act for banks for small business loans, you got to faster than slower, and we started off awfully slow,” he added.
“He indicated that I complimented him on dealing with China,” Biden continued. “Well, you know, 45 nations had already moved to keep — to block China personnel from being able to come to the United States before the president moved. It’s about pace. It’s about —it’s about the urgency, and I don’t think there’s been enough of it.”
WATCH: Biden Says Trump Should Have Stopped Air Travel from China Sooner READ MORE: https://t.co/oUOrqzCUyk
Keep in mind that while Biden now says Trump should have implemented the travel ban sooner, when he actually did so, many Democrats were calling it racist.
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, claimed in an interview last month that President Trump’s travel ban was key to America not getting hit as hard by the coronavirus crisis as other nations.
Democrats Were Distracted By Impeachment During Coronavirus Spread Early Days
In late January, a time when coronavirus was spreading and we can ostensibly believe Biden thinks Trump should have enacted a China travel ban, Democrats were obsessed with just one thing – impeachment.
Joe Biden or any other Democrat accusing Trump of taking his eye off the ball in this moment is laughable at best.
To be honest, with all of the crap the Democratic Party has done to the American people and President Trump, they should not be able to get one candidate through.
Americans Need To Include Term Limits For Elected Leaders
We need to change Congress Laws, so we have term limits, equal justice for Congress and Citizens, the same health benefit privileges if we are willing to pay and penalties for those that break their Constitutional oaths. We also need laws in place that can run for Congress. They must not be running under any agendas, not Constitutional, and must be a born USA Citizen. We have learned a lot, and only the best of us should be able to run for Congress!
I will go even further. The Democrats, after all, are the party of malcontents, societal reprobates, underachievers and non-achievers, substance abusers, and people in other ways uncomfortable in their skins.
People who ARE comfortable in their skins and with a healthy level of self-respect with few exceptions don’t vote Democrat because the Democrat Party has absolutely NOTHING to offer them except a LOT of self-destructive attitudes and policies.
Pelosi And Democrats Are Blind Leading The Blind
Pelosi and her conga line of Democrats in the three houses, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Mainstream Press were all looking the other way, concentrating on impeachment, obstruction, trying to re-tie the ship of State back to the pier of malaise, or boring holes in the hull below the waterline, and even claiming the COVID-19 (coronavirus) was no big deal, but President Trump was just racist and xenophobic to do anything about it, including to refer to its origination hot spot!
Virtually every major city in the US is run by Democrats, which means run by corrupt incompetents. To keep their jobs, democrats have made the inhabitants of their cities as dependent upon handouts and graft as they can. That and importing illegal aliens they can use as additional illegal voters. Then combining the corruption with an ideology designed to make people act against all logic and reason while making themselves more powerful, they have hollowed out the strength of every city for themselves.
New York is typical. Left on its own, as it would be, if the US were not in pandemic shutdown, de Blasio and his Democrats would quickly kill 10% of the city population. Remember into mid-March, about three weeks ago, the mayor and his people were promoting ignoring the virus. The people flooding hospitals today are the result, and every death is killing another Democrat. Of course, they will remain loyal Democrat voters.
PELOSI IS ABOUT ABOUT DESTROYING HER POLITICAL ENEMY
The answer to Pelosi lies with her daughter, who notably told us the truth about the evil, vindictive Democrat leader. She, in so many words, said to us that her mother would stop at nothing to destroy someone whom she perceived as an enemy of her political aspirations. In other words, the woman has no moral compass other than to get her way regardless of who or how many it hurts.
According to the Democrats, Trump didn’t do enough. He didn’t declare martial law and take over the entire healthcare sector. You know if Obama were in charge, that’s exactly what he would have done, just taken over everything! Who needs elections, communists just TAKE! Remember this every time you hear Trump didn’t do enough!
Folks let’s pray that our president and his advisors have supernatural wisdom and insight in this situation, that he listens to voices that tell him the truth. Believe Dr. Anthony Fauci must go. Bind up the spirits of deception and confusion that are continually in the propaganda in the airwaves in Jesus’ name.
Although the New World Order may think this is a perfect storm for more power, God has a greater plan.
We warned America, and Democrats delivered an impeachment to underscore the seriousness of the matter: Donald Trump wasn’t fit to be president. Republicans didn’t care, because tax cuts and judges, and now here we are.
Today, we’ll hit two Sept. 11ths’ worth of deaths, easily blowing by the 6,000 mark just two days after hitting a single 9/11. We’ve just about to reach a quarter-million cases, which is a whopping one-quarter of the total confirmed cases worldwide. By any measure, this is an abject disaster. Yet in a breathtaking display of goalpost moving, Trump said a couple of days ago, “[if] we have between 100 and 200,000 [deaths], we altogether have done a very good job.”
Yeah, nice try.
Trump is in a politically perilous position, for sure. His inability to respond to the crisis—from dismantling the institutions designed to identify (CDC outpost in China) and respond to such a crisis (the pandemic preparedness task force and FEMA), to incompetent staff, to an utter inability to be forthright and truthful to the American people, to simply misplaced priorities (stock market > grandma)—our nation never stood a chance.
Indeed, the only thing mitigating a death toll in the millions is the quick action of governors and local governments around the country. And even on that front, there was too much delay, particularly in Republican states, precisely because Trump was pretending things were okay to protect his donors’ stock portfolios.
But let’s consider Trump’s new thesis: that as long as national deaths number below a quarter million, he will “have done a very good job.” Does he think that people will applaud him?
Yesterday, 1,049 people died of the disease, and we’re nowhere near the peak. So every single day, we’ll be seeing 1,000, then 2,000, then a 9/11 (3,000 deaths), until who knows when. Every single day will see the kind of carnage we haven’t seen since World War II.
Every day, people will have to face the death of someone they know, someone they love, someone they respect or admire. Artists, movie stars, athletes, politicians, religious leaders, musicians, business leaders, and so many grandmas. Their stories will be broadcast across all media, all of them a dagger in our hearts.
And shock and sorrow will then give way to anger. It’s a stage of grief, after all.
Conservatives will work overtime to deflect: It’s the fault of the Chinese! People die all the time (flu, car crashes, heart disease, insert random other cause of death), this is nothing special! It’s the fault of open sanctuary cities like New York! No one could’ve predicted! And yet, the American people have already decided that they can’t and don’t trust trump.
NEW POLL >> The credibility gap between Dr. Fauci and Trump on coronavirus is a stunning 65 POINTS. Cuomo is 25 points better than Trump. A majority of Americans distrust Trump to tell the truth about the virus. via @NavigatorSurveypic.twitter.com/fMMQNQtGfL
Those numbers will only get worse. And those excuses might work in Fox News land, but that’s not where Trump needs to hold his numbers. Arkansas isn’t going to be competitive at any level this year.
There are seven states that will decide the presidential election: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. All seven are on a razor’s edge. A shift of even a few points can take these states from “coin flip” to “lean Biden.” And already, we’re seeing the largest Democratic lead in Trump’s reelection numbers all year:
If you have seven states that are essentially 50-50 ties, then a one-point shift makes it 51-49. Two points, its 52-48. See?
This is why Trump is freaking out. He can’t afford to bleed even marginal support, because every vote will matter. That’s why he’s trying to shift the goalposts.
But there is no way in hell that people look at thousands dying every single day and give Trump any kind of credit. NONE. The toll on our nation is too great. The impact we’re suffering is so much worse than what other countries have experienced that it’s impossible to blame the fates. This may be an act of god, but the aftermath isn't. How we prepared isn’t. How we responded isn't. How we move forward isn’t.
And we haven’t even discussed the economic devastation.
NEW with @AlexNBCNews: Week of April 13 is earliest Americans will see direct deposit relief payments from the government; paper checks could take as long as 20 weeks -- nearly 5 months -- for some Americans
Five months? The amounts being mailed out are already not enough. Just watch the Trump administration bungle this, too. Remember that 6.65 million workers filed unemployment claims last week, breaking the previous record by10 times. And with congressional Republicans ruling out further stimulus at this time (they’ll be forced to relent, eventually), the economic pain is only going to get worse.
Presidents don’t get reelected when they bungle the economy. How are they supposed to do so when they also preside over a mass-death event ?
So no, Trump isn’t getting credit if we see hundreds of thousands of deaths. And if we ultimately do see those kinds of numbers play out, his reelection prospects will be around zero percent, and we’ll be talking about how much damage his entire party will face all the way down the ballot.
Sen. “Moscow” Mitch McConnell went on the Hugh Hewitt radio show Tuesday, as he often does when he wants to be especially awful. He was exceptionally awful in all the most predictable ways: blaming the crisis we're in right now on impeachment—because of course he did—and rewriting all of the last three months of history while doing it.
The slow response by President Donald Trump and Congress to the COVID-19 crisis, McConnell said, was because the impeachment "diverted the attention of the government." Except that's total bunk. The Senate was still functioning while the impeachment trial was going forward during the last week in January, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was confirming the initial cases in the U.S. The business of the Senate included a Jan. 24 all-senators briefing on coronavirus with Trump health officials, including the CDC director and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. You remember that meeting, right? That's the one that happened just before three Senate Republicans dumped millions’ worth of stocks, collectively. That's the action they decided to take when confronted with the calamity that had hit our shores.
In fact, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who had received additional briefings, blew off the warnings. "The coronavirus doesn’t appear to pose any imminent threat to Americans who have not recently traveled to the Hubei province of China," he said. "For now, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control have the resources needed to prevent any significant contagion from spreading into the United States. If more resources are needed, Congress stands at the ready." He came to that conclusion on Feb. 4, the day before the Senate voted against the impeachment charges against Trump.
Continuing on with the rewriting of history in the Hewitt interview, McConnell gave credit to Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton for being "first" to warn of the dangers of coronavirus. "He was first. I think Tom was right on the mark." Right on the mark meaning spouting bigoted and dangerous conspiracy theories about how the virus might have been (wink, wink) a chemical weapon developed in "China's only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases." Sure Mitch, you go ahead with the idea of Cotton being the big epidemiological brain in the Senate GOP.
Because it's Mitch, there's more. More typical Republican denial of the breadth and depth of this crisis, and how it's affecting real people. "I'm not going to allow this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items they wouldn't otherwise be able to pass," he sniffed, dismissing the necessity for further action by Congress to save the whole damned country. No, he's got his eyes on his true prize.
When the Senate gets back, it will "go back to judges. […] My motto for the rest of the year is to leave no vacancy behind."
Everything about that is stupid. Canadians have better health care and are giving better cash payments to individuals to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a massive border and there’s no way anyone can seal it, much less some poor sap in combat boots. Symbolically, it’s the world’s largest demilitarized border. Why mess with that? There's nothing useful or practical about it! Well, there’s one benefit to Donald Trump: He can pretend that he’s “doing something.”
Remember, everything Trump does is predicated on his reelection. That’s why he tried so hard to limit testing in the early days. Instead of working to stem the spread of the disease, he decided that rising numbers were a threat to his political standing and he reacted accordingly. You can see it in this new ad by the Joe Biden campaign:
The past month has been about minimizing the impact of the pandemic, promising that the numbers will fall, promising snake oil cures, dismissing it as “just like the flu,” and as of late, demanding that people get back to work because “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”
“The cure,” of course, being people losing their jobs, while “the disease” is people losing their lives.
But there’s a method to the madness. Whether it’s closing the border, or comparing COVID-19 to the flu, or demanding people get back to work, it all has an underlying electoral purpose. Remember that solutions to the pandemic are liberal ones: government support of individuals, government intervention in the economy, better health care, better social safety net, communal action, etc. This isn’t 9/11, when conservatives could bloat the Pentagon budget even further, ride a new wave of racism, and curtail civil liberties. So how do Trump and the Republicans work this to their favor?
Here’s what they’ll do (and they’re already doing it):
1. TRUMP IS DECISIVE
Oh my god, Trump can’t stop being the best leader the world has ever seen! Did you see? He closed the border to China. Biden didn’t want Trump to close the border to China, but he did so anyway, because that’s the bold kind of leadership that saved thousands of lives.
Trump also closed the borders with Mexico and Canada and deployed our troops, because fuck yeah America is the greatest and so are our troops, and Trump is taking action while liberals want open borders.
What about testing kits, shuttering the pandemic preparedness task force, and months of promising that things were “beautiful” and “perfect” and everything would be fine just around the corner? Those are nasty questions and Trump is too busy being decisive anyway to answer them. Next!
2. LIBERALS BROKE THE ECONOMY
The flu will kill 60-80,000 people this year, and we didn’t shut down the economy because of it. Only a few hundred/thousand/tens of thousands have died because of this virus, and we had to destroy the economy as a result? This was just a liberal plot to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box. They were angry because the impeachment hoax failed, and they decided to punish the whole country as a result.
Why do you think it’s Democratic governors that are closing their states? Republicans tried to keep America working, and Democrats took your jobs away to punish Donald Trump for being the best president in history. It’s their fault the economy is bad. Only Republicans can fix it.
3. RACISM
The Chinese created this virus and infected America with it. No one could’ve predicted that our enemies would be so ruthless and calculating and effective in conducting a biological attack on our country. It’s their fault. We need Republicans to stand tough against the Chinese for their cowardly attack on our soil.
4. REGIONALISM
If liberals and their sanctuary cities weren’t so “welcoming” to all manners of riff-raff, the disease wouldn’t have spread throughout America. Where did the “Chinese virus” take hold? Seattle. San Francisco. New York. It figures that those liberals would infect the rest of Real America with their virus. Trump is trying to protect the Heartland from the evils of urban liberals.
So yeah, that’s their campaign. It’s already started. The pieces are already in place. And when you see a conservative or Trump say something seemingly insane, note how it fits one of those categories above. For example:
�Approximately 7500 people die every day in the United States. That�s approximately 645,000 people so far this year. Coronavirus has killed about 1,000 Americans this year. Just a little perspective.� @RealCandaceO
Will it play with their base? Undoubtedly. They’re too stupid for words.
Will it play with Democrats? Clearly not.
Will it play with Independents? Well, “independent” is not an ideology, and spans everything from Alex Jones crazies to Bernie socialists to the politically apathetic. We do know that government (read: Trump) approval ratings for managing the crisis are ebbing down among independents.
So maybe it won’t work, in the aggregate, amongst that group.
The one wild card is the death rate. If coronavirus deaths remain below or equal to flu deaths, then the argument that the Democrats blew up the economy for no reason will have added salience to the stupidity. So for that reason alone, you’d think that Trump would be working overtime to bend the curve. Yet he’s doing quite the opposite, in fact. It boggles the mind.
Stem the death toll, and Trump has a ready-made excuse for the shitty economy: The Democrats overreacted. Instead, his actions are pushing us closer to the nightmare scenario. For example, look at what happens if Florida doesn’t take action within the next couple of weeks:
CovidActNow.org
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is among the fiercest Trump allies, and will not do anything to contradict or undermine the impeached president’s words and actions. So we’re talking somewhere in between “no action” and “social distancing.” No matter what happens in New York and California (fiercely working to stop the spread of the disease), Florida alone may be Trump’s undoing. Even if those numbers are overly dire, one-third of the “social distancing” death toll is a horrifying 100,000. With numbers like that, Trump and the GOP won’t be able to compare COVID-19 to the flu anymore.
Furthermore, the more the disease ravages red states and rural America, the harder it’ll be to dismiss it as a creation of New York City and San Francisco. Oh, they’ll try anyway! But local politicians will bear the brunt of explaining why they didn’t take the necessary precautions, especially if small-state death tolls end up exceeding those of New York and California—which is quite plausible.
For example, the models that drive the CovidActNow.org projections estimate that California’s death toll, with its shelter-in-place already in action, will be around 11,000. Meanwhile, Missouri, which hasn’t taken any action at all, could see up to 122,000, Oklahoma could see 79,000 deaths, and Tennessee 136,000. As horrific as things look in New York right now, measures in place may limit the damage to 38,000. (California looks as good as it does because it was the first to start shutting down, particularly the five pioneering Bay Area counties that beat anyone else by almost a week.)
In any case, if we see that kind of death toll play out around the country, Trump’s goose is cooked, and so is his entire party. Otherwise, whether by luck (a vaccine or better treatment emerges), or by action (militarizing the Canadian border stops the spread of COVID-19 in Arkansas!), Republicans will use that mix of liberal-blamin’, big-city-hatin’, racism creatin’, and grandiose Trump myth-makin’, to explain away the economic collapse, and pin the blame squarely on the Democrats.
Just two months ago, the House impeachment and subsequent Senate acquittal of Donald Trump was the talk of Washington. Throughout the fall, GOP-aligned groups had blasted House Democrats with ads attacking their votes to impeach Trump. The conservative American Action Network had already dumped $11 million into targeting Democrats over impeachment, but by early February all those ads had been pulled, according to Politico.
Now everyone's reassessing. After a political year that featured a record-setting government shutdown, the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, and a historic impeachment vote, the coronavirus has shifted the political calculus all over again—and likely for the long haul.
“This is just going to dominate American life through Election Day,” one Democratic strategist who tracks House campaigns told Politico. This week, a Democratic super PAC said it was making its first calculated foray into messaging on the coronavirus—a $5 million digital ad buy criticizing Trump’s response to the pandemic. But for the most part, strategists in both parties are trying to figure out how to calibrate both their messaging and fundraising so as not to be seen as capitalizing on a national tragedy that is also wreaking havoc around the world.
One group of lawmakers breathing a sigh of relief in particular is freshman Democrats who flipped conservative seats blue in 2018. Republicans had tagged that bloc for special treatment after House Democrats voted to impeach Trump last fall. Now, however, that vote doesn't carry the baggage Republicans had hoped it would. In fact, Trump's supremely dismal leadership has put that vote in a whole new light, even for the Democrats who took it.
“Some of his reaction and what he says — ‘I didn’t want the people off that boat because I like the numbers where we are’ — that reminds me of the president we impeached. Because, again, it’s about thinking of the self-interest ahead of the nation," said New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski, a freshman Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018.
Democrats will have plenty of chances moving forward to skewer Trump’s leadership in the critical early stages of this epidemic using his own words. In fact, Trump’s repeated assertions that the virus was “under control” when it was clearly spiraling out of control, and his persistent failure to take responsibility during the crisis will continue to compromise the position of Republican lawmakers straight through November.
Sunday night’s Democratic debate was a stark contrast from the previous debates. This time there were only two candidates, spaced six feet apart (per CDC recommendations), and no live audience, which turned out to be a refreshing change and one future debate hosts should stick with down the road. If you missed the debate, I’d recommend this excellent recap from my colleague Jessica Sutherland.
By far the most newsworthy moment of the debate came when the candidates were asked whether they would commit to naming a woman as vice president and Biden didn’t hesitate, saying unequivocally that he would, adding “there are a number of women who are qualified to be vice president tomorrow.” Biden went even further, reiterating that he’d name a black woman to the Supreme Court, saying their representation on the court is long past due, and pledging that his cabinet and administration would “look like the country.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders got the same question and said would "in all likelihood" pick a woman and added, “my very strong tendency is to move in that direction.”
Now that we know Biden will select a woman, who do you think would make an ideal running mate for the former vice president? Stacey Abrams has long been a favorite for either candidate, but former candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Amy Klobuchar have all been mentioned, along with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo. I’d add Rep. Val Demings of Florida to that list as well. She has been impressive on the various congressional committees and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi selected her as one of the seven impeachment managers. She’s also the first woman to serve as the chief of police in Orlando.
Looking at that list of women, we have an embarrassment of riches, folks. All of these women are capable of doing the job and helping to lead this country forward.
So, who do you hope Joe Biden will select? Take the poll below and sound off in the comments with other suggestions or background information on the women below.
Our first clue that Senate Republicans planned to be exactly useless for the entirety of the 116th Congress was when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, backed by his caucus, conspicuously stood on the sidelines for weeks on end during what turned into the longest government shutdown in history, from Dec. 22, 2018—Jan. 25, 2019. Donald Trump alone manufactured that shutdown by demanding that nearly $6 billion in border wall funding be tucked into the budget deal, and McConnell decided he would simply let Nancy Pelosi and her newly elected majority tame Trump rather than help find a solution.
In fact, McConnell seemed to have a good sense of exactly how useless Senate Republicans would be pretty early in Trump's administration. After the GOP-led Congress squandered most of 2017 on its Obamacare repeal debacle, Republicans just barely squeezed out their tax giveaway to the rich and powerful before the end of the year on December 20, 2017. By February 2018, McConnell was already selling his Senate majority as being "in the personnel business"—he just forgot to add the word, exclusively. And while it's undoubtedly true that McConnell's Senate has reshaped the federal courts by pushing through some 190 judges since Trump took office, it did so to the exclusion of almost all legislative work. Gloating over his chamber's unique lack of productivity, McConnell even embraced the nickname "Grim Reaper" for making his Senate the place where the people's business goes to die. McConnell has single-handedly refused to consider more than 400 bills passed by Pelosi’s House of Representatives.
Simultaneous to that dereliction of duty, Republicans have stayed almost completely mum as Trump has spewed harmful lie upon harmful lie about the coronavirus. In fact, when Trump went to visit with the do-nothing GOP caucus Tuesday (because he refuses to meet with Pelosi), Trump told reporters the coronavirus would simply "go away, just stay calm," adding, "It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen." No. Hard no. A lot of good things are not happening. But to date, Senate Republicans have taken a total pass on correcting any of Trump's disinformation campaign.
Instead, they seem pretty content to rest on their success of banding together to run a sham impeachment trial with zero witnesses and ultimately vote to keep the most corrupt president in American history in office.
And by single-handedly refusing to remove Trump, Senate Republicans can now proudly share the credit for the epic economic and public health crisis that is quickly rippling through the country now. Heckuva job, Mitchy. See you in November.
In the annals of make-or-break political moments for a president, life and death situations often loom largest. The Iran Hostage Crisis and Hurricane Katrina come to mind immediately for helping to sink the approvals of a president who never quite recovered and indeed helped doom his party in the upcoming election. Katrina, for instance, shook America's confidence in the competence of the George W. Bush White House, helping Democrats notch massive wins the following year during the midterms that flipped control of both the House and the Senate. By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he had the benefit of historic Democratic majorities to help him usher in a major change to America’s health system.
Now Senate Republicans hoping to hang on to their seats in November are fretting as they watch Donald Trump's bungled coronavirus response. After holding a sham impeachment trial and acquitting Trump of any wrongdoing, Republicans have now cosigned every disastrous mistake Trump makes. Among the things Republicans have gifted to America in this moment are Trump’s stunning incapacity for human empathy and total inability to understand even the most basic public health concerns. According to the Washington Post, Trump's GOP allies on the Hill have become "unsettled" and "on edge" as they watch Trump's overwhelming incompetence in the face of a life-threatening crisis.
“It’s really bad for those who have kind of hitched their wagon to the president ahead of this year’s election and are relying on him and his base,” former senator Jeff Flake told the Post, in an admission more candid than any sitting GOP senators would be willing to make.
Democrats, however, are plenty eager to state the obvious.
“I don’t think we can ignore how disastrous their performance has been,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said of Trump and his administration. “In many ways this was the moment we feared: a true security threat to the nation and a president who can’t tell the truth, who can’t organize a consistent response, and doesn’t have enough experienced people on the job.”
Meanwhile, Trump's been openly mocking the media's coronavirus hysteria to his campaign donors. “It’s not that big of a deal,” Trump said at one event. Presumably that was before the stock market suffered its worst drop on Monday in over a decade. Trump sure rushed to the cameras after that Monday evening to reassure the markets and congratulate himself on how great his administration has been handling the crisis.
Speaking of which—congratulations to all the congressional Republicans who helped make Trump's stellar response possible. See you in November.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders insisted he would not shut down the border in order to protect Americans from the coronavirus.
He made the comments during a town hall hosted by Fox News.
President Trump has touted his early efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus in the United States by declaring a public health emergency in January and imposing travel restrictions from China.
When asked by host Bret Baier if he would consider similar steps or even going a step further to keep the American people safe, Sanders admitted he would not.
Open Borders Insanity
“If you had to, if you had to, would you close down the borders?” Baier asked during the town hall.
“No,” Sanders replied. “I mean, what you don’t want to do right now — we have a president who has propagated a xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment from before he was elected.”
What that false assertion has to do with restricting access to people who might have been infected with the coronavirus is anybody’s guess.
In a sane world, refusing to close the borders to head off a possible health crisis would be disqualifying for a presidential candidate.
.@BretBaier asks about dealing with Coronavirus: “If you had to, would you close down the borders?”
Bernie: “No.. we have a President who has propagated a xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment from before he was elected.”
Sanders insisted he would take a more scientific approach in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.
“What we need to do is have the scientists take a hard look at what we need to do,” he suggested. “There are communities where the virus is spreading. What does that mean? It may mean self-quarantining. It may be not having public assemblies.”
What if it means shutting down the border and ports of entry temporarily?
“Let’s not go back to the same old thing,” the Vermont senator continued. “Isn’t it interesting that a president who has been demagoguing and demonizing immigrants, the first thing that he could think about is closing down the border?”
What’s interesting is that, like a programmed robot curmudgeon, Sanders’ first response to everything is ‘keep the borders open.’ Let travel from any country flow freely. Even at the expense of the American people and their safety.
Over a month ago, while Democrats and the media were consumed with the impeachment charade, President Trump took decisive action to combat Coronavirus.
He established a Coronavirus Task Force and suspended all travel from China while establishing a quarantine effort.
Sanders believes such actions are racially motivated, an absurdity at best.
“Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low,” President Trump said.
With the media panicking over the cases that have been reported thus far, imagine how bad things would have been if Trump followed Bernie’s advice and refused to enact some form of travel restrictions.