In their ongoing effort to undermine President Trump, Democrats are seizing on his response to the coronavirus.
But the Associated Press, which as an establishment media fixture tends to lean left politically, is fact-checking the Democrats’ claims, concluding they are presenting a “distorted picture.”
“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,” wrote AP reporters Lauran Neergaard and Calvin Woodward.
“That’s a distorted picture. For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget,” they pointed out.
They noted the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.”
Nevertheless, Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg said of Trump: “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing.”
Bloomberg said the president “is not ready for this kind of thing.”
And former Vice President Joe Biden made a similar claim.
“We (the Obama administration) increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. … He’s wiped all that out. … He cut the funding for the entire effort.”
But the AP concluded both candidates are “wrong to say the agencies have seen their money cut.”
“Bloomberg is repeating the false allegation in a new ad that states the U.S. is unprepared for the virus because of ‘reckless cuts’ to the CDC. Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased.”
The New York Times reported other Democrats also have claimed that Trump isn’t “ready” for a battle with the coronavirus.
This despite his early moves to limit travel between China and the United States. And among the tens of thousands of cases that have been documented worldwide, only a few dozen are in the United States.
Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is insisting that money allocated for security on the nation’s southern border be redirected to the virus.
“I’m going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now taking to spend on his racist wall at the southern border and divert it to the coronavirus,” she said.
She is unlikely, however, to get support from others in Congress and certainly the White House.
Another Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., questioned Trump’s decision to put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the administration’s response to the outbreak.
And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has claimed the president is ill-informed regarding the virus.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also declared the president was unprepared.
However, the AP report found the public health system “has a playbook to follow for pandemic preparation — regardless of who’s president or whether specific instructions are coming from the White House.”
“Those plans were put into place in anticipation of another flu pandemic, but are designed to work for any respiratory-borne disease.”
John Auerback of the Trust for America’s Health said the CDC’s response “has been excellent, as it has been in the past.”
There are Democrats outright lying about the President’s response to coronavirus. Bloomberg is actually running ads that say CDC funding was cut – & it’s patently false.
There is no need to politicize this important issue, but they can’t help themselves. https://t.co/LGBEGButJ2
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) February 27, 2020
Is there no issue serious enough that politicians won’t make false claims about it for political benefit? https://t.co/4mBov3MkGE
— Brit Hume (@brithume) February 27, 2020
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said the nation is facing a danger bigger that the coronavirus: Bernie Sanders.
“They are trying to weaponize a virus that doesn’t know a Democrat from a Republican, from a conservative, from a liberal. They are trying to use this coronavirus to scare the hell out of everybody in their madcap hopes of finding something that will get rid of Donald Trump,” he said.
Limbaugh said, “If you want to really get a handle on the coronavirus, shut the border, stop airplane flights from China, stop airplane flights from where we know this virus has infected a lot of people.
“You’re gonna hear how the coronavirus is deadly, it’s a pandemic, and that Trump isn’t doing anything about it because Trump’s too stupid to know what to do about it. Trump is too uninterested, Trump doesn’t care, Trump is an idiot, Trump has gotten rid of all the smart people. We need people like Obama to save us and Obama is nowhere around. Where is Obama, anyway? Not that I care. But you’re gonna hear this all day long just like you heard every day for two years that Trump colluded with Russia, just like you heard every day that Trump was trying to dig up dirt on Biden and should be impeached for it with the phone call to Ukraine.”
He said the “panic and fearmongering” over coronavirus is the same as what “you heard for two years over Russia meddling in and stealing the election.”
