@GRHorn, like it or not, Trump is the President and we can only judge his handling of this threat at a strategic and tactical level. Strategically, he has attempted to defund the CDC the past two years, eliminated the pandemic response position on the national security council and appointed an unqualified overseer in Pence because of loyalty concerns. Tactically, he waited too long to take this seriously, continues to make public statements contradictory to the experts, has attempted to silence the experts (who have thankfully ignored the order to quit talking to the media) and otherwise conducts a response focused more on the feel-good economy in an election year than on the health and well-being of our citizens who are most at risk.
It’s been two months since the armchair QBs in the DT thread recognized this as a threat using a fraction of the information available to the President. We have just now gotten some funding in place and seen a trickle of test kits flowing to the front lines, so to speak. The video you posted is great, but it does not mean what you think it means. The presenter is criticizing China’s authoritarian response, not championing Trump’s — which advocates a softer quarantine in the suggestion to “avoid Seattle” (Larry Kudlow), ignoring CDC suggestions to stay home if infected, doctoring statistics by not counting the infected who have mild cases and avoidance of testing for those who don’t feel that ill. The presenter in that video makes statements that are counter to all of that coming from Trump and/or his administration.
The head of the WHO has said that “countries have been planning for this (type of event) for decades. Now is the time to enact those plans.” So what is our national plan for this type of event? There isn’t one. The position that would allow the President to be well-informed of an impending threat and who would be in the position to have a plan for an early tactical response was eliminated. That was not an Obama decision. It was not a Hillary decision. It was a Donald Trump decision.
This is Trump’s first real test in a national crisis not of his own invention and he is failing miserably.