The White House is pushing back on media and leftist efforts to claim President Donald Trump was too slow in moving to counter the coronavirus crisis, with a senior White House official telling Breitbart News on Monday that a number of actions the president took have saved lives.
The White House is pointing to a number of actions the president took–stopping flights from China, implementing social distancing guidelines, and mobilizing American supply chains for key items necessary to combat the virus–that demonstrate the president’s actions put in place over the past few months have significantly slowed the spread and impact of the pandemic.
On January 31, Trump issued an order banning travel from China to the United States, something a senior White House official told Breitbart News “saved American lives.”
“President Trump then stopped travel from the European Union in March, preventing more cases,” the senior White House official added.
Trump’s European travel ban, implemented on March 11, was rolled out in the president’s Oval Office address to the nation at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in early March.
Then, after he halted travel from Europe–and before various states issued stay-at-home or other lockdown orders–at the direction of Trump and Coronavirus Task Force leader Vice President Mike Pence, the White House issued guidance encouraging social distancing. Those original guidelines, the original “15 Days to Slow the Spread” plan, were issued on March 16–which a senior White House official told Breitbart News was “well ahead of hot zones like New York and D.C.”
It is actually correct that the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States–New York–was slower than the White House in issuing such guidance. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reported in March, it was not until March 20 that Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued stay-at-home guidance and business closures statewide–what has become known as a lockdown–and it was not until the evening of March 22 that those measures went into effect. That means Cuomo was nearly a full week slower than the White House.
Trump has also, the White House official argued, poured resources into aiding states in their responses.
“As the spread reduced, President Trump threw the full weight of the federal government to aid hospitals and state governments; we have 20,000 national Guardsmen in all 50 states and territories,” the senior White House official added.
Not to mention the fact that Trump has engaged the private sector and all of government in an approach that rivals the American response to and engagement during World War II.
“Finally, President Trump has executed the largest mobilization of public and private sector resources since World War II – meeting ventilator, PPE, and hospital bed needs above and beyond,” the senior White House official said. “We’re now accelerating testing production at an unprecedented rate and will be prepared within weeks to open the economy in phases.”
Original models from places like the Imperial College U.K. and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington had predicted as many as millions of dead Americans to as many as 240,000 dead Americans as a result of the coronavirus. But models have proven to be wrong as the U.S. response led by President Trump has blunted the spread and severity of the crisis. Since then, modelers have significantly lowered their predictions of the number of Americans who would die from the coronavirus to about 60,000–still a tragedy but much less severe than original dire predictions:
The White House’s pushback on the establishment media and Democrat narrative comes as everyone from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi–who as recently as late February was encouraging large gatherings of crowds in San Francisco’s Chinatown–to media outlets like the New York Times and others, many of which have had staffers who similarly downplayed the coronavirus in the lead-up to the crisis sweeping the United States, attacking his handling of it.
On Fox News Sunday, Pelosi attacked Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis, calling him a “weak leader.”
But it was Pelosi who opposed the actions that Trump took to protect Americans from Chinese and European spread of the coronavirus. As Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) noted in a video Trump shared on Twitter this week, the same day Trump banned travel from China due to the coronavirus spread–January 31–Pelosi introduced a bill called the “NO BAN Act,” which would have hampered the ability of the president to stop travel from certain countries:
Despite Pelosi’s promotion of the NO BAN Act legislation on her Speaker website–again, the same day Trump banned travel from China–Democrats eventually backed down and withdrew the legislation in March, in the midst of the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.