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Experts Tell Us That Weak, Stupid Trump Is Out of His Depth - Refuses To Admit He's An Unqualified, Incompetent BOOB

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All the President’s Lies About the Coronavirus
An unfinished compendium of Trump’s overwhelming dishonesty during a 
national emergency

CHRISTIAN PAZ
APRIL 9, 2020

THE ATLANTIC
Link Copied
Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus 
available to all readers. Find the collection here.

Updated at 12:30 p.m. ET on April 16, 2020.

More than a month since he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national 
emergency, President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about this once-in-
a-generation crisis.

Here, a collection of the biggest lies he’s told as the nation barrels 
toward a public-health and economic calamity. This post will be updated as 
needed.

On the Nature of the Virus

When: Friday, February 7, and Wednesday, February 19
The claim: The coronavirus would weaken “when we get into April, in the 
warmer weather—that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a 
virus.”
The truth: It’s too early to tell if the virus’s spread will be dampened 
by warmer conditions. Respiratory viruses can be seasonal, but the World 
Health Organization says that the new coronavirus “can be transmitted in 
ALL AREAS, including areas with hot and humid weather.”

When: Thursday, February 27
The claim: The outbreak would be temporary: “It’s going to disappear. One 
day it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
The truth: Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of 
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned days later that he was concerned 
that “as the next week or two or three go by, we’re going to see a lot 
more community-related cases.”

MORE STORIES

We Were Warned
URI FRIEDMAN
An illustration of Senator Rand Paul spreading coronavirus through the 
Capitol.
Rand Paul Has More Than a Cold
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
A doctor with the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic walks by a supportive sign in 
San Francisco.
This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus
AARON E. CARROLL ASHISH JHA
When: Multiple times
The claim: If the economic shutdown continues, deaths by suicide 
“definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re 
talking about” for COVID-19 deaths.
The truth: The White House now estimates that anywhere from 100,000 to 
240,000 Americans could die from COVID-19. Other estimates have placed the 
number at 1.1 million to 1.2 million. According to the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention, suicide is one of the leading causes of death in 
the United States. But the number of people who died by suicide in 2017, 
for example, was roughly 47,000, nowhere near the COVID-19 estimates. 
Estimates of the mental-health toll of the Great Recession are mixed. A 
2014 study tied more than 10,000 suicides in Europe and North America to 
the financial crisis. But a larger analysis in 2017 found that while the 
rate of suicide was increasing in the United States, the increase could 
not be directly tied to the recession and was attributable to broader 
socioeconomic conditions predating the downturn.

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: Trump can’t even imitate a normal 
president

Blaming the Obama Administration

When: Wednesday, March 4
The claim: The Trump White House rolled back Food and Drug Administration 
regulations that limited the kind of laboratory tests states could run and 
how they could conduct them. “The Obama administration made a decision on 
testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Trump 
said.
The truth: The Obama administration drafted, but never implemented, 
changes to rules that regulate laboratory tests run by states. Trump’s 
policy change relaxed an FDA requirement that would have forced private 
labs to wait for FDA authorization to conduct their own, non-CDC-approved 
coronavirus tests.

When: Friday, March 13
The claim: The Obama White House’s response to the H1N1 pandemic was “a 
full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to 
fix the testing problem, until now.”
The truth: Barack Obama declared a public-health emergency two weeks after 
the first U.S. cases of H1N1 were reported, in California. (Trump declared 
a national emergency more than seven weeks after the first domestic COVID-
19 case was reported, in Washington State.) While testing is a problem 
now, it wasn’t back in 2009. The challenge then was vaccine development: 
Production was delayed and the vaccine wasn’t distributed until the 
outbreak was already waning.

When: Multiple times
The claim: The Trump White House “inherited” a “broken,” “bad,” and 
“obsolete” test for the coronavirus.
The truth: The novel coronavirus did not exist in humans during the Obama 
administration. Public-health experts agree that, because of that fact, 
the CDC could not have produced a test, and thus a new test had to be 
developed this year.

When: Multiple times
The claim: The Obama administration left Trump “bare” and “empty” shelves 
of medical supplies in the national strategic stockpile.
The truth: The 2009 H1N1 outbreak did deplete the N95 mask supply and was 
never replenished, but the Obama administration did not leave the 
stockpile empty of other materials. While the stockpile has never been 
funded at the levels some experts have requested, its former director said 
in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, that it was well-equipped. (The 
outbreak has since eaten away at its reserves.)

On Coronavirus Testing

When: Friday, March 6
The claim: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We—they’re there. They 
have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”
The truth: The country’s testing capabilities are severely limited. Many 
states have experienced a lack of testing kits, as my colleagues Alexis 
Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported. Trump made this claim one day 
after his own vice president, Mike Pence, admitted that “we don’t have 
enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going 
forward.”

When: Wednesday, March 11
The claim: In an Oval Office address, Trump said that private-health-
insurance companies had “agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus 
treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent 
surprise medical billing.”
The truth: Insurers agreed only to absorb the cost of coronavirus 
testing—waiving co-pays and deductibles for getting the test. The Families 
First Coronavirus Response Act, the second coronavirus-relief bill passed 
by Congress, later mandated that COVID-19 testing be made free. The 
federal government has not required insurance companies to cover follow-up 
treatments, though some providers announced in late March that they will 
pay for treatments. The costs of other non-coronavirus testing or 
treatment incurred by patients who have COVID-19 or are trying to get a 
diagnosis aren’t waived either. And as for surprise medical billing? 
Mitigating it would require the cooperation of insurers, doctors, and 
hospitals.

Read: The dangerous delays in U.S. coronavirus testing haven’t stopped

When: Friday, March 13
The claim: Google engineers are building a website to help Americans 
determine whether they need testing for the coronavirus and to direct them 
to their nearest testing site.
The truth: The announcement was news to Google itself—the website Trump 
(and other administration officials) described was actually being built by 
Verily, a division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The Verge 
first reported on Trump’s error, citing a Google representative who 
confirmed that Verily was working on a “triage website” with limited 
coverage for the San Francisco Bay Area. But since then, Google has 
pivoted to fulfill Trump’s public proclamation, saying it would speed up 
the development of a new, separate website while Verily worked on 
finishing its project, The Washington Post reported.

When: Tuesday, March 24, and Wednesday, March 25
The claim: The United States has outpaced South Korea’s COVID-19 testing: 
“We’re going up proportionally very rapidly,” Trump said during a Fox News 
town hall.
The truth: When the president made this claim, testing in the U.S. was 
severely lagging behind that in South Korea. As of March 25, South Korea 
had conducted about five times as many tests as a proportion of its 
population relative to the United States. For updated data from each 
country, see the COVID-19 Tracking Project and the database maintained by 
the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Travel Bans and Travelers

When: Wednesday, March 11
The claim: The United States would suspend “all travel from Europe, except 
the United Kingdom, for the next 30 days,” Trump announced in an Oval 
Office address.
The truth: The travel restriction would not apply to U.S. citizens, legal 
permanent residents, or their families returning from Europe. At first, it 
applied specifically to the 26 European countries that make up the 
Schengen Area, not all of Europe. Trump later announced the inclusion of 
the United Kingdom and Ireland in the ban.

Another claim: In the same address, Trump said the travel restrictions 
would “not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo but 
various other things as we get approval.”
The truth: Trump followed up in a tweet, explaining that trade and cargo 
would not be subject to the restrictions.

When: Thursday, March 12
The claim: All U.S. citizens arriving from Europe would be subject to 
medical screening, COVID-19 testing, and quarantine if necessary. “If an 
American is coming back or anybody is coming back, we’re testing,” Trump 
said. “We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to 
be tested … We’re not putting them on planes if it shows positive, but if 
they do come here, we’re quarantining.”
The truth: Testing is already severely limited in the United States. It is 
not true that all Americans returning to the country are being tested, nor 
that anyone is being forced to quarantine, CNN has reported.

When: Tuesday, March 31
The claim: “We stopped all of Europe” with a travel ban. “We started with 
certain parts of Italy, and then all of Italy. Then we saw Spain. Then I 
said, ‘Stop Europe; let’s stop Europe. We have to stop them from coming 
here.’”
The truth: The travel ban applied to the Schengen Area, as well as the 
United Kingdom and Ireland, and not all of Europe as he claimed. 
Additionally, Trump is wrong about the United States rolling out a 
piecemeal ban. The State Department did issue advisories in late February 
cautioning Americans against travel to the Lombardy region of Italy before 
issuing a general “Do Not Travel” warning on March 19. But the U.S. never 
placed individual bans on Italy and Spain.

When: Multiple times
The claim: “Everybody thought I was wrong” about implementing restrictions 
on travelers from China, and “most people felt they should not close it 
down—that we shouldn’t close down to China.”
The truth: While the WHO did say it opposed travel bans on China 
generally, Trump’s own top health officials have made clear that the 
travel ban was the “uniform” recommendation of the Department of Health 
and Human Services. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the 
coronavirus task force, both praised the decision too.

On Taking the Pandemic Seriously

When: Tuesday, March 17
The claim: “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.

When: Thursday, March 26
The claim: 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.

On COVID-19 Treatments and Vaccines

When: Monday, March 2
The claim: 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.”

When: Thursday, March 19
The claim: At a press briefing with his coronavirus task force, Trump said 
the FDA had approved the antimalarial drug chloroquine to treat COVID-19. 
“Normally the FDA would take a long time to approve something like that, 
and it’s—it was approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by 
prescription,” he said.
The truth: FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who was at the briefing, quickly 
clarified that the drug still had to be tested in a clinical setting. An 
FDA representative later told Bloomberg that the drug has not been 
approved for COVID-19 use, though a doctor could still prescribe it for 
that purpose. Later that same day, Fauci told CNN that there is no “magic 
drug” to cure COVID-19: “Today, there are no proven safe and effective 
therapies for the coronavirus.”

Read: Anthony Fauci’s plan to stay honest

On the Defense Production Act

When: Friday, March 20
The claim: Trump twice said during a task-force briefing that he had 
invoked the Defense Production Act, a Korean War–era law that enables the 
federal government to order private industry to produce certain items and 
materials for national use. He also said the federal government was 
already using its authority under the law: “We have a lot of people 
working very hard to do ventilators and various other things.”
The truth: Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter Gaynor 
told CNN on March 22 that the president has not actually used the DPA to 
order private companies to produce anything. Shortly after that, Trump 
backtracked, saying that he had not compelled private companies to take 
action. Then, on March 24, Gaynor told CNN that FEMA plans to use the DPA 
to allocate 60,000 test kits. Trump tweeted afterward that the DPA would 
not be used.

When: Saturday, March 21
The claim: Automobile companies that have volunteered to manufacture 
medical equipment, such as ventilators, are “making them right now.”
The truth: Ford and General Motors, which Trump mentioned at a task-force 
briefing the same day, announced earlier in March that they had halted all 
factory production in North America and were likely months away from 
beginning production of ventilators, representatives told the Associated 
Press. Since then, Ford CEO James Hackett told CNN that the auto company 
will begin to work with 3M to produce respirators and with General 
Electric to assemble ventilators. GM said it will explore the possibility 
of producing ventilators in an Indiana factory. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose 
company Trump highlighted in a tweet, has said that the company is 
“working on ventilators” but that they cannot be produced “instantly.”

On States’ Resources

When: Tuesday, March 24
The claim: Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York passed on an opportunity to 
purchase 16,000 ventilators at a low cost in 2015, Trump said during the 
Fox News town hall.
The truth: Trump seems to have gleaned this claim from a Gateway Pundit 
article. That piece, in turn, cites a syndicated column from Betsy 
McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, which includes a 
figure close to 16,000. The number comes from a 2015 report from the 
state’s health department that provided guidance for how New York could 
handle a possible flu pandemic. The report notes that the state would need 
15,783 more ventilators than it had at the time to aid patients during “an 
influenza pandemic on the scale of the 1918 pandemic.” The report does not 
include a recommendation to Cuomo for additional purchases or stockpiling. 
Trump “obviously didn’t read the document he’s citing,” a Cuomo 
representative said in a statement.

Another claim: Trump also repeated a claim from the Gateway Pundit article 
that Cuomo’s office established “death panels” and “lotteries” as part of 
the state’s pandemic response.
The truth: The 2015 report and the accompanying press release announced 
updated guidelines for hospitals to follow to allocate ventilators. The 
guidelines “call for a triage officer or triage committee to determine who 
receives or continues to receive ventilator therapy” and describes how a 
random lottery allocation might work. (Neither should be the first options 
for deciding care, the report notes.) Cuomo never established a lottery.

When: Sunday, March 29
The claim: Trump “didn’t say” that governors do not need all the medical 
equipment they are requesting from the federal government. And he “didn’t 
say” that governors should be more appreciative of the help.
The truth: The president told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday, March 
26, that “a lot of equipment’s being asked for that I don’t think they’ll 
need,” referring to requests from the governors of Michigan, New York, and 
Washington. He also said, during a Friday, March 27, task-force briefing, 
that he wanted state leaders “to be appreciative … We’ve done a great 
job.” He added that he wasn’t talking about himself, but about others 
within the federal government working to combat the pandemic.

When: Sunday, March 29, and Monday, March 30
The claim: Hospitals are reporting an artificially inflated need for masks 
and equipment, items that might be “going out the back door,” Trump said 
on two separate days. He also said he was not talking about hoarding: “I 
think maybe it’s worse than hoarding.”
The truth: There is no evidence to show that hospitals are maliciously 
hoarding or inflating their need for masks and personal protective 
equipment when reporting shortages in supplies. Although Cuomo reported 
anecdotal stories of thefts from hospitals early in March, he was 
referring to opportunists trying to price-gouge early in the pandemic. 
Reuters has reported a handful of stories of nurses hiding masks to 
conserve supplies amid shortages, but not wide-scale thefts as Trump 
claimed.

On China

When: Tuesday, April 14
The claim: Asked about his past praise of China and its transparency, 
Trump said that he hadn’t “talk[ed] about China’s transparency.”
The truth: Trump lauded the country in tweets he sent in late January and 
early February. In one, he highlighted the Chinese government’s 
“transparency” about the coronavirus outbreak.

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Experts Tell Us That Weak, Stupid Trump Is Out of His Depth - Refuses To Admit He's An Unqualified, Incompetent BOOB Byker <fuuktrump2021@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-20 15:50 +0000

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