Saturday, May 9, 2020

Chasing the Roadrunner

Matt Margolis has a column at PJMedia in which he asserts that there are at least five things that President Trump did or said for which he took criticism from the media, but about each of which he was correct and the media was wrong.

Here are the five are with excerpts from Margolis' explanations:

1. Mr. Trump correctly claimed that we rely too much on China. Margolis writes, "Trump’s “America First” foreign policy was called protectionist, isolationist, and even xenophobic. His trade war with China was mocked. China may have offered cheap labor, but the coronavirus pandemic has shown us just how deadly our dependence on China really is."

2. Mr. Trump correctly claimed that the Obama administration botched their response to the H1N1 epidemic. Obama waited months after the World Health Organization declared H1N1 a global pandemic to declare a national emergency. By then, millions of Americans were already infected, and over a thousand had died. President Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency two days after the WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, and had been aggressively responding to the outbreak before most Americans were even paying attention to it.

I might add here that this is especially ironic in light of polls showing that nearly 50% of Americans believe Obama would've handled the current pandemic better than Trump.

3. Mr. Trump (probably) correctly claimed that the fatality rate for Covid19 is likely under 1%. When the World Health Organization estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was 3.4 percent, Trump was skeptical. “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number," he opined in an interview. "Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor."

4. Mr. Trump correctly claimed there was no ventilator shortage. Remember when states were requesting ventilators in huge numbers? Governor Andrew Cuomo alone requested 40,000 ventilators and blamed Trump for not providing enough. “You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die,” Cuomo dramatically said during a press conference.

Trump didn’t believe he needed 40,000. “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to need,” President Trump said. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

Trump’s belief that states drastically overestimated their needs proved right. Despite claims from the media, there was no ventilator shortage.

5. Mr. Trump correctly claimed that travel bans work. In January, President Trump took the bold step of banning travel from China back in January. The World Health Organization said it wouldn’t work. Joe Biden called it xenophobic. Others joined in on the criticism. But, a month later WHO experts conceded that it worked and it saved lives.

While Trump was widely criticized for his travel bans, his critics have largely flip-flopped on the issue. Even Joe Biden has flip-flopped on this; he now supports the travel ban with China after previously calling it “xenophobic.” Other former critics of the ban would later claim the ban didn’t go far enough and should have been implemented earlier.

In each of the cases Margolis cites the media excoriated the president, and in each case the media was shown to be wrong and the president right. Even so, each time he's proven to be correct it seems to just deepen the media's hatred and contempt for him and to strengthen their resolve to humiliate him over the next thing he says.

Perhaps our media people would benefit from spending a little time watching some old Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Just like the coyote they just never seem to learn.