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Cohen, M., Subramanium, T., & Hickey, C. (2020, April 18). The lost MONTH: Trump says he took 'strong action' in February to STOP coronavirus. Here's the full picture. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/04/politics/trump-covid-response-annotation/

Marcus, D. (2020, May 04). The media is blatantly lying about trump's coronavirus response. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/04/the-media-is-blatantly-lying-about-trumps-coronavirus-response/

Schwellenbach Nick Schwellenbach Nick Schwellenbach is a Senior Investigator at POGO., N. (2019, December 29). The first 100 days of the U.S. GOVERNMENT'S COVID-19 Response. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/05/the-first-100-days-of-the-u-s-governments-covid-19-response/

Timeline of Trump's Coronavirus RESPONSES. (2021, February 19). Retrieved February 27, 2021, from https://doggett.house.gov/media-center/blog-posts/timeline-trump-s-coronavirus-responses

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The White House said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded airport screenings, but the hyperlink says it was rolled out by the Department of Homeland Security.

That's a minor error. The bigger issue is that these screenings, of travelers arriving from China, didn't immediately lead to large quarantines. Reuters reported that five days after this announcement, "only a handful of commercial airline passengers" had been quarantined.

In announcing the change, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf said, "The overall risk to the American public remains low." (When he said that, there were only about 11 confirmed cases in the US. Within six weeks, there were nearly 3,500 nationwide.)

As these changes were made, Trump spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The Food and Drug Administration relaxed the limits on who could conduct tests for Covid-19, permitting tests not only at official CDC labs but also at public health labs that are "CDC-qualified." This paved the way for more testing, but testing shortfalls remained, so the rules were further relaxed as things got worse later in the month, to allow private labs to do their own testing.

Additionally, there were problems with some of the test kits that the CDC gave to labs across the country, which led to even longer delays. States complained about inconclusive results from the faulty tests, which meant local officials were in the dark about the size of their outbreaks.

February 4: During the State of the Union, President Trump stated that his "[a]dministration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens" from the coronavirus.

It's true that Trump mentioned the coronavirus during his State of the Union address, but only in passing, taking 20 seconds out of his 78-minute speech. By contrast, he spent more than three minutes praising right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh and presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In the speech, Trump said he was working with Beijing "on the coronavirus outbreak in China." Trump did not mention that US intelligence agencies had already sent a flurry of warnings to the White House about the growing dangers of a pandemic, including at least one warning that was included in his daily intelligence briefing, according to The Washington Post and ABC News.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Mulvaney later said only "five senators" and about a dozen House members showed up, and he blamed impeachment for the low attendance.

Some Democrats walked away from the briefing underwhelmed. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted at the time, "they aren't taking this seriously enough," and pointed out that the Trump administration didn't ask for emergency funding or address supply-chain issues for hospitals.

February 6: President Trump and President Xi discussed coronavirus response efforts over the phone.

Yes, Trump and Xi spoke that day, but Trump followed up his conversation by heaping praise on the authoritarian leader and his Communist government. Trump said Xi was "strong, sharp and powerfully focused," and echoed unproven theories that the virus would die off in the spring.

He also said China was "professionally run" and "they have everything under control," consistent with his past comments that Beijing was being cooperative and transparent with the world.

But as the pandemic worsened in the spring, and after the US overtook China as the country with the most reported cases, Trump changed his tune and started attacking Beijing. He accused China of fabricating its statistics and suppressing lifesaving medical information.

This briefing created some confusion for the two dozen governors who attended.

The Washington Post reported that "many of the governors" were rattled afterward, because the information they received didn't resemble Trump's public comments about the virus, which were rosy and optimistic. One day later, at a political rally in New Hampshire, Trump said, "By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, (the coronavirus) miraculously goes away."

This announcement was an early step in a long process. Trump has inaccurately said that a vaccine could be available by the summer. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, has said it will likely be more than a year until it's ready for the public. Some experts say even that pace is optimistic, because vaccine studies typically take much longer.

Trump was at Mar-a-Lago when the CDC made this announcement about expanded testing.

That same day, HHS and the White House National Security Council produced a memo warning that stay-at-home orders and widespread closures could become part of the nationwide effort to stop Covid-19 from spreading, according to The New York Times.

These warnings turned into a reality just weeks later, when much of the country was shut down to enforce social distancing. Undercutting that effort, Trump has repeatedly pined about reopening the country, ignoring data from the CDC and states that suggest the virus is continuing to spread.

This was another initial step toward a Covid-19 vaccine. Public health officials have said this process will take at least a year, though Fauci has also said, "This is the fastest we have ever gone from a sequence of a virus to a trial." The White House talking points never mentioned this year-plus timeline for a potential vaccine.

Meanwhile, the President was still traveling and campaigning as planned, with three rallies in the three days following the HHS announcement. It's also interesting that the White House chose to highlight this arrangement with Sanofi Pasteur, because multiple news outlets have reported that Trump has a small financial interest in the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.

Lawmakers from both parties expressed concerns that the Trump administration's request was too low. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, proposed $8.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the coronavirus. After 10 days of heated negotiations, the White House agreed to $8.3 billion, in a deal brokered with congressional leaders from both parties.

This funding was microscopic compared with the $2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress a few weeks later.

Although the Trump administration has consistently tried to cut funding for agencies now integral to responding to the coronavirus, Azar attempted to defend next year's budget as having adequate funds for these response efforts.

According to the link provided by the White House, Azar's testimony that day was before the Senate Appropriations Committee, not the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Azar's testimony was focused on Trump's budget request for the next fiscal year, not the coronavirus, though he briefly mentioned the outbreak in his opening statement.

Azar told the committee that the 2021 budget proposal "reflects how seriously we take the threat of other infectious diseases, such as the China coronavirus," because it prioritized funding for infectious disease programs and hospital preparedness - funds that had been slashed in past Trump budgets.

This announcement, while initially praised as evidence the President was prioritizing the US coronavirus response after an official visit to India, created more confusion at first. In particular, it raised questions about who was actually in charge, Pence or Azar, whose standing with Trump was already in question at the time. However, Pence was also criticized for not giving the crisis his full attention after he attended a fundraiser only two days into his new role.

Right before putting Pence in charge, Trump had downplayed the severity of the situation, claiming the number of US coronavirus cases "within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero," from 15. One week later, the US had 158 confirmed cases of the virus. The number has steadily increased, soaring past 1,000 within two weeks, and is now more than 700,000.

This was a helpful move, but possibly too little too late. The announcement came after states had struggled with the CDC tests for weeks, prompting more than 100 virologists and other specialists to write a letter to Congress protesting the FDA's regulatory process. The letter said the existing guidelines were preventing labs from running validated coronavirus tests and putting "undue pressure on the CDC," which was scrambling to remanufacture its tests after the initial ones distributed in early February were found to be faulty.

Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert on global pandemic preparedness now with the Center for Global Development, told CNN the Trump administration's initial reliance on the CDC's test caused a delay in the country's ability to test for the virus and allowed it to spread relatively unchecked.

Pence announced the US was raising the travel warning to level 4, its highest, and cautioning Americans against traveling to South Korea and Italy. But the policy has not stopped travelers from entering the US from either country. That day, South Korea had exceeded 3,000 coronavirus cases and Italy surpassed 1,000 cases. The new travel warning came as public health officials in Washington state announced the first coronavirus death inside the United States.

Coming almost a month after Trump blocked foreigners who visited China from entering the US, this proclamation was the second travel restriction the President issued as part of his efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus. The day these restrictions were announced, Iran confirmed its 593rd case of coronavirus, putting it fourth globally in terms of cases, behind China, South Korea and Italy. However, even though South Korea and Italy had more coronavirus cases than Iran, they remained exempt from similar travel restrictions until later.

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The lost month: Trump says he took 'strong action' in February to stop coronavirus. Here's the full picture.

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The White House said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded airport screenings, but the hyperlink says it was rolled out by the Department of Homeland Security. That's a minor error. The bigger issue is that these screenings, of travelers arriving from China, didn't immediately lead to large quarantines.

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Feb. 7, 2020

"It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flu... This is deadly stuff" [Trump in a private interview with Bob Woodward from The Washington Post made public on Sept. 9, 2020]

July 19, 2020

"Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day"

"They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test"

Aug. 19, 2020

New York Times report reveals that in December 2020 that Trump yelled, "You're killing me! This whole thing is! We've got all the damn cases...I want to do what Mexico does. They don't give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you're vomiting," at Jared Kushner during an August 19, 2020 meeting.

Oct. 20, 2020

Politico reports that The White House is considering slashing millions of dollars for coronavirus relief, HIV treatment, screenings for newborns and other programs in Democratic-led cities that President Donald Trump has deemed "anarchist jurisdictions."

January 20, 2021

Trump's term in office saw over 25 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, over 400,000 of which resulted in death. President-elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are sworn into office.

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Timeline of Trump's Coronavirus Responses

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May 2018 The Trump Administration disbands the White House pandemic response team. July 2019 The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist embedded in China's disease control agency left the post, and the Trump Administration eliminated the role. Oct. 2019 "Currently, there are insufficient funding sources designated for the federal government to use in response to a severe influenza pandemic."

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There are times in the life of a body politic when conventional wisdom grows out of falsehoods. The danger of such a situation is that once it takes hold few people will actually look beyond the deception to discover the truth. We are living through just such a moment as much of our news media perpetrates a lie that the Trump administration was doing nothing to combat the novel coronavirus during January and February.

Last week, The Federalist obtained the January timeline of virus response from the Department of Health and Human Services. What it showed was a robust response to the pandemic that was not yet a pandemic; that began well before China reported its first coronavirus death on January 11. In fact, on January 9 the Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had already begun work on diagnostic tests and a vaccine.

Mind, you this was happening while China was blatantly lying about the gravity of the virus and claiming it had all of 41 cases total, and that there was no human to human transmission. Throughout January the Trump administration would ramp up travel bans and free up 105 million dollars to fight the coronavirus while standing up its task force.

This brings us to February. In a tweet, Dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg conceded that the travel ban had bought the United States time, but then asked what did the administration do in February? White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah was happy to provide Goldberg with a rather comprehensive answer based on the February timeline. The whole thread is worth reading.

Glad you asked, @JonahDispatch. Thread:
Feb 2: CDC expanded enhanced entry screening to 8 major airports

Feb 4: FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the CDC diagnostic

Feb 5: Trump Admin officials briefed lawmakers on the Federal Govt's coronavirus response efforts. https://t.co/V8eAKqBQVT

- Alyssa Farah (@Alyssafarah) May 4, 2020

Here is a sampling of what the White House was doing according to Farah:

Feb. 2: CDC expanded enhanced entry screening to 8 major airports.

Feb. 4: FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the CDC diagnostic.

Feb. 5: Trump Admin officials briefed lawmakers on the Federal Govt's coronavirus response efforts.

Feb. 14: CDC announced their ongoing work with five labs to perform community-based influenza surveillance and study the spread of coronavirus.

Feb. 18: HHS announced it has engaged Sanofi Pasteur in order to develop a coronavirus vaccine and treatments for coronavirus infections.

Feb. 24: The Admin requested $2.5 billion from Congress to help combat the spread of the coronavirus.

What both the January and February timelines make clear is that far from ignoring the threat of the Chinese virus, the administration was working daily to prepare for it. And mind you, they were doing so based on nonsensical lies from both China and their lapdog the World Health Organization. It was not until early March that Italy began providing the world with accurate information about the spread of the virus. Within two weeks of that, most of the United States was in lockdown.

Part of the blame for the public's poor understanding of the realities of the Trump administration's response lies with the president himself. Even while the White House was working feverishly on the virus, his tone was too often dismissive, and he said things such as, anyone who wants a test can get a test, which at the time simply wasn't true.

Trump's overly optimistic rhetoric and his penchant for off-the-cuff hyperbolic statements damaged perceptions of the response. But he had reasons for this, for one thing he was trying to save the economy, and for another he was trying to avoid mass panic. But notwithstanding Trump's errors in his discourse on the virus, the facts show that behind the scenes the work was being done.

This is where whatever fault may lay with Trump, far more fault lies at the feet of the news media. Once again they made Trump's tone the centerpiece of the story, not even bothering to find out or report on what the administration was actually doing. It was a lazy jump to a kneejerk position that has become all too familiar in the age of Trump. And as usual it left the American people woefully misinformed.

The inescapable bottom line is that regardless of the news media's lies, the Trump administration did not ignore the threat of coronavirus. They tackled it head on. The media didn't just play the American people, they played themselves too. Just a week ago, half the news outlets in America were breathlessly saying that HHS Secretary Alex Azar was about to be fired. He wasn't.

How did they get that story so wrong? Easy, they convinced themselves of the false narrative they were selling to the American people that the early response was a disaster. Trump of course knew the truth, and praised Azar instead of burying him. The media showed no contrition, they just moved along continuing to ignore the facts.

There is no question that the coronavirus response will be an issue, if not a fundamental one, in the November election. The Trump administration must do a better job setting the record straight because we know the news media won't. The facts are on the side of the White House. How clearly they can present them to the voters may well tell the difference between reelection and a Joe Biden presidency, the latter being exactly what the media lies are meant to ensure.

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The Media Is Blatantly Lying About Trump's Coronavirus Response

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There are times in the life of a body politic when conventional wisdom grows out of falsehoods. The danger of such a situation is that once it takes hold few people will actually look beyond the deception to discover the truth.

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The First 100 Days of the U.S. Government's COVID-19 Response

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POGO has compiled a day-by-day timeline of the first 100 days of the U.S. federal government's response to the novel coronavirus outbreak to enhance understanding of what the government did, didn't do, or did ineffectively in response to COVID-19.