On 3/17, Trump Told Reporters, "I Felt It Was a Pandemic Long Before It Was Called a Pandemic.” On Friday, He Lied Again, Claiming That It Was Unforeseen.
March 28, 2020
Liar-in-Chief Donald Trump (Gage Skidmore)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
The Washington Post has recorded more than 16,000 lies made by Trump in public or by tweet. In some days, he will lie and then lie again denying he lied the first time. He twists the truth within even one news “briefing.” The craven DC Press Corps, with the exception of about five reporters including PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor and CNN’s Jim Acosta, rarely challenges Trump on his ceaseless lies and disinformation.
This has become apparent as Trump, who rarely has held formal news conferences in his presidency, has hijacked the Coronavirus catastrophe, exacerbated by Trump’s negligent manslaughter (yes, it’s much more than just “bungling”; it’s willful). The DC Press Corps should not be covering these daily propaganda appearances, in the guise of “Coronavirus Task Force Briefings.” They are Trump’s cunning solution to the halt of his raucous, demagogic campaign rallies, which Trump treats as celebrity spectacles rolled out to his adoring cult followers. It is performance art, of the basest kind.
The “Task Force Briefings” offer Trump the opportunity to message disinformation that might help him in repositioning himself for the fall election, and now he has a servile “scientific” loyalist to back him up: Mike Pence’s Task Force Response Coordinator, Deborah Birx. The lies come in cascades, alternating between hucksterism, cliches, platitudes, coarse nicknaming and, most irresponsibly (which may be redundant in terms of identifying Trump’s behavior) dangerous disinformation. The DC Press Corps, eager to get credit with their papers or TV stations for getting Trump to answer one of their questions, generally cry out softball questions. With rare exceptions, the DC Press Corps rarely challenges Trump on his abuse of the media and his charge that they are “enemies of the people,” or mocking of individual reporters.
Yesterday is an example of how most of the DC Press Corps rarely calls out Trump for his lies.
According to CNN, which did write up an abridged post-event fact check of Trump’s Friday propaganda “briefing,” noted that Trump was “incorrect” in stating that the Coronavirus pandemic was unforeseen:
How unforeseen the coronavirus crisis was
Multiple times throughout Friday's press briefing, the President claimed the current situation was unprecedented and unforeseen. According to Trump, "nobody was prepared for this," not even past presidents. He added, "In all fairness to all of the former presidents, none of them ever thought a thing like this could happen."
Facts First: This is false. The US intelligence community and public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Experts had also warned that the country would face shortages of critical medical equipment, such as ventilators, if a pandemic occurred.
You can read a full fact check here about some of the pandemic warnings. You can read a full fact check here about warnings about the need for additional ventilators in a pandemic.
However, as is often the case in the churn of media cycles, CNN didn’t document that Trump had himself directly contradicted his own claim of ignorance.
A March 17 New York Times article has a headline that refutes Trump with his own words, “Trump Now Claims He Always Knew the Coronavirus Would Be a Pandemic. The president tried to rewrite his history with advising Americans about the Coronavirus. His own words prove him wrong.”
The article goes on to quote Trump: “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
Among the many contradictory statements to that self-aggrandizing boast that he predicted the Coronavirus pandemic are noted in the NYT article:
On Feb. 26, at a White House news conference, commenting on the country’s first reported cases: “We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck….”
On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
This is only one example of one of 16,000 plus lies that Trump has made, and probably many more that The Washington Post has missed. Yet, occasionally after the fact, fact-checking only reaches a small number of people who have absorbed the disinformation in the “Task Force Briefings.”
The DC Press Corps continues to slaver at the nuggets of misinformation and churlish outbursts of Trump, and they continue to air on television the often dangerous, mendacious and misleading Trump statements.
It would be better for the TV stations, even if it hurts their ratings, to boycott the faux “briefings,” which are merely replacements for Trump’s need to cancel his campaign “rallies.” He doesn’t even practice CDC social distancing guidelines as his retinue bunches together behind him, as he pontificates on the rostrum.
A socially responsible Seattle NPR station recently announced that it would no longer broadcast Trump’s now daily “briefings” because of the disinformation that is spread. If only the rest of the media would follow suit and serve the interests of their readers instead of their own careers and the stockholders of their companies.
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