On March 5, President Donald Trump said that his decision to implement travel restrictions on people entering the U.S. “saved a lot of lives.” On March 17, he adjusted that claim to “a tremendous number of lives.” A week later, he got more specific, saying, “Probably tens of thousands would be dead right now if I didn’t make that decision.” On April 7, he said, “If I didn’t do that, we would’ve had hundreds of thousands more people dying.”

Regardless of the exact number of American lives that he claims to have saved, one thing is for certain: Trump wants people to believe that his January 31 decision to curb travel from China was of great consequence. And with a lot of help from his media allies, this has become a running theme in coverage of the administration’s response to the unprecedented public health crisis over the past few months.

Fox News personalities have been hyping Trump’s travel restrictions with minimal evidence that they were effective in the long-term.

“If only we could determine how many people the president, by implementing that travel ban, prevented from getting sick,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said during the March 2 episode of Fox & Friends. “I'm so glad he did that. That was a few weeks ago, when the Democrats were screaming impeachment, and he implemented that travel ban, thank goodness.”

Also on March 2, Fox host Sean Hannity claimed during his radio show that Trump “stopped the spread of this virus” by restricting travel from China, attacking Trump’s political rivals and mainstream news outlets for supposedly doubting him and declaring, “No president has acted faster.”

During the March 6 edition of Hannity, Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel said, “The president has jumped in quickly, started the travel bans. He understands the public health issues. He's got top leaders advising him. Guess what the reason is? Try to prevent and slow the spread before it takes root here.”

Former Trump adviser and right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka appeared on Fox Business on March 12 to say that Trump’s “travel ban” saved lives and was “the vindication of everything that propelled him into the White House.”

On March 16, Hannity called the travel restrictions “the single most consequential decision in history.”

During the March 31 edition of Fox News’ The Five, co-host Jesse Watters said that the travel ban was “much more critical in saving lives” than testing for coronavirus.

Lou Dobbs used the April 1 episode of Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight to exalt the president’s travel restrictions, claiming Trump saved “thousands of lives” and “gave us an opportunity at least to begin to react to this crisis.” “He wants to be certain that we are saving American lives,” Dobbs continued. “He has been proved right at every point.”

The giant gap between Trump’s issuing travel restrictions and implementing social distancing recommendations illustrates how important pro-Trump media are to his public image.

One way to obfuscate weeks of damaging inaction on Trump’s part is to falsely overstate the importance of what action actually was taken, as Hannity did with his ludicrous claim that restricting travel from China was “the single most consequential decision in history.”

During his April 2 press briefing, Trump himself tried to hype up his January 31 decision as bold and unique: