One of the big rules for anyone speaking at the president's daily I'm in Charge and I'm Doing Something But Anything That Goes Wrong Is Not My Fault exhibitions is to mention his travel ban. El Jefe did move early to ban travel from China on January 31, even after the World Health Organization downplayed the effectiveness of travel restrictions the day before. Everyone from the vice president to the actual experts, like Dr. Deborah Birx, now knows they must say the president took Decisive Early Action before they can get to what they actually want to tell the public from the White House briefing room. Never mind that the ban did not apply to some 40,000 people who came to the United States from China after it went into effect, any of whom could have been carrying the disease. That's the problem with a pandemic: Americans in China—or Europe—can catch the virus and bring it back with them.



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But let's grant, for the sake of argument, Donald Trump's claim that his travel ban was decisive in the American response, buying the United States time to prepare for what the president had been told since as far back as November (!) could be a catastrophic event. What did the federal government do after the president acted so wisely, decisively, strongly? How did they use the crucial following month of February, before COVID-19 struck the United States in earnest? CBS reporter Paula Reid demonstrated exactly how to ask in Monday's briefing.

Now this is how you do the White House reporter thing. Reid asked a simple question—"What did you do with the time you bought—the month of February?"—and kept asking it, even as the president tried to change the subject—Democrats! Biden!—and attacked her as "fake" and talked about her "approval ratings." This is the president's entire pathetic spiel on rich display, the essential emptiness of his presidency thrown into sharp relief. It's all bluster and manufactured conflict, no results. It's not a presidential administration, it's a one-man traveling show where he bashes the various Enemies of Real America for the vindictive satisfaction of his most devout followers. Trump says they did "a lot" in February, and they'll give you a list, and yet he can't name one thing. He has no actual response to the question. He just says "excuse me" more and more loudly and then goes on some bullshit tangent.

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The administration did next-to-nothing in February, even though Trump had been briefed for months—and certainly throughout January—on how bad this could get. The president did not oversee any efforts to build out hospital capacity. He did not wield the power of the federal government to secure more masks, PPE, or ventilators. He spent that time downplaying the threat, suggesting the number of cases would go from 15 to zero miraculously. How much worse is our national crisis because of this inaction? How many more people have gotten sick because of our poor response? Could we have avoided blanket lockdowns and used a more targeted mitigation approach, like some other countries have, with less damage to our economy?

This exchange was prompted by a campaign video these classy operators put on in the White House briefing room, and which Trump is also circulating on Twitter. They essentially regard the virus as a public-relations problem that can be fixed with the kind of Bullshit Avalanche you'd get at one of his rallies. So they showed reporters what they'd normally put on the Jumbotron before the big guy walks out to yell about immigrant crime. In this case, take a look first at how the president, who has access to more information and intelligence about world affairs than just about any other human alive, compares his own early response to a few people on television who had far more limited information about what was going on in China at the time. (The key, as usual, is to lower the bar until the President of the United States can clear it.) Also, check out the timeline that the president's own campaign ad is bragging about, in which basically nothing happens in February.

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Between February 6—when the CDC first shipped testing kits after it rejected some approved by the WHO and botched the process of developing its own—and March 2, even the president's own people say nothing was done. These are folks who would tell you the sky is purple if the Mad King so decreed, but they failed to manufacture anything they could credit the president with doing during possibly the most crucial period in the U.S. response.

What did you expect, really? Remember when the president finally did acknowledge that a worldwide pandemic might be a problem, declaring it a national emergency and holding a summit in the Rose Garden with a bunch of big-time CEOs right before the market closed on a Friday so the Dow Jones Industrial Average would sit higher for a few days? Basically everything he promised there never happened. Total snake oil. It's enough to make you wonder whether there was ever any intention of actually doing, say, nationwide drive-through testing at Walmarts, or if the president merely thought of it as something he could say to juice the markets.

This is why we in the Fake News Lyin' Media have cautioned against taking hydroxychloroquine just because the president, who's desperate for a Magic Potion, tells you to do so. It's not that it can't work, it's that we don't yet know it's safe, and he doesn't really care about the details. He will just say anything to score a good news cycle and pump up The Stocks for a bit. There is no plan, except to spin whatever the result is into a Win.

However many people die, the president will say the number is lower than it could have been, and it would have been even lower if not for those very nasty governors. (You're not supposed to ask if it would have been lower if someone else were the president.) The goalposts will shift continuously as the field of play is remade until the president can argue he won the game. That's why we need people like Paula Reid to ask the same question, over and over again. It reminds us where the lines are.