President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus during a news conference in the press briefing room at the White House, Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

While coronavirus panic sets in across the country, it’s interesting to look back over the previous few weeks and see the reaction after the Trump administration took steps to stem the tide and stop infections from reaching our shores. The current narrative is that Trump has “bungled” the response (there’s no real evidence of that), thereby threatening his re-election, because that’s all this is really about to them.

But that wasn’t always the narrative. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that the media were chastising Trump for doing too much to battle coronavirus in the United States. How biased are our media? The following thread illustrates it perfectly.

"The Trump admin's quarantine and travel ban in response to the Wuhan coronavirus could UNDERCUT international efforts to fight the outbreak by antagonizing Chinese leaders, as well as stigmatizing people of Asian descent, according to public health experts and lawmakers." — Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) March 8, 2020

Sun Feb 2, the Trump Admin ordered U.S. travelers to China’s Hubei province to be held in a mandatory quarantine for two weeks, the anti-Trump article by @AliceOllstein at Politico quoted "healths experts" who said this will make it worse because people will hide their symptoms. pic.twitter.com/wABifxgJmQ — Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) March 8, 2020

At the end of the article, paragraph 20 onward, did Politico finally have a few quotes backing the Trump Admin's early public efforts on Corona which, again, was almost 3 weeks before it was reported to have reached Italy, S. Korea and so on. Why is this relavant? Because the — Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) March 8, 2020

Interesting is that when the Admin announced measures 5 + weeks ago (which was weeks before the numbers came in from Italy etc), it was @ddiamond who wrote an article which showed that many arms of the US Gov are fully invovled from CDC to State and DHS. https://t.co/1d0ThPNM27 — Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) March 8, 2020

Politico's narrative in early Feb didn't just attack the Trump Admin's steps on Corona as being too much. The article kept blaming the moves as harming efforts to control the virus! One such claim came from @RepBera; the other came from WHO's top doctor! See the four attachments: pic.twitter.com/fP76RMg2SQ — Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) March 8, 2020

It’s just unbelievable. Trump took very early steps, before the first infection stateside, to stop the flow of the virus into the country. What did he get for his trouble? A myriad of op-eds proclaiming that containing the virus was actually hurting the containment of the virus. None of it made sense, but it wasn’t meant to make sense. It was simply a way to start an orange man bad narrative. Now that we have infections in the United States, they’ve flipped the narrative and claim Trump hasn’t done enough. There was never any winning for him in this situation. The media were simply not going to allow it.

The truth is, the government is not magic. I’m actually fairly disappointed with a lot of conservatives whining about the current response, as if the feds have secret factories ready to pump out supplies to meet any pandemic at a moments notice. No President has the ability to stop an infectious disease from spreading. It’s not possible to contain something like that. You can only manage it. One of the cornerstones of conservatism is realizing that the government kind of sucks. It can’t do things fast and efficiently and no amount of “leadership” will change that. The response to H1N1 was painfully slow under Obama. The response to Katrina was sloppy under Bush. It’s not because they were incompetent and “bungled” things, it’s because there’s only so much the federal government can actually do.

Trump has done everything in his power to this point. Things will get worse before they get better. Conservatives, of all people, should understand the limitations here instead of playing into them.

Front-page contributor for RedState. Visit my archives for more of my latest articles and help out by following me on Twitter @bonchieredstate. Read more by Bonchie