Fox Business Network host Trish Regan. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

On Monday night — following a day in which several Republican lawmakers self-quarantined due to coronavirus exposure, the stock market took an historic hit, and the 26th American died from COVID-19 — Fox Business Network’s Trish Regan began her show with a monologue damning the opposition party for politicizing the public-health crisis. As Regan spoke of a “chorus of hate being leveled at the president,” the chyron next to her read: “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam,” an effective summary of the host’s wandering defense of President Trump:

We’ve reached a tipping point. The hate is boiling. Many in the liberal media are using coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the president, despite the virus originating halfway around the world. This is yet another attempt to impeach, and sadly, it seems the left cares little for any of the destruction they leave in their wake, including losses in the market. This, unfortunately, is all just part of political casualties for them.

And, like with the Robert Mueller investigation, like with the Ukraine-gate, they don’t care who they hurt, whether it be their need to create mass hysteria to encourage a massive sell-off in an overly anxious stock market or, to create mass hysteria in order to stop our economy dead in its tracks.

You gotta watch this, I mean........you just gotta watch pic.twitter.com/x2ZsayVrmv — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) March 10, 2020

Though it’s unlikely that a competent White House would be able to contain the coronavirus due to the tattered American safety net, the Trump administration has made big-picture decisions (cutting the CDC’s epidemic prevention programs by 80 percent) and acute failures (escalating testing errors) that have directly and negatively impacted health agencies’ abilities to manage the crisis. Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported on the White House’s most brazen decision yet — to overrule the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that seniors avoid flying, in an apparent attempt to limit the economic damage wreaked by the virus.

Later on Fox News, host Tucker Carlson disagreed with Regan’s assessment, calling the coronavirus a “major event” and criticizing those who have “spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.”

Tucker Carlson pushing back against coronavirus coverage from those who "have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem."



"'It's just partisan politics,' they say. 'Calm down. In the end this is just like the flu.'



Carlson: "It's definitely not just the flu" pic.twitter.com/h7N20Pi2Bd — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) March 10, 2020

The monologue amounted to what one CNN’s Oliver Darcy called “a giant subtweet of much of Fox’s coronavirus coverage.”