COVID-19 Timeline in the USA

Purpose

Did the Trump administration manage the COVID-19 response badly?

To decide, I made a timeline, using information from this Washington Post article:

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

Early Days

In January and February, President Trump made public statements dismissing the risk. As far as I can tell, those statements were substantially true, based on the information available at the time, as shown below.

The Crisis Hits

One week after the first death, President Trump signed an emergency spending bill. One week after that he "turned the corner."

Conclusion

I don't see a large failure here. The way President Trump talks is very annoying, but his actions don't seem to me to be substantially negligent.

Every opposition party always screams these two messages:

1. The current administration is awful.
2. We would do much better.

Message 1 is always easy to make after the fact, but message 2 is very weak and unconvincing. If the president had been Obama or Biden, the public statements would have had a style more to my liking, but events would probably have followed the same course.

There are reasons to vote for Democrats, but I'm afraid I must agree with the majority of Americans that President Trump is doing reasonably well at handling the crisis.

Posted April 5, 2020 by Sam Bowne