The media’s criticisms of Trump never address the important caveat: Compared to what? Is it fair to compare Trump’s response to coronavirus with Obama’s response to swine flu? You can be the judge of fair. Fair is always an unreasonable and subjective thing. So let’s do the exercise.
Virus Response: Obama versus Trump
So, how did Obama respond to the 2009 swine flu outbreak? The documentation of the first case was in the US was in April 2009. Obama declares the outbreak a national emergency in October 2009 after six months. At that point, the death toll in the U.S. was over 1000 and was present in 46 states.
So far I think we are still well under 100 deaths from coronavirus. That’s a difference, don’t you think? We’ve had coronavirus in the US for less than two months. That appears to be a difference in response. What do you think?
Swine flu was known to be deadly to the healthy and young. Media coverage of the swine flu was nowhere near the breathless hysteria of coverage today. Coronavirus seems to affect the sick, immune-compromised and aged far worse than the general public. Who gets sick and the lethality of the disease determines the size of the pool of lethal outcomes. That appears to be a difference.
Swine flu was more deadly than coronavirus. That’s a difference, don’t you think? It also attacks the population generally. That just seems significant somehow. So why the disparity in press coverage?
Obama enjoyed eight years of a slobbering media love affair.
Media coverage
Is it possible Obama’s time was replete with uncritical, laudatory, and selective coverage? Does the media incessantly attack Trump? Does their coverage have a slant or is it intentionally mendacious? Are their stories resting on partisan, analysis with a slant and anonymous leaks? We all answer the question for ourselves every day. We should answer them honestly, if only to ourselves.
Think about it. Obama was caught on a hot mic promising Russia “flexibility” on missile defense. But Russia would have to wait until after his reelection. What did the media do? They gave a big collective yawn. Yet, when Trump urges the president of Ukraine to investigate his country’s meddling in the 2016 election what happens?
The world knows Ukraine has notorious corruption. There exists the immediate appearance of the corruption involving a U.S. Vice President’s son. And what about the billions of U.S. dollars missing or with no accounting in Ukraine? Does the president not have a duty to find out what happened to American taxpayer money?
Yet, Trump went through impeachment on the charge of “abusing his authority.” This is journalistic idiocy and professional malfeasance. We’ll forego the discussion of the performance of the Democrat leadership. Suffice it to say when you do not respect due process you will not and should not prevail.
The cause of this behavior is the COVEFE-16 virus.
The uni-party technocratic, globalist elite, is a product of progressivism’s success. Progressivism has turned socialist, fascist and communist. It is bent on undermining the American Constitution. They have been infuriated by Trump’s penchant for breaking every rule of the techno-media-political-academic guild.
He is shattering their gatekeeping and paradigm protecting notions of socialist propaganda. The exposure of their serial failures both at home and abroad threatens them. They are illiberal. Their politically correct manners are facing mockery and ridicule. Worse than those offenses was Trump’s success in unleashing the economy from Obama’s shackles.
Trump has taken the kick-me sign off our foreign-policy. The socialist mavens had hung on that America’s back since WWII. Particularly galling to them is Trump’s abandonment of the appeasing and dangerous Iran nuclear deal. Then there were the economically suicidal Paris Climate Accords. These moves starkly expose the folly of the “rules-based international order.” The world socialist elites, the globalists use the rules-based international order to camouflage and justify their failures.
It is no surprise the progressives sought to undermine, to terminate Trump’s presidency from inception. With supreme hypocrisy, the Democrats whine about his vulgar and insulting tweets. But it is they who pioneered the “politics of personal destruction.” They start with Nixon’s presidency, Never Trumpers go along. They invoke lofty standards of “decorum.” Yet they never meet their own standards themselves. Do as I say not as I do is all about the leftist propaganda machine.
