‘The pro-Trump media is trying to bury the Trump White House’s failures to fully protect and prepare the country from this pandemic…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) CNN’s Brian Stelter claimed on Sunday that the Trump administration’s response to the Wuhan virus pandemic has been a “9/11-level failure.”
The federal government’s “delays and dysfunction” in addressing the health crisis were similar to the intelligence failures that neglected to detect the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Stelter argued.
“[Trump] is still getting lots of facts wrong at these briefings,” Stelter ranted.
“One day, he said scarves work better than masks. One day he said airplane and train travelers are being given very strong tests for the virus before departure and after arrival. It’s not true,” Stelter continued. “Maybe it should be true, but it’s not.”
The “State of the Union” host, who is CNN’s chief media correspondent, also accused those who support the Trump administration of pushing “a whole lot of revisionist history,” unlike his own network.
“The pro-Trump media is trying to bury the Trump White House’s failures to fully protect and prepare the country from this pandemic,” Stelter said.
Quoting an Associated Press headline that stated the U.S. “wasted months” before preparing for COVID-19, Stelter said the media needs to start asking what went wrong just like it did back in 2001.
Stelter was referencing a 2004 report from an independent, bipartisan commission, which found that government agencies failed to act on intelligence before the terrorist attacks. Democrats have tried to accuse Trump’s administration of this same kind of neglect.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has even demanded that Congress establish another “9/11-style commission” to investigate how much the Trump administration knew about the COVID-19 outbreak and what it did to prevent it.
“After Pearl Harbor, September 11, and many momentous events in American history, independent, bipartisan commissions have been established to provide a complete accounting of what happened, what we did right and wrong, and what we can do to better protect the country in the future,” Schiff said in a statement.
“Though we are still in the early days of the Coronavirus crisis, there is no doubt that such a comprehensive and authoritative review will be required,” Schiff continued. “This is not an exercise in casting blame or scoring political points, but something that the American people should rightly expect from their government as an exercise in accountability.”
Trump’s conservative defenders, however, have noted two important mitigating factors that helped contribute to the “months” of delayed response, both of which have been downplayed by the Left and its media allies.
Although the virus is estimated to have originated in China around November 2019, the country’s communist government rebuffed any efforts for international support and falsely tried to minimize the potential pandemic concerns. It was supported in this cover-up by the United Nations-backed World Health Organization, which only declared a global pandemic in mid-March. The first confirmed U.S. case arrived in Washington state in January.
Moreover, Trump’s own attention was diverted by the Schiff-led partisan impeachment effort that ended with his acquittal in early February. Even afterward, while allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to oversee the Coronavirus Task Force he created on Jan. 31, the president remained suspicious of left-wing attempts to use the virus as an excuse to further undermine his presidency.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.