- President Donald Trump insisted on Monday that he did "a lot" to address the rapidly-spreading coronavirus in the month of February, but overwhelming evidence points to the contrary.
- In the month of February, as global cases of the virus jumped from about 12,000 to over 85,000, Trump tweeted or retweeted nearly 900 messages, of which just 20 mentioned the coronavirus.
- Every one of those 20 messages either praised the Trump administration's response to the virus or criticized Democrats or the media for their response to the pandemic.
- Experts say Trump lost crucial time to implement diagnostic testing to identify where the virus was and contain it, build up emergency stockpiles of supplies, and recommend Americans practice social distancing.
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President Donald Trump insisted on Monday that he did "a lot" to address the rapidly-spreading coronavirus in the month of February, but evidence points to the contrary.
One data point are the president's tweets, his preferred mode of communication with the public. In the month of February, as global cases of the virus jumped from about 12,000 to over 85,000, Trump tweeted or retweeted nearly 900 messages, of which just 20 mentioned the coronavirus.
Every one of those 20 messages either praised the Trump administration's response to the virus or criticized Democrats or the media for their response to the pandemic.
Trump tweeted just twice about the coronavirus between February 1 and February 23. Both of those messages were about his conversation with China's top leader, Xi Jinping, who Trump claimed "will be successful" in beating the virus "as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone."
As COVID-19 has killed nearly 25,000 people in the US in recent weeks, the president has repeatedly attempted to rewrite history, falsely asserting both that his administration never could've predicted the severity of the pandemic and that he acted as aggressively as possible to slow its spread.
Trump took his first real step to contain the novel coronavirus in late January when he restricted travel to the US from China. But he did little to slow the spread in February, during which time the first US resident died of COVID-19, and instead aggressively downplayed the virus.
When Trump was asked about this gap during his daily White House coronavirus briefing on Monday evening, he refused to answer the question and lashed out at the reporter who asked it.
"What did your administration do in February with the time that your travel ban bought you?" CBS News' Paula Reid asked Trump on Monday.
"A lot," Trump replied before calling Reid and her network "fake."
In reality, the president spent February repeatedly claiming the infectious disease was "very much under control" in the US. In late February, Trump said the country's 15 confirmed coronavirus infections "within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero."
Part of Trump's motivation for spinning a rosy picture of the virus in the US was clearly to calm anxiety that could hurt the stock market.
This came even as multiple top White House aides issued stark warnings about the virus's potential impact. Trump's top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, sent multiple memos to the National Security Council in January and February that predicted hundreds of thousands could die from the novel coronavirus with a loss of trillions of dollars for the economy.
Navarro recommended a significant amount of funding be appropriated to purchase essential medical supplies for frontline workers, but his request wasn't fulfilled and it took the administration until mid-March to place an order for crucial N95 masks.
Experts say Trump lost crucial time to implement diagnostic testing to identify where the virus was and contain it, build up emergency stockpiles of supplies, and recommend Americans practice social distancing.
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