Duuude, When you repost Trump’s lame excuses for his criminally negligent conduct in office you very much act to defend him, and I’m left wondering why. Citing the travel closures he claims were effective actions to fight the pandemic is spreading that lie, and endorsing it. It is irrelevant whether he took flak for imposing an ineffective travel closure, his job is to do what’s necessary to protect the public and either explain it effectively or take the heat.

It was known long before March that the virus was deadly and was rapidly spreading. I certainly knew, President Trump knew, anybody who cared to read a newspaper knew. A quick glance at google pulls up a Jan. 24 article about people collapsing in the Wuhan streets, about China locking down all travel in and out of Wuhan, about spread to 10 other countries including the U.S. Lying by proxy. I guess that gives you plausible deniability, which practically makes you his protege, given that one of Trump’s few proven skills is the wink and nod direction of seamy activities so that he can’t be held liable. Michael Cohen comes to mind.

Any non sociopath in the Oval Office would have been ramping up our response in early January on the possibility that this could turn out exactly as it did. You can’t lay this off on Fauci, who was navigating the impossible space between Clorox boy and the very real ongoing need for robust public health measures. Nor can you claim without some sort of proof that there was any serious balancing of cost vs. rewards for such measures, not when Trump himself is on record “playing it down”, claiming “it will disappear like magic”, not while he still holds super spreader events nearly every day.

Other nations? They have vastly lower death and infection rates and now ban US from travel. You’re a fact guy, look at the graphs. There’s simply no decent excuse to carry water for Trump on this issue, and certainly no decent excuse to use his words or rationalizations on a grieving widow.