Criticism of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus for the most part centers not on policy but on style: The president made many ill-considered and inaccurate remarks, and he tried to happy-talk his way through the situation. His habit of going off message, which appears to be incurable, gives his opponents a steady stream of ammunition with which to attack him. As for the happy talk, there was an awful lot of that going around.
As David Harsanyi points out, on the day Trump tweeted that the virus is “very much under control,” Nancy Pelosi was urging her constituents to visit Chinatown in San Francisco. That was February 24. On March 5, Bill de Blasio was urging New Yorkers to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” As late as March 19, Andrew Cuomo was still playing Kevin Bacon in Animal House — “Remain calm, all is well!” he cried, as he got flattened. Cuomo told us “the fear and panic is, if anything, worse than the virus,” though it turned out that the virus was actually quite a bit worse, and a little more fear and panic earlier in the year would have been useful in limiting its spread.
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