Five years ago this week (March 13, 2020), President Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency. It was the beginning of a national trauma. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 1.2 million Americans have died of COVID in the past five years, while millions more suffered severe illness.
Compounding the misery, government-ordered shutdowns triggered an economic calamity. The March 2020 jobs report showed an immediate loss of 20 million nonfarm payroll jobs, as unemployment skyrocketed to 14.8%, the worst level since the government began tracking the rate in 1948. The U.S. economy contracted by a devastating 31.4% in the second quarter of that year, representing more than $2 trillion in lost economic activity.
But 2020 was also an election year, and President Trump had just emerged victorious from a Democratic-led impeachment effort. The COVID virus was definitely bad news for America, but liberal journalists weren’t about to let a crisis go to waste. So, during those precarious first weeks of the pandemic, the media unleashed a punishing assault on the President, claiming he was personally responsible for the suffering.
“More people are dead and dying in America tonight because Donald Trump is President,” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell thundered on March 12. “This is what happens when you elect a sociopath as President,” PBS’s David Brooks sneered the next night.
“We will see that the Trump administration, because of the character of the person at the top, created a reality distortion field that slowed and warped a response that is going to kill more people than the Vietnam War did,” ex-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham claimed on April 3.
While the airwaves were jam-packed with journalists blaming Trump, viewers heard almost nothing negative about China’s government for its role in creating the crisis. From January 17 through March 13, 2020, the weekday broadcast evening newscasts aired 634 minutes of coronavirus coverage, yet less one percent (just 3 minutes, 14 seconds) presented topics unflattering to the Chinese government.
Five years later, here are the most extreme quotes from the NewsBusters archives showing how liberal journalists cynically exploited the bad news to bash Trump in order to turn the crisis to Democrats’ advantage:
■ “This [coronavirus] may be Donald Trump’s Katrina….If there was any moment that would shake that 40 percent, the folks who would allow him to shoot someone and right down [on] Fifth [Avenue] — if there is any a moment, it’s this one. Because it’s babies, it’s friends, it’s loved ones....It’s grandparents. It’s your Nana....This is an event that could take down a presidency.”
— MSNBC contributor/Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, March 6, 2020.■ Host Stephanie Ruhle: “You’ve called this his Chernobyl. Can you explain?”...
Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas: “Since the beginning of this crisis, the important thing for Donald Trump has been protecting myths around his alternative reality which is to say that he has this completely under control. And in Chernobyl, what you had was a moment in which protecting the Soviet state’s myths were the most important thing and that caused people to die.”
— MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle, March 12, 2020.
■ “More people are sick in American tonight, because Donald Trump is President. More people are dead and dying in America tonight because Donald Trump is President.”
— Host Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, March 12, 2020.■ “This is what happens when you elect a sociopath as President, who doesn’t care, who has treated this whole thing for the past month as if it’s about him, ‘How do people like me,’ minimizing the risks, ‘Does the stock market reflect well on me,’ and he hasn’t done the things a normal human being would do.”
— New York Times columnist David Brooks on PBS’s NewsHour, March 13, 2020.■ “I would stop putting those briefings on live TV...If he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should — all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it’s going to cost lives.”
— Host Rachel Maddow on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, March 20, 2020.
■ “The cocktail of all his [Donald Trump] worst qualities is mendaciousness, his constant telling of lies, his narcissism, his lack of empathy for people in general, his obsession with money, classes, et cetera, has led to disaster, has led to delay….History will prove this — this will be something that’s paid in human lives, and that’s an enormous tragedy.”
— New Yorker editor David Remnick on CNN’s Reliable Sources, March 29, 2020.■ “Do you think there is blood on the President’s hands, considering the slow response? Or is that too harsh of a criticism?”
— Host Chuck Todd to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on NBC’s Meet the Press, March 29, 2020.
■ “Mr. Vice President, what is President Trump’s level of culpability, what’s his level of responsibility, say, toward the illness and fatalities we’re witnessing every few minutes these days?”
— Host Brian Williams to Biden on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, March 31, 2020.■ “We will see that the Trump administration, because of the character of the person at the top, created a reality distortion field that slowed and warped a response that is going to kill more people than the Vietnam War did.”
— Presidential historian and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham on PBS’s Amanpour & Company, April 3, 2020.
■ “They believe him! There are people who believe him because he’s the President of the United States, and he’s giving misinformation to their own peril. People are dying because of some of the information that’s being disseminated from these clown press conferences.”
— Co-host Sunny Hostin on ABC’s The View, April 6, 2020.
■ “What the President showed us today is what the nation’s top scientists have to deal with every day, a President who now uses these briefings as a re-election platform, an opportunity to lie, to deflect, to attack, to bully, and cover up his own deadly dismissals of the virus for crucial weeks.”
— Host Anderson Cooper on CNN’s AC360, April 6, 2020.■ “I don’t think it’s actually an overstatement to say that Donald Trump has — there are tens of thousands of people who will die in the country, or have some hope of them have already died, more are still going to die because of Donald Trump’s incompetence and lack of leadership.”
— MSNBC national affairs analyst and Showtime’s The Circus host John Heilemann on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, April 8, 2020.
■ “People are dying because of his foolishness. It’s really foolishness at this point. You know, America — you know, folks who loved him, fine. You voted for him. You stuck it to the elites for three years. But now your loved ones can die. The game’s over. This isn’t reality TV anymore. People are dying, and this guy is acting a fool.”
— Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik on CNN’s Reliable Sources, April 12, 2020.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
