House GOP praises Trump's coronavirus response hours after he tests positive

GOP lawmakers on a special committee created to study the Trump administration’s coronavirus response released a report on Friday morning praising Donald Trump for his “strong leadership” on the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The facts clearly show that President Trump’s leadership during this unprecedented pandemic has our country on a path to a full recovery,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the ranking member on the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, said in a news release. “President Trump followed the science to develop national plans that could be rapidly implemented to address an ever-changing situation.”

Republicans released the report just hours after Trump announced that he and first lady Melania Trump both tested positive for the coronavirus, with Trump reported to be experiencing mild symptoms like fatigue.

The White House has thus far ignored almost every protocol to stop an even bigger outbreak.

Trump and other White House officials did not immediately quarantine after learning they had been exposed to Hope Hicks, who tested positive for the coronavirus this week.

Not only did Trump not quarantine, but he traveled to New Jersey for an indoor fundraiser, where he mingled with “dozens” of donors without wearing a mask or letting those donors know that he had been exposed to the virus.

Trump ultimately announced that he tested positive for the virus just hours after holding the fundraiser, where reports said he was showing symptoms like lethargy.

Trump and his campaign also did not inform Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign that the White House was experiencing a coronavirus outbreak, even though Trump had been on a debate stage with Biden on Tuesday, and Biden campaign staffers were in the same debate hall where Trump family and aides did not wear masks. That ignores basic contact-tracing protocol.

The GOP report also included numerous lies about Trump’s coronavirus response.

Their report said, “Trump saved thousands of lives by restricting travel from China, Europe, and the United Kingdom early in the pandemic.”

However, Trump’s travel restrictions were full of holes, with tens of thousands of people coming in from China without any screening, according to the Associated Press.

Trump’s restrictions on travelers from Europe — where many of the cases in New York were seeded from — didn’t come until the middle of March, when the virus had already been in the United States and was starting to grow exponentially.

The report also said Trump “built the world’s strongest and most robust testing operation from scratch” — even though many in the United States are still struggling to obtain tests.

Ultimately, reports say that Trump wasted more than two months to prepare the United States for the virus, which led to thousands more deaths. Trump publicly downplayed the virus, even though he knew it was deadly and incredibly contagious.

Democrats who run the special coronavirus committee released their own report, which concluded that “over the last eight months, the Administration engaged in a persistent pattern of political interference—repeatedly overruling and sidelining top scientists and undermining Americans’ health to advance the President’s partisan agenda.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.