One Day After Calling for Politics to Be Put Aside, Trump Rages Against Joe Biden in Misleading Twitter Rant

Barely 24 hours after calling for all Americans to come together and put aside politics during the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump unleashed a Twitter rant against his potential 2020 Democratic rival, Joe Biden, over the latter’s role in the 2009 swine flu response.

Trump’s online tirade came late on Thursday, hours after Biden gave a speech detailing his own coronavirus plan, in which he called the Trump administration’s response a “colossal” failure, and following yet another massive drop in the nation’s stock market, which, according to the Washington Post, left the president “apoplectic.”

Using his typical insult for Biden, Trump first brought up the H1N1 swine flu epidemic that hit during the early years of the Obama administration, and made two inaccurate or misleading statements.

Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020

The 78 percent figure Trump cited seems to derive from a Gallup poll from early February 2020 — when public focus on the outbreak was low — that found 77 percent of Americans had “high confidence” in the government’s ability to handle the COVID-19 outbreak. However, that same polling data also contradicts Trump’s other claim, as Gallup also found that 67 percent of the public had had high confidence in the Obama’s administration’s H1N1 response in 2009, second-highest on record.

What’s more, Morning Consult has repeatedly polled the public since February, and has found a steady erosion in job approval of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus response, which had dropped to a near even split as of the first week of March, before the largest stock market drops and his widely panned Oval Office speech. In addition, a Quinnipiac poll from last week showed a public that had soured on Trump’s personal actions about the outbreak, with a -6 net disapproval of his coronavirus response.

In a follow-up Tweet, Trump then slammed the Obama White House for waiting until October 2009 to declare the H1N1 swine flu a “national emergency.” But that too is a partly misleading claim, as the Obama administration had already declared the epidemic a “public health emergency” in April, just weeks after the virus was detected and before anyone had died.

“The Obama White House had to immediately issue an apology for Joe Biden’s remarks, and any alarm that he might have caused, an alarm about a Swine Flu outbreak that took 6 months for President Obama to declare a National Emergency, and that killed 12,000 Americans.” @LouDobbs

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020

At latest count, more than 1,600 Americans have been officially identified as having COVID-19 — although public health experts suspect the real number is many times higher — and more than 40 have died. However President Trump has so far refused to declare the pandemic a “national emergency,” even though he did so last year in order to get emergency funding to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

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