Mike Huckabee
Friday, President Trump held a news conference in which he officially declared the COVID-19 coronavirus to be a national emergency. That quickly freed up about $50 billion worth of federal aid. This comes just two days after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. Also, in a move that shows how different this President is from previous Presidents (and how vastly different he is from those who seek to replace him), he announced that he had struck deals with some of America’s largest corporations, such as WalMart, Target, Google and CVS, to use their vast resources to assist in fighting the disease and helping Americans with procedures and testing. Instead of using the emergency as an “opportunity” to grow government, he’s employing the greater efficiency of the private sector in partnership with government.
Trump also announced that he’s waiving interest on federally-held student loans until further notice.
Another way Trump is different from any Democrat seeking to replace him is that he also declared Sunday to be a National Day of Prayer.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-sunday-national-day-of-prayer
Trump’s actions must have impressed Wall Street, since the Dow roared back by nearly 2,000 points, the biggest one-day gain since the 2008 meltdown, shortly after it took the worst drop since 1987.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/us-stocks-march-13-2020
Also, late last night, the House passed a bill providing emergency funding for dealing with the pandemic, after the Administration demanded a rewrite due to objections that House Democrats were larding up the bill with lefty wish list items, like taxpayer-paid abortions.
Here’s the full text of Trump’s letter:
And full video of the press conference:
You can safely skip the Q&A from reporters at the end. It was mostly a lot of lame “gotcha” attempts by reporters who don’t seem to get that Trump is dealing with a life-or-death health crisis, and very effectively. This is not the time to try to undermine his efforts with your one-track-mind Trump Derangement Syndrome. As noted previously, even such rabid anti-Trump Governors as California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo…
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/361358
…have praised Trump and his team for quickly providing them with everything they promised. I’m glad of this, but not that surprised: Governors may be politicians, but it's much more important to be pragmatic and work with whoever you have to in order to protect your state’s citizens. If actual Democratic politicians can put aside partisanship and acknowledge that Trump is doing a good job, maybe the amateur Democratic politicians in the media could try that as well.
When I see how many ways the media try to attack Trump (when one path fails, they try another, then another), it makes me think that COVID-19 may not be the most aggressive virus plaguing America today. For instance, Trump was called a racist, xenophobic incompetent for acting too quickly to shut down all travel from China. Once it became apparent that bought us precious time, they attacked him for not doing it soon enough. Now, they’re trying to circle back to the nonsense “racist” charge, but in a way that only makes themselves look hypocritical…
https://www.mrctv.org/blog/watch-34-times-media-said-wuhan-or-chinese-coronavirus-they-blame-gop
As for the claim that Trump was ignoring the coronavirus or not doing enough, Deborah Birx, the internationally known HIV/AIDS expert appointed by Trump to help coordinate his coronavirus response, said there has been “intense effort” put into bringing quality testing kits to people “at unprecedented speed,” adding, “I understand that a lot of this behind-the-scenes action in the last couple of weeks was invisible to the press and the American people.”
So she’s saying that Trump and his people were actually exerting intense effort to deal with the crisis, but the public might not have known it because they were putting their efforts into dealing with the crisis rather than trying to make themselves look good to the media.
I think I’ve just found another way that this President is very different from all the people trying to replace him!