Trump Seeks To Calm Partisan Fed Panic, Market Rout

Feb. 27, 2020 (EIRNS)—In a press conference Feb. 26, President Donald Trump sought to calm mounting hysteria concerning COVID-19 resulting from the politicization of the fight against the virus from both Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, their media echo chamber, anti-China fanatics within the Republican Party, and stock market vultures who have massively profited from the outsourcing of U.S. production. Trump put the Vice President in charge of the task force assigned to fight the epidemic, as a signal of the seriousness of the administration’s response, stated that he would take whatever extra funding Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wanted to offer to fight the epidemic, repeatedly defended President Xi Jinping and China’s response to the illness, and otherwise deferred to the experts assembled around him to provide a briefing to the public on the nature of the threat.

Trump was flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield MD; CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat MD; and Director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci MD. Trump’s message over and over again was to stop spreading panic, that the threat at this point was minimal although it could expand, and that the United States was ready to confront any eventuality. In response to a direct question concerning whether China was hiding both the scope and the origin of the outbreak, a favorite trope now on Fox, the President said he did not believe that at all.

On Feb. 27, the administration announced further appointments to its novel coronavirus response team, including Dr. Deborah Birx, currently the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, an Obama appointee. In addition, it was announced that the administration was considering using the Defense Production Act to cause immediate production of respiratory devices and masks, among other items.

Pelosi seemed to have been taken to the principal’s office and, in her Thursday press conference today, took shots at the President but largely stressed the needs for national bipartisan unity. She said that Congress was now discussing a bipartisan bill to respond to the crisis. She also denied that the stock market rout had little to do with the panic she and Schumer had spread, attributing it, instead, to “the invisible hand doing what it does.”