Aspirational is just stupid when it has 0 chance of success. For that to even come out of someones mouth shows that they have no understanding of the virus, or they just don't care if many people die.
I'm sure he partially said it to gauge the reaction and see if people overwhelmingly wanted more shutdowns than to try to let this thing spread more naturally. Anyway, it's Trump. He's a salesman and is always talking shit, trying to will the things he wants into reality through his words. No, it's not traditionally presidential, but it's who he is.
I think that Trump banned travel from China because he thought it was a nice retaliatory move against them. It delayed things a little, but he didn't use that time at all, and he talked like someone who thought he had already won.
I don't think that makes sense at all. Trade talks with China were going well comparatively. Shutting down flights from any country is going to cause big scares in the stock market, and we know how much Trump cares about the DJI value. I do not think he wanted to shutdown travel to China, but knew that doing so might have a chance of slowing things down enough to not require further major actions in the United States. Given the timeline, it looks like our outbreak (especially on the East Coast) likely came from the strand of the virus that spread from China to Europe and then from there to here.
The Coronavirus task force headed by "lets pray it away" Pence? Pence has actually done a great job in the pressers, and in at least talking to the states, but major preparations were not taken for what was coming.
More preparations certainly should have been done, but it's hard to just blame our federal government, since basically no government around the world was prepared for something like this. As long as this pandemic is in living memory, I think governments will work a lot harder to prepare themselves for the possibility in the future.
Trump called it a national emergency, but left most of the work to the states.
I do not see the problem with this, but I suppose this is more subjective. This is the United
States of America and I want states, as much as possible, to be able to handle their own affairs. No one should welcome more federal government intervention in their states than is necessary, in my opinion.
If Trump had taken immediate and strong actions, some idiots might have complained, but he would have been proven right in short order, and made himself a hero.
I do not think this true at all. There's nothing he could have done that would have made him a hero. People already called him a wannabe dictator and if he took strong action on a federal level that restricted people's freedoms before people started dying and cases began growing exponentially, the torches would have been out.
There have been countries with worse responses, and leaders who failed their people in greater ways, but I expect the best from the US, and we haven't been close yet.
The United States is incredible at a lot of things, but decentralized government and freedom are some of the things that many of us value greatly. It comes at a cost, though, as we're seeing with the lack of consistency in our reaction as a country.
Deblasio deserves to be shit on for his early response, and he's been awful as a mayor in general. Cuomo was slower to respond than he should have been, and he actually held Deblasio back from doing a full stay at home order by a week. The West Coast have lead the way on this, but there's only so much local government can do to get us through this period.
There's a ton that local governments can and have been doing, which is a big part of why the numbers are so different across states. I'm sure all politicians will have to answer come election time for the actions they took during these trying months, but I personally find it hard to fault anyone for not having acted sooner. It's political suicide to proactively take freedom-restricting actions when the threat is not apparent.
It's also not hindsight when there were plenty of people who warned us of what was coming. We now know that government agencies were putting out warnings late last year, we know that politicians were worried enough that they decided to sell their stocks on the information they had. I'd love to put it in the past like I did with Cuomo and Deblasio when they started handling things correctly, but Trump isn't there yet and hasn't shown he has that ability at all.
Plenty of people say all sorts of shit. Different experts saying different things. It's only thanks to hindsight that we can point to the ones who were right about it and hold them up as people who should have been listened to.
Anyway, that's my take. I try to look at these things as objectively as I can and not let my dislike of any individual color my opinion of the actions they chose to take in the moment.
or 
