Ross: Is Trump finally taking coronavirus threat seriously?

There is this sideshow going on, where reporters at White House briefings try to get the President to admit that he once blew off coronavirus as no big deal.

A month ago, he seemed to dismiss the casualty projections for the U.S. as media hysteria.

“You hear 35 and 40 thousand people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode — CNN, fake news, and their camera just went off,” he said at a February rally.

But yesterday – one month after that speech in South Carolina — it was Donald Trump himself with a very scary projection of U.S. casualties.

“Think of the number, potentially 2.2 million people if we did nothing, if we didn’t do all the things we’re doing,” he estimated.

For a President who would have dismissed that number as hysteria a month ago, to utter it repeatedly in the Rose Garden strikes me as a pretty big win for his critics. This is the President telling his base to trust the experts, aka the deep state!

“But Dave,” you might say, “he’s putting that number out there so he can claim a victory if it turns out to be only 100,000.”

Maybe. But the point is, that all of a sudden the tests are on the way, the ventilators are being built, and the idea of packing the pews on Easter Sunday is off the table, even in the red states.

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