Trump opened his February 28, 2020 rally in Charleston, South Carolina with an attack on Democrats, who began in January calling for a stronger and more organized response to the growing pandemic than Trump was putting forward.
Trump told his crowd that Democrats had attacked him with "Russia, Russia, Russia," and he told them Democrats had attacked him with "the impeachment hoax," and now, he told them, the Democrats were trying to discredit him with "their new hoax," attacks on his response to the spreading disease.
“Russia, Russia, Russia” was a response to a congressional intelligence briefing a week earlier, when Congress and the nation learned (or had suspicions confirmed) that Russia was actively helping Trump in the 2020 election cycle. Trump had tweeted,
That week, between Trump’s February 21 tweet and his 2/28 rally in Charleston, was a busy one, both for Trump and for Democrats.
As early as January, Democrats began warning the White House that preparations for a major pandemic response should be underway. But while CDC and other health agencies were warning the same, the message from inside the Trump administration was that everything was under control.
White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow said on February 25 that “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight.” Kudlow also predicted smooth sailing in the medical supply chain: “But I’m not at all convinced that we can’t get hold of what we need here in the U.S. We have stockpiles. We also have the capacity to produce more in all these areas.”
Trump’s money wizard also predicted that “The business and the economic side, I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all.”
Trump was equally chipper. The next day at his daily press briefing, Trump said,
“Because of all we’ve done, when you have 15 people [tested positive], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.
Democrats were not so upbeat in the days before Trump’s Charleston rally. On February 25, the day of the Charleston Democratic debate , Elizabeth Warren shot off a series of tweets that began,
At the debate that evening, Michael Bloomberg was blunt:
“What’s really happening here is the president fired the pandemic specialists in this country two years ago so there’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. He’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, C.D.C., so we don’t have the organization we need. As you see, the stock market is falling apart because people are really worried, and they should be.”
Bernie Sanders was no more gracious:
“In the White House today, we have a self-described ‘great genius,’ and this great genius has told us that this coronavirus is going to end in two months. April is the magical date that this great scientist we have in the White House has determined.”
All of the Democratic candidates took their turn at condemning Trump’s lackadaisical response to the looming crisis. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who had been a key figure in ramping up federal preparedness for viral disease disaster in the Obama administration, had since January criticized Trump’s “draconian” dismantling of programs in the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).