President Trump has spent much of the past two months downplaying the novel coronavirus threat. Those statements, others have noted, are dramatically different from his comments about the Ebola outbreak in 2014.
Back then, Trump repeatedly played up fears of Ebola to attack President Barack Obama. His many tweets included incorrect claims that “Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting” and that a “single Ebola carrier infects 2 others at a minimum.” …
The Ebola threat was, of course, enormously overstated. PolitiFact even named “exaggerations about Ebola” its 2014 Lie of the Year. …
Nevertheless, everything we know about public opinion tells us that prominent Republicans’ differing partisan messages about those two viruses’ respective threats should have profoundly affected Americans’ concerns about each. And they certainly did. CONT.
Michael Tesler (UC Irvine), Monkey Cage