Coronavirus crisis is really Trump’s time to step up

Not until well into the Democratic debate late last month did the COVID19 coronavirus come up, and it was Mike Bloomberg (who ended his campaign Wednesday), not a CBS moderator, who raised it:

“The president fired the pandemic specialist in this country two years ago,” the former New York mayor said. “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded the CDC.”

Not 24 hours later, President Donald Trump, home from India, was in the White House briefing room, flanked by the nation’s foremost health experts, deputizing Vice President Mike Pence to head the task force to lead America’s battle against the spreading disease.

Whatever happens medically — the mortality rate of the virus is between 2 and 3% — it’s hard to see how the world averts a recession if COVID-19 is not soon contained and controlled.

Already, Democrats are piling on Trump for cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and failing to reflect the seriousness of the threat. And the issue does present a challenge to Trump’s presidency. His handling of it may determine his stature as chief executive.

Yet the issue is also tailor-made for Trump.

First, the disease comes out of Xi Jinping’s China, not Trump’s USA.

Second, the president occupies what Theodore Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit,” the White House. He can use that pulpit daily to command the airwaves and inform, lead, unite and direct the nation during what could be a monthslong crisis. And Trump alone has the power to declare a national emergency, should that be needed.

If Trump acts as a leader, urging unity in the struggle to contain the virus and discover a vaccine, the hectoring from the Democratic left, already begun, can come to be seen as unpatriotic.

Still, given the news coming from all over the globe, there is a risk that by November, the U.S. and the world may have tumbled into a recession. Airlines are already canceling flights to and from Asia.

Travel and tourism are suffering terribly. Schools are closing.

Chinese factories that produce essential parts for factories and finished products in the U.S., Europe and Asia are shutting down. Supply chains are being severed. Shortages are cropping up.

The Japanese are talking of canceling the Olympics. If the virus spreads here, the question arises: Will our two parties still hold their nominating conventions this summer in Milwaukee and Charlotte?

The chickens of globalization are coming home to roost.

In recent decades, America’s economic and political elites of both parties surrendered America’s economic independence for globalism, a new interdependence of nations, where we Americans no longer rely on ourselves alone for the vital necessities of our national life.

According to The Washington Post, critical ingredients of medicines and drugs, upon which many American lives depend, are made in Chinese factories now in danger of being shut down.

In the ongoing struggle between nationalism and globalism, the globalists are taking a beating. Like the Chinese and Japanese and Koreans, Americans are not going to be looking to the WHO or U.N. to ensure their health, but to their nations.

Like Trump’s America, all nations, in this crisis, are going to put their own people first. As they should.