Two months after Donald Trump left the White House, the Media Research Center was still defending him and his dubious behavior.
We’ve already documented how the MRC rushed to Trump’s defense when the Biden administration accurately pointed out that the Trump administration had no plan for coronavirus vaccine distribution beyond shipping the vaccines to state. Yet Tim Graham dedicated his March 17 column to attacking Vice President Kamala Harris for pointing that out. “Team Biden has a persistent lying problem when it comes to the Trump administration’s supposedly terrible record on vaccines,” he asserted, then acted as the second coming of Kayleigh McEnany:
Were vaccines “moving at a snail’s pace”? On January 15, the week before Biden was sworn in, 10.6 million Americans had received a COVID vaccine under Trump, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Did they fail to order enough vaccines? The federal government, as of last December 31, had contracted to buy at least 800 million COVID-19 vaccine doses with delivery by July 31.
Was there “no real plan” for vaccine distribution? Last September 16, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report to Congress, outlining a strategy for vaccine distribution and a playbook for states and localities “on how to plan and operationalize a vaccination response.”
The Trump administration encouraged a flexible and federalist approach to coronavirus restrictions, and also to coronavirus vaccines. Leftists would say letting states control anything instead of the federal government equals “no national strategy.”
Graham lept from that to rehash the MRC’s old arguments:
The Democrats and the media have decried Trump for “politicizing” the pandemic, which is a bad joke, since they were clearly politicizing it soon after their first impeachment attempt fizzled. Trump called their political exploitation a “hoax,” and then they claimed he called the virus a “hoax.” Even today, Team Biden is relentlessly slamming Trump as the scapegoat for everything that’s ever gone wrong.
Um, didn’t Trump blame Obama for everything that went wrong under his administration?
Remember: For Graham and the MRC, the narrative is everything, facts less so.