What Mulligan Had to Say about Ebola

I've been thinking about what our current coronavirus pandemic (?) will be like with a germ-phobe (and incompetent) president. I mentioned the 2014 Ebola outbreak briefly in a recent post, and particularly what my elderly father was like at the time. It made me wonder what Mafia Mulligan was said about it, since I wasn't paying much if any attention to him then.

Journalist Sam Stein did my job and rounded up Mulligan's 2014 tweets and other statements on the Ebola crisis:

I don’t think people appreciate just how bad Donald Trump was during the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Here’s a short list of the things he said, which were amplified (rather inexplicably) by the media. (Seriously, what was the reason for that?)

He infamously insisted that the U.S. could not allow those infected back into the country, saying that had to “suffer the consequences” -- including doctors who’d gone to treat patients.

He said that the CDC was not being honest with how contagious the disease actually was: "Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting. Spreading all over Africa-and fast. Stop flights" -@realDonaldTrump

And he just kept hammering the CDC in subsequent media appearances.

“They couldn’t control their own labs a month ago. What would they know [about Ebola]?"

He compared it to the AIDS epidemic because, you know, they’re both…. Diseases????

"If you look at the AIDS epidemic, it started very small and then all of a sudden it grew and grew and we have to this day, a massive problem with that.”

He chastised Obama for appointing a point person (Ronald Klain) to oversee the response across agencies?

"It's the wrong person," Trump said. "Do we need more people? Do we need more bureaucracy?"

Then he said the government couldn’t be trusted to deal with it at all.

“Why would anybody trust our government to handle this crisis?”

Hooboy.