A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Manufacture.

A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Manufacture. By RICH LOWRY

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-real-crisis-president-trump-critics-media/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-03-31&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Excerpt: Trump closed off travel from China while the trial was still ongoing, the day after senators asked their final questions of the impeachment managers and the White House defense team. Only two and a half weeks after the trial, the White House requested $1.25 billion in emergency coronavirus funding from Congress. If the trial hadn’t ended expeditiously, the Senate easily could have been still seeking the testimony of, say, former White House counsel Don McGahn about the details of the non-firing of special counsel Robert Mueller — at the same time that everyone expected the administration to be shifting into wartime footing against the virus. In that circumstance, the impeachment trial obviously would have been immediately shelved, because a discretionary national crisis can’t compete with a real, unavoidable one. Political melodrama must give way to a potential public-health catastrophe. Purportedly historic events that were going to be forgotten within weeks can’t compare with days that genuinely might define our era. For more than three years, American national politics has been constantly on a crisis footing over presidential tweets, two-day controversies, and dubious storylines whipped up by the media and Trump’s genuine outrages. Little of it has been enduring, or nearly as important as the intense, wall-to-wall attention at any given moment suggested.