"When an outbreak of the Ebola virus struck West Africa in the summer and fall of 2014 — killing thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — the Obama administration took action. It coordinated a comprehensive global response, sending personnel and resources to affected regions. It pushed Congress to appropriate more than $5 billion in emergency funding to assist international efforts against the disease. USAID established treatment units and care facilities, the State Department helped countries “prevent, prepare for and respond” to Ebola, and the Centers for Disease Control trained medical workers and educated the public about the virus.

It was a full-court press to stop the disease from spreading and it was effective. By the following year, new cases had dropped significantly. By 2016, the World Health Organization had declared West Africa “Ebola-free.”

Despite the success of the response, however, the Ebola outbreak was still a bruising political experience for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. It was an election year, and Republicans played demagogic games with the Ebola outbreak, fanning fears of large-scale infection in the United States. Donald Trump, then just a private citizen, demanded a ban on travel from West Africa. “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” he said on Twitter. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas echoed the call, saying it was “common sense” to impose a ban on commercial travel from those countries. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, then running for the Senate and up for re-election this year, warned in a debate that “bad actors” from Mexico would bring the virus to the United States if the government didn’t “seal the border.” And in the House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers used their oversight authority to hold hearings and force the administration to account for its Ebola response.

 You could call this “playing politics.” And it was. But it worked. That November, fear of disease — fanned by Republican politicians and conservative media personalities — helped the Republican Party win a majority in the Senate, giving it full control of Congress.

I mention all of this because it provides a stark contrast to how the Democratic Party has approached the coronavirus outbreak. Right now, the White House is slow-walking the response and downplaying the scope of the problem to secure the president’s political standing in an election year. In official statements and on national news channels, President Trump has told Americans that there’s nothing to worry about, contradicting experts in his administration. He has condemned estimates of the virus’s lethality as a “hoax,” and his allies have attacked the C.D.C. as part of the “deep state” threatening Trump’s power.

Democrats could use their House majority to hold regular news conferences bolstering expert opinion; they could critique and criticize the president on television and other media outlets; they could use their oversight power to make the administration answer for its conduct. In the wake of President Trump’s acquittal on charges of obstruction and contempt of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would focus on health care for the rest of the year. Here, in Trump’s dangerous response to coronavirus, is a crisis tailor-made for that strategy.

But the party and its leaders are silent, and they are squandering a chance to draw a powerful contrast with the president. There are no referees in politics — Democrats won’t get points for not “politicizing” the situation. What they will do is sacrifice an opportunity, in the middle of an election year, to show Americans just how unfit Trump is for office."

Jamelle Bouie, NY Times