Left Hand, Meet Right Hand (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I’ve been trying to lay off national politics in this space, but while the Democratic Party seems dead set on crushing my soul, Republicans seem determined to turn me into the living embodiment of ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Since this column will appear before Super Tuesday, I’m going to try to hold out some hope that Democrats don’t actually tumble for Bernie Sanders. Right now I want to talk about the mixed messages about the new strain of coronavirus that Americans are receiving from their president, his administration, its friends in Congress and conservative media figures.

Last week began with a selloff on Wall Street after alarming weekend reports that COVID-19, the newly identified virus, had surged in locales as far-flung as Italy, Iran and South Korea. President Trump, as is his wont, took to Twitter to assure Americans that the virus “is very much under control in the USA” and to observe that the stock market was “starting to look very good to me!” even as the Dow Jones was losing 3.5% of its value.

Monday’s 1,000-point drop in the Dow grew to more than 3,200 by the end of trading on Thursday — more than 11%. Perhaps that’s because Tuesday’s message from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention was somewhat different from the president’s. The CDC said COVID-19 could create “severe” disruptions to our daily lives, even as the president was tweet-blaming the “Fake News” and Democrats for “doing everything possible” to stoke fear — “including panicking markets, if possible.”

But even Americans who wouldn’t listen to a Democrat or the mainstream media if they were paid would have no idea what to make of COVID-19.

In the lead-up to the presidential reassurances, our own U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton took a different position. He suggested — while admitting that he had not a smidge of evidence — that the virus could somehow be connected to the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, a facility in the massive Chinese city where the outbreak was first detected. In an appearance on Fox News, he declared with confidence but without evidence that “This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market,” although that seems to be the working theory of actual epidemiologists.

Rush Limbaugh didn’t pick up on the lab-created biothreat angle. Instead he joined Trump in accusing “the media’’ of weaponizing the virus to hurt the president. But he took minimizing the danger a giant step further by dismissing the new disease as just “the common cold.”

The common cold is caused by a variety of coronavirus strains, but COVID-19 is a new strain that is more serious and far more likely to be fatal. I would never wish illness on anyone, but you’d think that a man being treated for advanced lung cancer after insisting for decades that smoking was safe would be cautious about giving medical advice to his trusting audience. Nope. “I’m dead right on this,” Limbaugh said.

Tucker Carlson offered another theory entirely on his Fox News show: We’re on the verge of a deadly pandemic because Americans have been too welcoming to foreigners. “Wokeness is a cult. They would let you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength,” Carlson said.

Carlson made this pronouncement a week after the State Department allowed 14 cruise ship passengers — Americans, not foreigners — who tested positive for the virus to return to the United States on the same flight from Japan as uninfected Americans, against the specific advice of the CDC. Wokeness indeed.

President Trump took the threat from COVID-19 seriously enough to request $2.5 billion in emergency funds to respond to the spreading epidemic. It’s a fraction of the funding cuts his administration has made to disease security programs, including disbanding the global health security team whose job was to prepare for and respond to epidemics and pandemics. Vice President Pence was named to manage the emergency because someone had to fill that void.

The coronavirus isn’t the only issue in which the administration can’t seem to get everyone singing from the same hymnal. Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff and director of the Office of Management & Budget, recently declared that the U.S. is “desperate” for immigrants to fuel economic growth.

This is a belief widely held among economists who see our declining birth rate as an ominous economic indicator. But it is completely contrary to the usual rhetoric coming from Mulvaney’s boss — “I’m sorry, we’re full.” — and the bill introduced by Sen. Cotton and endorsed by Trump, which would slash legal immigration in half.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.