So very REKT! Brit Hume puts the media on BLAST for the 'awful mess' they made of the Trump/Ventilator story

If you’ve watched any of Trump’s daily briefings you know he spends a good amount of time talking about how many ventilators we have, that we are the leader in building them, providing them. Seriously, it’s like we have ventilators coming out of our … armpits.

Or something.

And the reason he’s doing that is, of course, to inform us, but also to slam the media for attacking him early on about a lack of ventilators.

Brit Hume said it far better.

They really made an awful mess of this. https://t.co/F3GSOzLjSi

— Brit Hume (@brithume) April 20, 2020

From National Review:

This also meant that much of the press coverage get it exactly backward. The media portrayed as an inherent failure the fact that the administration gave states a portion of their requests. (“Trump sent Arizona a fraction of the ventilators it sought,” a Vox headline said. “Republicans still framed it as a big win.”) In reality, not giving governors what they wanted was integral to the success of the overall operation.

If, for instance, the administration had tried to fulfill New York’s initial stated need for 40,000 ventilators, everything would have gone out the door to New York, and for no good reason. There was immense political pressure to send the ventilators anyway, although it would have been a mistake. “In the moment, that wasn’t 100 percent clear,” says the senior administration official. “There was a lot of pressure to send them all, because the pressure is basically, ‘How is it going to look if you’re holding in a stockpile and people need them?’”

None of this is to say there weren’t real needs in New York and New Jersey. Some 8,000 ventilators were sent out from the reserve, many of them to those two places, which were at times operating on very thin margins.