The Atlantic: The Rank Hypocrisy of Trump’s Ebola Tweets
“…To recap, from 2014 to 2016, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone experienced the largest Ebola epidemic of all time, infecting more than 28,000 people and killing more than 11,000. Many American health workers flew to the affected countries to help. Two of them — [the physician Kent] Brantly and the nurse Nancy Writebol — became infected themselves in July 2015, and were airlifted back from Liberia to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Both recovered. But their arrival sparked fear, especially among those who believed Ebola to be a super-contagious virus that would rapidly spread through the country. … And no single person fanned those flames with more enthusiasm than [Donald] Trump. … To be clear, if Trump had wielded presidential power at the time and had acted on his sentiments, Brantly and Writebol would be dead. Hence the gross hypocrisy of retweeting a celebration of Brantly’s successful return and treatment when he tried to oppose it. … In fairness to Trump, his administration’s response to the current Ebola outbreak, now entering its second year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been more responsible than his earlier rhetoric…” (Yong, 8/3).

Mother Jones: 5 Years Ago, Trump Said an Ebola Doctor Should ‘Suffer the Consequences!’
“President Donald Trump on Saturday retweeted a message from evangelical leader Franklin Graham celebrating the recovery of Kent Brantly, a doctor who contracted Ebola five years ago while fighting a devastating outbreak of the disease in Liberia. … The heroism of Brantly, Writebol, and the people who saved their lives is absolutely worth celebrating. But it’s a remarkable about-face for the president. Trump, who at the time was not yet a Republican presidential candidate, spent days stoking fears about the threat he (wrongly) claimed the evacuation posed to people in the United States. He demanded that the Obama administration ‘stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S.’ and declared that people who fight deadly diseases overseas ‘must suffer the consequences!’…” (Schulman, 8/3).