Trump 'Was Born' to Fight Coronavirus, His Response 'Almost Perfect,' Presidential Historian Says

Conservative commentator and presidential historian Doug Wead praised President Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic, describing him as "born for this moment" because of his unique leadership qualities that defy political ideology.

Wead, speaking with Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney Monday morning, was asked if he believed the Trump administration will enforce "more dramatic action" in terms of restricting freedom of movement and association among Americans. The Inside Trump's White House author compared Trump's response to Woodrow Wilson's. Wilson, who contracted the Spanish Flu in 1918, scrambled to hide his diagnosis and "misinform" the American people, Wead explained. He said Trump's handling of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has been "almost perfect" because he avoids mistakes that conservative and liberal presidents in past epidemics have made throughout U.S. history.

Wead argued that "transparent" Trump has embraced both the full power of the federal government and the private sector's pursuit of vaccines in trying to curb the coronavirus' spread.

"What he's doing right now, from the standpoint of history, is almost perfect," Wead said Monday on Fox Business. "It looks like he was born for this moment. For one thing, he's transparent by nature. He gets into office and opens the files on the Warren Commission and UFOs and the assassination of Kennedy. When they criticized him for the phone call to Ukraine, he made that public. We hear what he's thinking in real time."

"Woodrow Wilson didn't tell the American people anything and actually gave them misinformation which added to the crisis," said Wead, who has interviewed six presidents and several First Families. "Donald Trump seems to be beyond ideology. A conservative president may hesitate before putting the full weight of the federal government behind this. And a Democrat president might hesitate before allowing the private sector to become involved—Obama, as you know, had all these regulations against private clinics who are now trying the vaccines."

Wead described Trump as a uniting force, referencing Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin's recent cooperation to craft an economic relief package to curb the coronavirus' hurt on the economy.

"With Trump, you've got a man born for this moment. He unites Walmart and Target and Pelosi and Mnuchin and he's willing to use the government and he's willing to turn loose the private sector. He wants to do good, that desire to be a good president, I think it's a healthy thing in spite of all the criticism," Wead concluded.

Other political commentators, including the New Yorker's David Remnick, have criticized the president's "mishandling" of the coronavirus crisis. In a piece published Sunday, Remnick compared Trump to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had "suffered the consequences of an earlier epidemic [polio] and derived from it a code of empathy and endurance." That is unlike Trump, Remnick said, a president who responded to the COVID-19 health crisis by trying to "minimize it, downplaying the realities of the new coronavirus while bragging about what an 'amazing' job he's been doing. He squandered the most valuable resource in a pandemic: time."

Wead is the author of several books of Trump and past presidents, including, Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency and Game of Thorns: The Inside Story of Hillary Clinton's Failed Campaign and Donald Trump's Winning Strategy.