We all know that Democrats, in the media and politics, lie about Trump.  The most famous is the assertion that President Trump called white supremacists "fine people."  That hoax's reach perfectly exemplifies the old American saying that "falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on."  Even though it's been repeatedly, and definitively, debunked, myriad people will state with fervor that Trump is a racist who loves neo-Nazis.

With coronavirus in the air and an election looming, the same culprits behind the "fine people" hoax are now trying to tar Trump with a different hoax.  This one is the claim that he and John Bolton, while the latter was his national security adviser, dissolved the department in charge of dealing with possible pandemics.

Enter Tim Morrison, one of the witnesses who testified against President Trump during the impeachment proceedings.  According to Paul Mirengoff, who also has never been able to warm up to Trump:

Morrison was present during the telephone call in which Trump discussed with Ukraine's president investigating the 2016 election and the Bidens. He testified about that call, saying he didn't find it improper.

He also testified that Gordon Sondland told a Ukrainian official that the country would probably get military assistance unfrozen if the government announced investigations into Democrats. Morrison testified he heard this directly from Sondland and that he knew Sondland talked to Trump about half a dozen times this summer as the White House froze aid to Ukraine. Morrison also said Sondland told him he was acting at Trump's request.

Morrison resigned from the NSC right around the time he gave this testimony.

Morrison, then, is not an apologist for Trump. He's an ally of Bolton, his boss at the NSC whom Trump has attacked. Reportedly Morrison has been called "Bolton without a mustache."

Morrison may not like Trump, but he's not going to let a slander against Trump stand.  Instead, he explains that Trump didn't disband the pandemic preparedness organization in the government.  Instead, he made it more efficient by consolidating the various knowledge groups so they were working together:

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration's second term, the NSC's staff "had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people." That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

[snip]

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government's expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

Summed up, Trump has an active pandemic response staff, it's up to the job, and he's getting the best advice possible from people who know what they're doing.

There's a pretty good rule of thumb to use when reading negative stories about Trump in the mainstream media or listening to criticisms about him from his political opponents.  Nine times out of ten...no, make that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you should assume that the story is an outright lie or, at best, a partial truth that functions as a lie.

Reagan's "trust but verify" dictum is no longer operative here.  Instead, it's "distrust and research."  If you're taking the mainstream media and the Democrat Party at face value, you are almost invariably misinformed.