Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (36 page)

During phase two, vulnerable people should remain at home and those living with them should be careful to isolate from them within the home. People should still maximize physical distance from others, and social settings of more than fifty people should be avoided unless social distancing can be practiced. Nonessential travel can resume. Telework would still be encouraged and common areas in workplaces should still be closed. Schools, day cares, and camps could be opened. Visits to senior care facilities and hospitals should be prohibited. Large venues—restaurants, movie theaters, sporting venues, and places of worship—can operate by observing moderate physical distance protocols. Gyms can operate under strict physical distancing and sanitation protocols, and bars may open “with diminished standing-room occupancy, where applicable and appropriate.”
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Under phase three, vulnerable individuals could go back out in public but must practice physical distancing. Visits to hospitals and nursing homes could resume, though people who interact with patients and residents must diligently practice hygiene. Unrestricted staffing of work sites could resume. Restaurants, movie theaters, sporting venues, and places of worship could now operate under limited physical distancing protocols. Bars could operate with increased standing-room occupancy.

President Trump's approach to reopening the economy was balanced, seeking to reignite growth without reexposing Americans to unnecessary risk. But there's no satisfying the left—because they don't want to be satisfied. Never weighing Trump's actions fairly, they reflexively oppose everything he does, and they were true to form here as well—as Trump was adhering to the scientists' guidance, Nancy Pelosi dismissed him as a science denier. Why anyone pays attention to this hyperpartisan attack rhetoric is a mystery to me. For every Trump action, they seem to have a pre-crafted denunciation just waiting to drop. They are destructive agents incapable of contributing solutions to the nation's problems.

The left was determined to keep the economy closed regardless of the damage it was causing the very people whose interests they pretend to represent. As unemployment skyrocketed due to the shutdown, they showed shocking disregard for the plight of American workers who were increasingly anxious about how they'd pay the next month's rent. New York governor Andrew Cuomo cavalierly dismissed desperate people protesting the shutdown, saying, “If you want to go to work, go take the job as an essential worker. Do it tomorrow.”
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AOC did her part, calling for a national boycott in which Americans would categorically refuse to go to work.
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Meanwhile, as the Democrats were delaying Republican attempts to replenish depleted emergency funds for small businesses, Queen Pelosi released a video of herself showing off the gourmet ice cream collection in her deluxe refrigerator-freezer.
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The Democrats' primary focus before the general election was on destroying Trump. In their minds they had no choice. Impeachment had backfired, and Trump was flying high before the virus fell into their laps like a political gift from the gods. They had to capitalize on it and cripple Trump enough to defeat him in November.

Never forget the Democrats' abominable behavior when they parade themselves as the party of compassion. I've always told you that they are the opposite, and they vindicated me again.

President Trump's masterful leadership during this entire timeline
shows his instincts as incredibly superior to his partisan, opportunistic critics. Ten days after the first known case in the United States, he instituted the travel ban on China. Then he instituted the first quarantine in more than fifty years, followed by subsequent travel bans. It is incalculable how many more Americans would have contracted the virus and died had he not done so. Remember that Joe Biden called the travel ban “hysterical, xenophobic, and fearmongering.” Following these crucial actions, President Trump implemented the largest and fastest medical mobilization in the history of mankind. Democrats were too busy impeaching him to even pay attention.

Meanwhile, Democrats made the deadliest decisions in this entire saga. Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a directive on March 25 that nursing homes must take in COVID-19 patients, followed by Governor Tom Wolf's same decision in Pennsylvania on March 29, followed by Governor Phil Murphy in New Jersey on April 6, Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan on April 15, and Governor Gavin Newsom in California on April 24.

You might think the spread of a pandemic would provoke the media to temporarily drop their constant Trump bashing and inform the American public about the relevant facts needed to protect their health. But you'd be wrong. As the coronavirus spread, the media marched in lockstep with the Democrats, reporting the story through the warped prism of attacking Trump. “Let's Call It Trumpvirus,” declared
New York Times
columnist Gail Collins on February 26, following that headline with the subhead “If you're feeling awful, you know who to blame.”
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“Trump Makes Us Ill,” wrote her fellow
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd three days later.
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New York Times
columnist Bret Stephens labeled the coronavirus “Trump's ‘Chernobyl.' ”
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The
New Yorker
graced their cover with a drawing of Trump screaming with a medical face mask around his eyes.
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The media's amnesia is unbelievable—they themselves systematically downplayed the virus for months after the outbreak. Here's just a sample of the early coverage:

• “Why we should be skeptical of the Chinese coronavirus quarantine.”—
  Washington Post
  , January 24, 2020
  
• “Don't worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu.”—
  BuzzFeed
  , January 29, 2020
  
• “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.”—
  Vox
  (now-deleted tweet), January 29, 2020
  
• “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.”—
  Washington Post
  , February 1, 2020
  
• “Who Says It's Not Safe to Travel to China?”—
  New York Times
  , February 5, 2020
  
• “Coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat.”—
  Daily Beast
  , February 7, 2020
  
• “Coronavirus is not going to cause a major issue in the United States.”—Dr. David Agus,
  CBS This Morning Saturday
  , February 8, 2020
  
• “The risk [of coronavirus in America] is low. The risk, however, for the flu is through the roof.”—Dr. Jennifer Caudle,
  CNN Newsroom
  , February 15, 2020
  
• “So if you're freaked out at all about the coronavirus, you should be more concerned about the flu.”—Anderson Cooper, CNN, March 4, 2020
  

Once the virus's impact became undeniable, the blame-Trump media brigade changed course and decided the outbreak was a historic catastrophe caused by Trump. Because they believed the deeper the crisis was, the more damage it would do to the president. Shockingly, many of
them sounded like cheerleaders for the virus. MSNBC host Nicole Wallace claimed the virus could have a “silver lining” because it caused “all of the president's sins from his first three years to catch up with him.”
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They'd even show contempt for the American people and denigrate our whole country when it was useful for bashing Trump. Referring to media reports that Trump once referred to certain places as “sh*thole countries,”
GQ Magazine
's Julia Ioffe asked, “Who's the sh*thole country now?” while retweeting a report that America had the world's highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases.
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It's like the media was trying to prove me right that they're a purely destructive force for the country.

The coronavirus crisis came at just the right time for the media mob, because they were in desperate need of a new line of attack on the president. They had failed in two separate efforts to remove Trump from office—once through the Russian collusion hoax and once through the appalling impeachment on the Ukraine hoax. The coronavirus outbreak presented a third opportunity to get rid of Trump, this time by making him unelectable in 2020 by blaming the virus on him.

And the mob went all in. An analysis of the first hundred days of coronavirus-related stories on the
Washington Post
's front page showed that negative stories about Trump outnumbered positive ones by an incredible 25–1 ratio. “Trump's error-filled speech rattled rather than reassured” and “70 days of denial, delays and dysfunction” were typical attacks—and mind you, these were supposedly news stories, not opinion columns—while the only two positive stories did not even focus on the president but on Dr. Anthony Fauci and Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.
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The
Post
also argued that the economic damage of the virus shutdown somehow diminished Trump's previous stellar economic record, claiming, “The Coronavirus crisis is exposing how the economy was not as strong as it seemed.”
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The get-Trump strategy was clear in the media's hysterical response to the China travel ban. Citing critics warning that travel bans “are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people,” the
Atlantic
warned that Trump might now “double down
on xenophobic suspicions.”
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CNN also worried that the ban would have the “backfire” effect of “stigmatizing countries and ethnicities.”
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Apparently, travel bans are politically incorrect, and as always, political correctness takes priority over everything else for the media, including even Americans' health and safety. Trump's later travel ban on Europe was harder to portray as being racist, but the media attacked it anyway, with CNBC reporting, “Trump's travel ban on many European countries is ‘politically motivated,' analysts say.”
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The media's racism accusations reached a comical extreme. Trump haters were outraged when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the virus the “Wuhan coronavirus,” referring to the Chinese city where the outbreak began. They were also crazed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's tweet referring to the “Chinese coronavirus.” “Academics have ranted the practice leads to stigma and racism,” reported the
Guardian
.
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Ferreting out the real important news as a deadly virus was spreading worldwide, CNN published an article denouncing the “lack of diversity” in a photo of officials briefing President Trump on the pandemic.
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When Congressman Paul A. Gosar announced on Twitter that he would self-quarantine after having been exposed to someone who had tested positive for the “Wuhan Virus,” the race-obsessed media mob went ballistic. Apparently unaware that the mainstream media had been using the term “Wuhan virus” for weeks, MSNBC's Chris Hayes called Gosar's tweet “astoundingly gross,” and David Gura called it “racist.”
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The media also exploded when Trump referred to the coronavirus as a “foreign virus”—which of course it is. CNN's Jim Acosta raised the specter of “xenophobia,”
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while
New Yorker
staff writer Susan Glasser took offense at Trump's “militaristic, nationalistic language.”
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Amazingly, after China somehow birthed this virus, covered it up, and lied about it, the American media viewed it as an abomination to talk about its origins in China.

When Trump justifiably denounced the Democrats' politicization of the virus as “their new hoax,” the media widely misreported Trump as having said the virus itself was a hoax. During a presidential press
conference on the virus,
Daily Caller
writer Chuck Ross noted that reporters asked Trump two questions about his use of the term “hoax” and asked no questions of the assembled experts about how the disease might spread through the United States. “This press conference is insane,” Ross said.
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Ross was right. Trump's daily press conferences were an object lesson in media bias. While the president and his experts tried to inform the American people about the virus's trajectory, the government's economic assistance efforts, and prospects for reopening the economy, many reporters were busy trying to pin the blame for the virus directly on Trump. In one exchange,
New York
magazine correspondent Olivia Nuzzi asked Trump, “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be re-elected?”
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Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer criticized Nuzzi's question on Twitter, noting that it was designed purely to “provoke,” not to provide any useful information to viewers. Showing the class and restraint typical of the mob, Nuzzi replied by tweeting at Fleischer, “Oh shut the f*ck up.”
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Reporters in the briefings were completely indistinguishable from Resistance activists. They developed a strategy of trying to drive a wedge between Trump and his medical experts, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, by encouraging the doctors to contradict the president or disagree with his policies or actions. At an April 13, 2020, press conference, Dr. Fauci tried to clear the air after the media attacked Trump over a comment Fauci had made indicating that more lives would have been saved if mitigation efforts had been enacted earlier. Fauci explained he was not accusing Trump of a late response—in fact, he said, Trump enacted strong mitigation measures after the first time Fauci recommended them. Robbed of another get-Trump narrative, a reporter asked Fauci if he was providing that explanation voluntarily or if Trump put him up to it. Disgusted, Fauci put his hands up and said, “Everything I do is voluntarily—please, don't even imply that.”
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The press conference enraged CNN, which displayed these captions on the screen: