Trump's COVID Hobson's Choice

When the Fauci diary hit the airwaves, and it became clear that, beyond being a narcissistic celebrity-whore, the good doctor had been lying through his teeth in so many of his public pronouncements—or lack thereof—the Fauciphiles who are still out there came forward in lockstep, as the left always does, with a new retort. It is the simple question: “And who was president in 2020?” This is followed by discussions of how President Trump “botched” the COVID pandemic response.

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The problem with countering these misleading statements is that, because the left is utterly consumed with a hatred for a president not seen since the Slave-Holding Confederacy’s disdain for Lincoln, to do so makes one a “Trumpkin” or a “MAGA cult member.” The usual tropes. (At least no “Nazi” this time…yet.)

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But there are several things to consider. First is the knee-jerk resistance to anything Trump says or does by Democrats—the true cult these days—who, if Trump cured cancer, would decry his cruel war on oncologists.

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Let’s recall a few events lost in the historical revisionism of the left. From early on, it became clear—even if the likely lab leak was not confirmed—that the virus had come out of China. So what did Trump, caring more about Americans’ health than the convenience and feelings of foreigners, do? On January 31, 2020, he issued the China COVID travel restriction. It suspended entry for most foreign nationals who had been physically present in mainland China during the preceding 14 days. It was not even a complete ban on all travel from China: U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and certain family members were exempt.

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And yet…that same day, then-candidate Joe Biden criticized Trump for “hysteria and xenophobia—hysterical xenophobia—and fearmongering” while discussing the coronavirus at an Iowa campaign event. The next day, he tweeted that the COVID crisis required science rather than Trump’s “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fearmongering.”

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Then, on February 24, 2020, as the pandemic—which originated in China—was escalating, Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco’s Chinatown and encouraged people to visit, trying to counter the collapse in business caused by coronavirus fears. She said she felt “safe and sound” there, while local reporting described the purpose of her visit as showing that Chinatown was safe.

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So who was playing politics with Americans’ lives regarding coronavirus from its beginning? The answer is self-evident. But you will have to do a Mariana Trench-proof deep-sea submersible dive down the media memory hole to find this lost bit of narrative.

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And then there was St. Anthony of The Science. Trump is accused of “downplaying” the virus and thus “ignoring science.” But what did the man who declared himself the voice of “the science” have to say during the early stages?

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On January 21, 2020, the day the first confirmed U.S. case was announced, Fauci told Newsmax: “This is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”

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Five days later, on January 26, Fauci again said: “The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States.”

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And remarkably, as late as February 29, 2020, Fauci was asked on NBC whether Americans should change their habits—going to malls, movies, gyms, etc. He answered: “No. Right now at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”

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And yet, just eleven days later, Fauci changed his tune when he appeared before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on March 11, 2020. Asked what Americans should expect, Fauci warned: “It’s going to get worse.” He also made a much more alarming comparison with influenza: “The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. This has a mortality rate of 10 times that.” (A claim we now know was an abject lie, for although he publicly declared COVID to have a two percent mortality rate, in his own diary he privately admitted it was actually 0.2 percent.)

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Now, what was Trump saying at the same time? On January 22, 2020, after the first confirmed U.S. case, Trump was asked whether he was worried about a pandemic. He replied: “No, not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China … It’s going to be just fine.”

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Then, on January 30, he said: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment.”

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However, by March 13, 2020, Trump had officially declared COVID a “national emergency.”

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If we overlay the White House’s level of concern and sense of urgency regarding COVID’s threat with Fauci’s, the two track almost perfectly. And why? Because Fauci was, at the time, the man whom both the White House and the media that opposed Trump saw as the go-to guy when it came to recommending COVID-response protocols. So, in fact, Trump very much did listen to “the science”—counsel that came from a man who was offered up by a fawning press as being synonymous with pandemic wisdom.

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Setting aside the sheer mendacity, anyone who is not trapped in an ideological straitjacket—or too proud or embarrassed to admit that they were not just wrong, but astoundingly so—knows that the good doctor’s recommendations, from masking and “immunizing” children to lockdowns, vaccine mandates, school closings, discrediting herd immunity, and dismissing viable alternative treatments, did far more damage to the nation than the disease itself. But, of course, at the time Trump could not have known this. He was, after all, doing what the left claims it is all about: putting science over wishful thinking.

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But let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say that from early on Trump suspected this disease was more dangerous than Fauci was telling us. So let’s say he ignored Fauci’s downplaying statements and did, in fact, advise the very same protocols that would eventually be put in place later, when the narrative suddenly and inexplicably changed from nothing to see here to the next Black Death. So let us imagine that in January 2020 Trump had unilaterally recommended closing schools and small businesses, lockdowns, masks—the works. What would the media be saying even today?

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We know what they would say. They would be calling the economic collapse that took place on the back of these inane policies the “Trump market collapse.” They would declare it a self-inflicted depression because Trump carelessly “ignored the science” and didn’t listen to Fauci, who had said there was nothing to worry about. It would be held up as proof that Trump was reckless, dictatorial, and “anti-science.”

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So then let’s say March rolled around, and now Fauci and his media acolytes were all touting the pandemic as a deadly emergency and calling for lockdowns, closed schools, social distancing, mask and vaccine mandates, and all the rest that eventually became a roar. But at the same time, Trump looked at the data and came to the same conclusion as many of us who were not caught up in the pandemic-panic media hype—and who were censored for our efforts—that coronavirus was not an equal threat to everyone, but overwhelmingly endangered a narrower at-risk cohort of the elderly and immunocompromised.

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By then, Fauci had become the face of the pandemic response, feted by the media as the man who would “get us through this.” People were creating social-media pages in his honor, and signs reading “Thank you, Dr. Fauci” were popping up across the land. His political influence, fueled by his own media personality cult, was enormous, and thus Trump and the White House adopted many of his recommendations as federal guidance.

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It is important to remember that at that time neither Fauci nor Trump had the legal authority to lock down America. Fauci, as head of NIAID, was, however, an advising member of the White House COVID task force who strongly advocated mitigation measures. It was then up to governors and state and local health officials to exercise their own legal authority to impose the actual lockdowns and most mask mandates.

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In support of these mandates, however, Fauci did more than just “advise.” He was front and center. His diary boasts of his convincing mayors like de Blasio and governors like Newsom to shut down their respective city and state. Fauci made somewhere on the order of several hundred media appearances in 2020—roughly 250 to 300 by available tallies—and more than 350 appearances had been logged by mid-2021, not even counting many of the early White House briefings. He was worshipped by a media and entertainment industry hostile to Trump to the point that he said, with a straight face, that to oppose him was to oppose science itself.

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So, with this media and political backdrop, let us imagine that the Trump administration, suspecting overkill, had not issued Fauci’s recommendations or, even more sacrilegiously, had publicly opposed them. Well, from March to May 2020 alone, some 125,000 Americans supposedly died of COVID—the true number may never be known, given the tainted sample when it comes to distinguishing how many died from COVID as opposed to merely with COVID. Had Trump not climbed aboard the Fauci science train and instead publicly challenged him—and given both the media’s hatred of Trump and Fauci’s love for the spotlight, it would have been very public—Trump would have been branded by the press as “the man who stubbornly resisted science and now has the blood of 125,000 Americans on his hands.”

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There was no winning scenario for Trump here. In many ways, intentional or not, COVID was the perfect psyop against an opposition president they despise who, until blue-state governors especially—as well as leftist governments worldwide—shut down the national and global economies respectively, had been presiding over a very successful term of office, despite Democrats’ attempts to thwart the will of the people through sham investigations and impeachments…because they believe in “democracy.”

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When writing about history, one of the questions I always ask myself about subjects such as the dropping of the atomic bombs is: What would I have done had I known only what they knew back then? The same applies to Trump when it comes to his COVID response. He literally followed what passed for “the science.” And for this he is vilified as a president who “botched COVID.”

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I ask anyone to tell me what they would have done between January and May 2020. Would you have listened to Fauci and put out recommendations and guidelines that did little to prevent the virus’ spread but did much to ruin lives, businesses, and futures for millions? Or would you have defied Fauci by recommending that the country remain open, only to be vilified by both politicized scientists and their TDS-infected media megaphones as the man who killed more than a hundred thousand people through his ignorance and resistance to “science”?

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A Hobson’s choice indeed.

Brad is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. His latest book, A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific, will be released in February 2027 and is available now for preoder.