Posted on 03/31/2020 7:11:15 AM PDT by SJackson
In mid-March, as America became the nation with the most cases of the coronavirus (if you trust the Chinese statistics), Trump declared himself “a wartime president,” fighting “an invisible enemy,” which he described as the most dangerous enemy of all.[1] But anyone paying attention to the political battlefield recently knows that there are actually two wars engulfing the country, posing dire threats to its future.
The second - visible - war was launched four years earlier by Democrats and their deep state allies to prevent Trump from being elected, then to sabotage his presidency through a vaunted “resistance,” and finally to remove him from office through several failed partisan impeachment attempts.
The first principal of psychological warfare is to attack the moral character and credibility of the adversary’s commander-in-chief. If their leader is convincingly portrayed as being driven by ulterior motives, which have nothing to do with the common good or winning the war, or worse as being a compulsive liar, he is effectively crippled in the task of mobilizing a united front in the war. Most people understand this, which is why there are so many calls for “unity” and working together in America’s current war with the invisible enemy.
Dealing with a viral epidemic is a complex matter for any leader. It requires a balancing act between reassurance and caution. Avoiding panic is one priority; sounding sufficient alarm so that potential targets will take precautions is another; and the two can obviously be in conflict. That’s why in wartime if the nation’s leader mis-speaks, or makes mistakes in assessing the battlefield, his countrymen who are dependent for their survival on his leadership normally rally around him, and hope he will do better. The last thing they do is exaggerate his errors, and do everything in their power to undermine his effectiveness as their leader.
Not so with Trump. The visible war to destroy his presidency by destroying the man has continued unabated throughout this crisis. Trump’s first action against the invisible enemy was his decision in January to ban all travel from China, the epicenter of the contagion. This life-saving move was immediately denounced by his chief political rival, former vice-president Joe Biden: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia,… and fearmongering.”[2]
Biden’s first presidential campaign ad followed in March, featuring this message: “Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it. Donald Trump didn't create the coronavirus, but he is the one who called it a ‘hoax,’ who eliminated the pandemic response team, and who let the virus spread unchecked across America. He should stop talking and start listening to the medical experts.”[3] This was Biden’s response to the fact that Trump had shut down travel from China, declared a state of emergency held daily hour-and-a-half briefings at the White House flanked by his scientific team to reassure, caution and guide the public in dealing with the virus and its spread. Every claim Biden made, moreover, was demonstrably false. Trump did not call the virus a “hoax”; he called the campaign to discredit him during the crisis a continuation of the “Russia hoax.” He did not eliminate the pandemic response team; and his chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci is on the record saying that whenever he and the president have disagreed on a matter affecting the virus, the president deferred to the doctor.[4]
When infections reached 100,000 making America the nation with the most cases in the world (assuming one could trust the numbers coming out of China), Trump’s political rival Hillary Clinton tweeted: “He did promise ‘America First.’”[5]
This was a reference to the slogan Trump used to defeat her in the 2016 election – it was, he had said, time to put America First. In using the phrase in this context, Hillary not only mocked the American victims of the virus but insinuated that Trump was responsible for the epidemic. She also denigrated Trump’s remarkably successful effort to revive America’s economy, restore its military, secure its borders, boost the nation’s confidence, and provide a leadership that put the safety and prosperity of Americans first.
In case anyone was uncertain of the priorities of Democrat leaders as to which war and which enemy was of primary importance, Nancy Pelosi was there to remind them. In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on March 29, she accused the president of being responsible for the crisis. “His denial at the beginning was deadly. His delaying of getting equipment to where it is needed is deadly….When did the president know about this, and what did he know?....That’s for an after-action review.”[6] Quoting the key question in the Nixon impeachment inquiry was a not so subtle warning of what a new impeachment inquiry would look like if Democrats retained control of the House the following November.
Like Biden’s, Pelosi’s slanders had no basis in fact. The lack of masks, for example, was the result of the Obama administration’s failure to replenish the nation’s stockpile, which he and Biden had used up t during the H1N1 epidemic and failed to replace. The claim that Trump was in denial at the beginning of the crisis is belied by his swift ban on travel to China and the distortion of his remark that the Democrats’ attacks on him – not the virus – were an updated version of the Russia hoax.
A more pertinent question was what were Pelosi and the Democrats focused on as the virus spread from China outward and then to America in December and January 2018. Answer: led by Pelosi, Democrats were entirely focused on impeaching Trump on a partisan basis, and causing the entire nation to focus on that objective as well.
Here’s the timeline:
On December 18, the Democrats in the House impeached the president without a single Republican vote. During the process the House prosecutors defended the unprecedented speed with which they drove the process as a matter of “national security” alleging that Trump had tried to rig the elections once and would likely do so again. For the same reason, Rep. Adam Schiff who was running the prosecution said the 130 million voters scheduled to cast their ballots in the coming elections could not be trusted to decide the president’s fate, which was better kept in the hands of Schiff and the 232 Democrats in the House.[7]
Then, in an unexpected move, Pelosi refused to send the impeachment articles to the Senate for trial. A month later, she changed her mind, sending them on January 15. This was only four days after China’s state media reported the first death from the virus in Wuhan. Five days later the first U.S. case occurred in a man who had traveled to the infected city. On January 23, the Chinese government sealed off Wuhan to stop the virus’ spread, even as the House prosecutors opened their case for the removal of President Trump.
On January 30, the World Health Organization declared a “global health emergency” because of the dangers posed by the virus. The next day Trump declared a state of emergency and imposed a ban on travel from China, which Democrats opposed as “racist” and “anti-immigrant.”
Five days later, Trump delivered his State of the Union message to a joint session of Congress. In it he said, “Protecting Americans' health also means fighting infectious diseases. We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the Coronavirus outbreak in China. My Administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.” When Trump’s remarks were over, Speaker Pelosi, who was standing on the podium behind him, tore up the official copy of his speech in front the television cameras, as a gesture of protest and contempt.
The next day the Senate voted to acquit Trump. It was only then that Pelosi’s party finally took up the subject of the virus in the House Foreign Affairs sub-committee on Asia.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the war on Trump – a war that for most Democrats takes precedence over the war on the virus, is how it shapes the attitudes of the media elites who should know better and who in other circumstances would have been critics not allies of self-absorbed, ethics-free Machiavellians like Nancy Pelosi.
Andrew Sullivan is a talented and nuanced writer, who has written sharp and valuable critiques of the ideological left. But when it comes to Trump, Sullivan’s usually astute judgment succumbs to calamitous outbreaks of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In a recent cleverly titled article “Trapped in Trump’s Blind Spot,” Sullivan dismisses Trump’s attempt to find light at the end of the tunnel before the measures to contain the virus kill the economy and leave millions of Americans without jobs to go back to. There were reasons to question Trump’s timetable – he originally proposed Easter Sunday as the day the nation would come back to life. But he has already adjusted the deadline by a month, and it is hard to fault his intention in providing a stricken nation with a ray of hope.
But Sullivan will have none of this. To him, Trump is an egomaniacal menace with no interest in the public good or in anything but himself. The nation is trapped because the Democrats’ three-year seditious effort to overthrow him failed. Therefore, since he is still the president, “given the crisis, we have only one option. We need to listen to the experts, rely on governors, trust in Drs. Fauci and Birx, and do our bit. But we also have a more urgent patriotic task: to ignore this president until we can eventually rid ourselves of him. This is too grave a crisis to give him the respect he doesn’t deserve.” (Emphasis added).
In other words, no support for the nation’s leader in his fight against the invisible enemy that has laid the nation low. To Sullivan, Trump’s determination to defeat the virus and revive the economy is “explained entirely by Trump’s reliably rock-solid instinct to preserve himself and his own perceived interests over any kind of rational assessment of the public good, or any measure of internal consistency or coherence.”[8]
This is the typical giveaway that shows we are dealing with an irrational tic rather than a credible analysis. It’s a giveaway because it is refuted by facts so obvious that everyone not so deranged can see them. One would never know from this arrogant dismissal, for example, that while Obama and Clinton made themselves multi-millionaires by exploiting the high offices with which they were entrusted, Donald Trump is the only American president who has donated his entire $400,000 annual salary to the public good, or that he had just given $100,000 – his first quarter paycheck - to the federal government to fight the corona virus decimating his countrymen.
To reduce Trump to such a repulsive caricature one has to ignore how he has dedicated himself against all odds – and opposition across the spectrum - to reshaping America’s trade deals in order to end the fleecing of his fellow citizens to the tune of trillions of dollars over three presidencies. The fleecing was done by foreign powers who took advantage of the laziness of previous presidents both Democrat and Republican who didn’t care enough to make those deals fair for the citizens they were supposed to serve. Truth be told, as a politician dedicated to the public good, Trump has few if any modern presidential rivals.
Ana Navarro is a pundit for CNN, ABC and other anti-Trump channels. Shocked by the fact that one poll was reporting that 51% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the corona virus, while only 45% disapproved, Navarro wrote: “Who are these 51% of Americans who approve of the way this lying, narcissistic, science-denying, petty, partisan, infantile, intellectual wasteland, lame excuse for a President with the vocabulary of a 4 year-old (apologies to 4 year-olds), is mishandling this crisis?”[9]
This was far more typical of media anti-Trumpers. These attitudes led to widespread calls from Democrats like Joe Biden for the president to just “shut up” as a way of helping the fight against the virus. The consensus among the anti-Trump media was that the hour-and-a-half daily press conferences held by Trump and his scientific team were Trump substitutes for the political rallies he could no longer hold because of the nation’s lockdown, and should be terminated for that reason. On the other hand, when the Democrat governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo held similar hour-long pressers about the virus, the response of the CNN-MSNBC-NY Times-Washington Post anti-Trump media was that the virus had caused the unlikely rise of a new “political hero” and would be a contender to replace the inadequate Biden as the party’s 2020 nominee.[10]
Few things could be more telling in revealing the agenda that the anti-Trump Democrats considered more important, or the war that was closest to their hearts. As for the damage they inflicted on a stricken nation by their sabotage of its duly elected leader, that toll was still being counted.
David Horowitz is the author of the forthcoming Humanix book, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win.
Notes:
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/18/trump-administration-self-swab-coronavirus-tests-135590
[2] https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/19/neither-biden-nor-sanders-would-have-saved-american-lives-with-travel-bans-like-trump-did/
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/politics/biden-trump-coronavirus/index.html
[4] https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/03/24/the-truth-about-the-charge-that-trump-eliminated-white-house-pandemic-office-before-coronavirus/; https://thehill.com/homenews/media/489191-fauci-media-should-stop-pitting-me-against-trump
[5] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/489905-hillary-clinton-on-us-leading-coronavirus-cases-trump-did
[6] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/490043-pelosi-trumps-denial-delay-on-coronavirus-response-is-deadly
[7] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/24/dems_cant_take_the_chance_of_voters_deciding_2020_election.html
[8] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan-america-is-trapped-in-trumps-blind-spot.html
[9] https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/1243668659299631110
[10] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/politics/andrew-cuomo-polls/index.html
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Trump’s task in leading the country’s defense against the coronavirus pandemic has been made immeasurably more difficult by the Democrats’ disloyal attempts to undermine its commander-in-chief at every turn. These attacks are summed up in the absurd caricature Democrats have created of the president as a “pathological liar,” a “narcissist uninterested in anything but himself,” and “out of control,” “incompetent,” “bigoted,” “anti-scientific,” and of course an anti-immigrant racist. And, therefore, a threat to national security rather than its guardian. These attacks have been carried to such extremes that perfectly sensible measures adopted by governments all over the world, such as closing borders, are characterized as “racist” when enacted by him – and carried out in a particularly advantageous fashion, such as his ban on travel from China within days of the virus being designated a global health emergency by the World Health Organization.
Since Trump is a leader who relies on his instincts, a bold risk taker who is willing to buck opposition from all sides if he feels his instincts are right, but is also ready to correct course if his instincts prove wrong, he is an exceptionally easy target for hostile critics. He is particularly vulnerable in the midst of a crisis which calls for alarm and calm simultaneously - for a realistic assessment of the threat but also for a leader who can convincingly provide a basis for optimism to those dependent on him lest they succumb to panic and despair.
This balancing act is made far more difficult in an environment where basic facts are still unknown because of the failures of the CDC and previous administrations to prepare for such a pandemic. Trump’s antagonists have exploited these fault lines to maximum advantage in their campaign to destroy him, seizing on one element to the exclusion of others. When judgments are driven by irrational hatreds any outcome is possible. The victims of the malodorous judgments that follow from these hatreds are all Americans who are dependent on him, since he is and remains the duly elected leader of the country.
Thus, if Trump touts an untested anti-viral drug cocktail like hydroxychloroquine and zythromax, as a possible solution to the crisis, his detractors will find a scientific skeptic whose doubts can serve as a basis to accuse Trump of medical malpractice, or incompetence or dangerous confusion – even though the jury is still out on whether such a cocktail will actually work. Similarly, when Trump raises the possibility of lifting the cloud of the virus on a certain date, like Easter, to avoid an economic collapse and provide hope anew, his antagonists attack him as acting from self-serving motives on behalf of Wall Street and giant corporations which have become – verbally at least – the new enemies of a Marxified Democrat Party.
Or, more pointedly, if Trump seeks to calm a panicking public by saying the situation is “under control” – the innocent equivalent of “your government is on the case” – this is denounced as an irresponsible lie that shows Trump (as usual) doesn’t know what he is talking about and is only concerned with burnishing his image. As Trump’s presidential rival Joe Biden said in his first campaign ad:
Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it. Donald Trump didn't create the coronavirus, but he is the one who called it a ‘hoax,’ who eliminated the pandemic response team, and who let the virus spread unchecked across America. He should stop talking and start listening to the medical experts.[1]
These sentiments were hardly designed to instill confidence in the man who is the still the constitutionally appointed leader of the nation’s efforts to defeat the virus.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh responded to Biden’s vile attack by shifting attention to the political disaster to which Biden and the Democrats were contributing: “It used to be that Americans faced national adversity with unity,” Murtaugh observed, “but Joe Biden and his allies have abandoned that principle in favor of rank, despicable politics.”[2]
With a few notable exceptions, it is the leadership of the Democrat Party and its media allies who spread the falsehoods that Trump had dismissed the virus as a “hoax,” cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control, and failed to provide an adequate number of surgical masks and ventilators to hospitals and their staffs. The “hoax” charge was particularly absurd since Trump had closed the border with China in the face of Democrat slanders that the measure was unneeded and “racist,” or that Trump had declared a state of emergency making it the top priority of his presidency.[3] But that didn’t stop the disloyal Biden and his Democrat allies bent on advancing their own agendas, however destructive to their fellow citizens.
The scarcity of masks was the result of the failure of the Obama administration to replenish the nation’s mask stockpiles after depleting them in the course of the H1N1 and Ebola epidemics. It was also the Obama Administration which had sought multi-million dollar cuts in the Centers for Disease Control budget, which were fortunately blocked at the time by the Republican Congress. Trump had actually increased the CDC’s funding.[4] Despite Trump’s obvious deference to his medical team, an army of Democrat and media saboteurs relentlessly attacked the president as “anti-science,” while insisting that he didn’t listen to his medical experts. This charge was specifically refuted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the epidemiologist who headed Trump’s crisis team. Fauci stated that he had never been over-ruled by the president when they disagreed over a scientific issue. Dr. Deborah Birx, who coordinated the task force on the virus, and who reaffirmed Dr. Fauci’s view of Trump as a responsible leader, was viciously attacked for her testimony as a “hack” and “Stepford Doc” by former Clinton shill Joe Lockhart and a legion of other Trump-haters in the media.[5]
The treacherous lengths to which leaders of the Democrat Party have gone to demonize and defame Trump are exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s crusade to tar him as a “racist” for referring to the infection as a “Chinese virus.” Clinton denounced Trump in a tweet, saying, “The president is turning to racist rhetoric,” for using that descriptor. His purpose, Clinton explained was “to distract from his failures to take the coronavirus seriously early on, make tests widely available, and adequately prepare the country for a period of crisis.” Clinton’s attack was framed in the language that had become the creed of the Democrat Party. Calling the term “China virus” a racist epithet was an absurdity to anyone not sharing the ideological assumptions of Identity Politics and Cultural Marxism. The names of other troublesome diseases like “German measles,” “Lyme Disease and “Spanish flu” were also derived from their geographical points of origin. Not only had the virus originated in China, but by concealing its appearance and allowing millions of Wuhan citizens to leave the infected city and travel to unsuspecting countries abroad, the Chinese Communist dictatorship had cynically exposed the global population to its deadly effects.
The president’s characterization was, in fact, defensive. To cover up its malfeasance, the Chinese Communist government had launched a global propaganda campaign accusing the U.S. military of deliberately creating the virus and maliciously spreading it. As Trump explained, “China was putting out information, which was false, that our military gave this to them. That was false, and rather than having an argument, I said I have to call it where it came from.”[6] So seriously did the Chinese Communist rulers take their psychological war based on this falsehood that they launched a $2 trillion lawsuit suit against the United States for allegedly creating and spreading the virus.[7] In this Cold War, the Democrat Party presented itself as appeasers or outright sympathizers with the enemy assault on their own country. So great was their hatred of Trump.
In other words, not only was Clinton aiding and abetting a disinformation campaign against her own country and its president, but she was actively undermining her commander-in-chief’s efforts to combat the virus threatening American citizens. Clinton’s disturbing readiness to abet China’s psychological warfare against her own country, was immediately praised by China’s ambassador to the United States who said: “Justice Speaks Loudly.”[8] What was loud and clear, however, was not justice, but a fault line in America’s body politic so volatile and deep as to pose an existential threat to the nation itself.
David Horowitz is the author of the forthcoming Humanix book, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win.
Notes:
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/politics/biden-trump-coronavirus/index.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] The “hoax” comment his enemies were referring to was specifically a reference to the attacks on him, which claimed he was doing nothing to fight the epidemic or fighting it incompetently. Those responsible for these slanders were the same people who had peddled (and were still peddling) the discredited “Russia hoax,” designed to undermine and destroy him. Nor did Trump shut down, disband or fire the White House pandemic team as Biden’s ad (and many other Democrat officials and media allies) falsely claimed. The team had been reorganized within the National Security Council to make it more efficient. https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/03/24/the-truth-about-the-charge-that-trump-eliminated-white-house-pandemic-office-before-coronavirus/
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/obama-admin-repeatedly-sought-millions-in-cdc-funding-cuts
[5] https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1243244272335413249?s=20; https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/03/27/nolte-cnn-analyst-joe-lockhart-belittles-dr-birx-as-stepford-doc/
[6] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/488251-hillary-clinton-trump-using-racist-rhetoric-to-distract-from
[7] https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/03/27/chinese-lawyers-sue-america-on-conspiracy-theory-virus-came-from-u-s/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20200327&utm_content=Final
[8] https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/21/chinese-ambassador-lauds-hillary-clintons-attack-on-president-trump-justice-always-speak-loudly/
We have all met individuals like this in our lives. When in power these people often blame their mistakes on others and take credit for any success regardless of how little they contributed.
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