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I have praised the Trump administration’s accomplishments many times, but there is one huge blot on Trump’s record: his administration’s response to the covid epidemic. Via InstaPundit, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute comments on Megyn Kelly’s interview of Trump. Kelly, to her credit, began the process of asking Trump the tough questions about covid: We need to know why the churches, schools, and businesses were closed at the urging of the White House. We need to know why we faced travel restrictions, why government printed and spent multiple trillions that produced crushing inflation, why the hospitals were shut to...

The possibility of U.S. lockdowns—never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics—was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. Incredibly, the United States was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How...

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence –...

“Trust in Trump’s America is gone.” The coronavirus crisis has caused a dramatic deterioration in the European public perception of the US and left many believing the EU had become “irrelevant”, new polling finds. The new survey by the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) says the pandemic has traumatized Europeans and left them “feeling alone and vulnerable”. The survey studied the views of Europeans towards the EU and notably its response to the coronavirus crisis and the results did not make for positive reading. “There is a powerful sense among citizens of almost all surveyed member states that their...

It’s official: Democrats have completely blown the messaging around coronavirus. **SNIP** Let’s examine the most recent window of exposure - the past eight days. On March 12, the New York Times ran the following headline: “The President as Bystander: Trump Struggles to Unify a Nation on Edge.” Anyone who read this would have thought, just as I did, that Trump’s goose was cooked. But in the next eight days, Americans heard little from Nancy Pelosi beyond bill negotiations. They heard little in the way of indictments from Joe Biden. They’ve heard nothing from the DNC. The scattered criticisms on the...

The Chinese Communist Party has ramped up its propaganda efforts to control the narrative surrounding the novel coronavirus—by rejecting criticism and painting a picture that Beijing is effectively handling the outbreak. The regime’s propaganda has gone through several phases: first ignoring the severity of the outbreak, then creating positive coverage, and now, blaming the United States. Internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times have highlighted how the regime bungled its data tracking and censored discussions of the outbreak, fueling the virus’s spread. High-ranking communist authorities have pushed a handful of talking points to deflect blame, including that the origin...

On March 15, 1995, by Executive Order 12957, the President declared a national emergency with respect to Iran to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the actions and policies of the Government of Iran.  On May 6, 1995, the President issued Executive Order 12959, imposing more comprehensive sanctions on Iran to further respond to this threat.  On August 19, 1997, the President issued Executive Order 13059, consolidating and clarifying those previous orders.  The President took additional steps pursuant to this national emergency in Executive Order 13553...