No president has taken on the tough issues like Donald J. Trump. He has lowered corporate taxes to 21% and eliminated regulations that were a hinderance to many businesses. This effort resulted in the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years (3.8%) for all Americans.
He re-booted our military, and reorganized the Veterans Administration. He put conservative judges on the Supreme Court and has been the most pro-life president ever. He moved our embassy to Jerusalem thus establishing it as the capital of Israel. The United Arab Emirates has made peace with Israel during the Trump administration. Although North Korea will never give up their nuclear weapons Trump has at least for the moment cooled some of the tension in that area. He killed Qasem Soleimani. The death of this revolutionary leader of Iran has made the western world a safer place. He is downsizing our military presence in countries like Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan and is forcing the European Union to pay their fair share in their own military defense. He has renegotiated what he believed to be bad trade deals that America made in the past.
The toughest of these trade deals has been with China. He has called them out on the fact that we import so many things from them while they import few things from us. He made demands that they correct this and put tariffs on their goods when they refused. He called them out on their stealing of our intellectual property and threatened more tariffs on them if they did not change their behavior. He drove them nuts. They never had to deal with anybody like this. All of our previous presidents had acquiesced to the Chinese. Trump would slap them with tariffs and then get on Twitter and Fox News and brag about how much this was costing China and how we are bending them over and making them pay. He rubbed their noses in it. At the same time China was not going to change. They were having none of this! Especially where intellectual property is concerned.
This is where China gets lucky. Their population is 1.4 billion people and a large percentage of them are starving. These poor people live and eat off the land. That includes any animals they may find. There is an animal in China called the Pangolin. This Pangolin looks like an anteater only with scales on its body to protect it from other animals. The Pangolin likes to roll itself in the manure of other animals thereby giving itself a musky odor that will also keep other animals from eating it. This one Pangolin rolled itself into some Bat Manure thinking this should do the job. Along comes a hungry Chinaman who works in a wet market. He eats this tasty Pangolin and he goes back to work. He may or may not have had any real symptoms. But he gets everyone at the market real sick and everybody at the market gets everyone else real sick. Or somebody dropped a vial of virus in a laboratory in Wuhan and now China has an epidemic on their hands. Dr. Li Wenliang at the Wuhan Hospital in late December tried to warn others but was tortured.
The resourceful Chinese Communist Party now realized they had a weapon that they could send to the Western World including the United States that would neutralize the Trump Presidency. They denied the epidemic was contagious and started sending Chinese tourists to America. Xi Jinping played this one beautifully. Without this pandemic, Trump would have sailed into his second term with a smooth transition. Now that’s off the table and the Bob Woodward tapes clearly show Trump knew the seriousness of the virus and held this information from the American People.
The fact that he lied doesn’t change the situation. He still acted responsibly. He shut down the country for thirty-five days and in doing so put the following companies out of business. The airlines, the cruise ships, the shopping malls, the movie theaters, the bars, the hotels, the restaurants, the gyms, and all the mom and pop stores. As the stock market fell to generational lows the Federal Reserve interceded by purchasing all the corporate debt. A bi-partisan agreement was made to give everyone a $1200 stimulus check and $600 a week in unemployment benefit until July 31, 2020.
France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Denmark: These countries are socialist. They can order their population to stay indoors. As a free society Trump doesn’t have the power to call out the National Guard in every city and allow them to give citations that will impose a $300 fine for those not wearing a mask, going grocery shopping more than once per week, or going to the beach on Memorial Day!
After the lockdown was over Trump gave power to the individual governors and mayors of the states and municipalities to determine if they wanted to continue the lockdown or responsibly open their state or county as they see fit. The Republican Party stands for smaller government. Had Trump acted differently, he would have lost the support of his Republican colleagues and would have been hated by his own party.
When I stayed in Thailand you could catch a parasite by eating food that wasn’t properly cooked. The only cure is to give the patient an anti-parasitic. The problem is the medicine is poison, but is given in the hope that it will kill the parasite before it kills the patient. This is the problem facing Trump. To much locking the country down will kill off major business and economy. To little and Covid-19 will kill massive amounts of people. How do you make a decision like this? The only president in American history that was faced with killing off major parts of the country in order to save it was the Lincoln Presidency. At least his enemy was visible.
To make matters worse, on May 25th 2020 George Floyd was executed by four Minnesota Policeman and another black person murdered in in Atlanta a month later. Since then we have had protests in almost every American City. How many millions of people have been protesting every night without wearing masks and without social distancing? This protesting is an American right. The president is powerless to do anything! He can’t call the National Guard and stop these protests even if they are a threat to public health.
Donald Trump did not cause Covid-19. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party withheld vital information from our President that he may fail in his bid to remain in office and a more China friendly Joe Biden replace him. Weather this strategy will work, will only be determined on election day.
