Coronavirus, Blame, and an Open Endorsement of Donald J. Trump

The one constant in the political world is blame.  In a crisis, even success can cause blame, if there is nothing to compare it to.

We have the third largest population in the world, so it is not surprising that the number of Americans who catch Coronavirus would be higher than the number of people who catch Coronavirus in most other countries.  We will not achieve herd immunity to the disease until between 70 and 80% of the public have been infected.  On the low end, that’s 230 million people.

Our goal is to get at least 230 million people infected, with as few deaths as humanly possible.  That obviously means flattening out the curve.

At the same time, seven million Americans starved to death in the Great Depression.  And that’s just starvation.  The Great Depression also caused suicides, murders, and a host of other ways to die.

Our goal then is to get at least 230 million people infected with as few deaths as humanly possible, without causing a depression.

And note that over the past thirty years, we have outsourced the bulk of our medical supply manufacturing to China.  China, while lying about the scope and nature of the disease (and getting the WHO to do the same), cut us off from the bulk of those supplies.

So our goal then is to get at least 230 million people infected with as few deaths as possible, without causing a depression, and without access to medical supplies made in China.

So far, our mortality rate from Covid-19 is running below 1%.  South Korea was previously considered the gold standard, with a mortality rate of 1.5%. 

We are ramping up our own production of medical supplies at an impressive pace.  Did you know that Ford is making respirators?  They are actually using some F-150 parts to make them.  American ingenuity is on full display in dealing with this pandemic.

But that does not make a pandemic somehow a good thing.  People are getting sick, and some of them are dying.

And in the meantime, our media is censored by the Chinese government, which is in full-on propaganda mode world-wide to blame the United States for the pandemic.  China’s story is that the US Army launched Covid-19 as a biological weapon in Wuhan, China.  China says this in spite of the fact that we have no Army presence in Wuhan, China.

Within our country, China is all-in on blaming Trump.

The most important decision that has been made in this pandemic was to shut down travel with China, and later with Europe.  Joe Biden criticized those decisions, saying that it was no time for Trump’s ‘xenophobic hysteria.’  Understand that if Joe Biden were your President, we would look like Italy right now, with a 45% mortality rate, rather than a mortality rate below 1%. Do you know why you have not seen Joe Biden on TV much recently? I’ll bet dollars to donuts it is because of the quote I linked above.

And understand that Europe is likely already in a depression.

The Chinese Government wants you to blame Donald Trump for this pandemic.  Our media (which they censor) is going so far as to print articles calling for Trump to be charged with involuntary manslaughter because someone won the Darwin Award by taking an anti-fungal fish bowl cleaner, to try and stave-off the disease.  CNN ran an article on that, without saying that what the guy took was a fish bowl cleaner, and not a real medication.

And in the meantime, the media is criticizing Trump for saying that an anti-malarial treatment seems to be effective in treating Covid-19.  Our media is doing that in spite of the fact that this treatment IS proving effective, and in spite of the fact that American pharmaceutical companies are starting to crank that medication out as fast as humanly possible, to help us fight this disease!

Can you imagine a media, not content to blame the President for the outbreak of a disease, that also wants to spin the cure to the virus into something it can blame the President for? Welcome to the America…

You can look at the Chinese propaganda that the media is spreading, or you can look at the facts.

Chinese propaganda tells you that Trump has grossly mishandled this crisis, and that many Americans are dying as a result.  Chinese propaganda is telling you that we have no choice but to flush our economy down the toilet for months.  Chinese propaganda tells you that the free market was grossly incompetent at preparing for, or handling, this pandemic.

The fact is that the United States is the best equipped country in the world for handling the pandemic, and that we are doing a better job than any of us could have imagined, at least thus far.  The fact is that as our economy is on lock-down, China is gearing its back up, and while we might not consider economic output a competition, China considers this a war.  The fact is that while some people will die from this pandemic, many more would die if we went into a depression.  The fact is that the Chinese government would LOVE the United States to fall into a depression, and is using our media to try and cause one.

The fact is that Joe Biden is a blathering idiot, who would have made this pandemic a thousand times worse, and that Chinese propaganda is working overtime to ensure that he is the next President of the United States.

And why does the Chinese Government want Joe Biden?  Because Trump is going to continue working to end our reliance on Chinese manufacturing.

I’ve stopped short of actually endorsing Donald Trump for more than four years (including during the Republican Primary in 2016).  I voted for Ted Cruz, and pushed people to consider Gary Johnson in 2016, before Johnson did an interview with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I did not want Donald Trump to be President (though I did eventually vote for him over Hillary Clinton), and I have been openly critical of Donald Trump whenever I have disagreed with him.  I have also been highly critical of his Twitter feed, and for the most part, his mouth.

I will continue to be critical of Donald Trump when and where I disagree with him.

Donald Trump is many of the things Democrats call him.  He is a blow hard.  He is an egotistical, big mouthed, braggart.  His ego often forces him to distort (or disregard) the truth. Personality-wise, he is easy to pick on, and he deserves much of the criticism he gets.

But he also gets things done.

Donald Trump is to being a President as George S. Patton was to being a General.  He has the same strengths, and the same weaknesses.  We are, for all intents and purposes, at war, and I’ll take Patton in a heart beat.

Donald J. Trump is my President.

NOTE: A reader correctly pointed out that while seven million people starved to death in the United States during the depression (and others died from other causes), the rate of starvation did not increase during the depression. Mortality rates were remarkably stable during the depression. From 1789-1930, mortality rates in the United States, including the rate of starvation, declined at the fastest pace in human history and as soon as the depression ended, starvation in the United States ceased. The CDC no longer even tracks starvation – it simply does not occur anymore. As such, though seven million people did starve during the depression, not all of those seven million deaths can be blamed on the depression itself. It is hard to say whether starvation would have been eliminated by 1939 without the depression, by 1932, or by some other year, and certainly the depression can be blamed for holding those rates up. As such, I will leave the language in the above post alone (‘seven million people starved to death during the Great Depression’), and leave it up to the reader to decide how many of those deaths it is ‘fair’ to blame on the Great Depression.