A central tenet of former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign has been to accuse President Donald Trump of falling short in responding to the Coronavirus pandemic. While not going into detail about what he would have done differently, Biden has continually averred that Trump needs to listen to the experts and heed the science. One person that the left holds in high regard is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The rallying cry among Democrats is to “listen to Fauci,” but if they chose to listen to him, their entire offensive would fall apart at the seams ahead of the November vote.
“Impressive”
Since the formation of the White House Coronavirus Task Force in January, the mainstream media has attempted to stoke division between President Trump and the experts on the panel, including Dr. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. Whenever the press corps alluded to anonymous reports of tensions between the president and the task force members, both leading figures dismissed the assertions. In fact, one of the most prominent champions of the administration’s response to COVID-19 has been Fauci.
Speaking in an interview with Mark Levin on Fox News in March, Fauci described the White House’s coordinated response as “impressive.” He praised Trump’s decision to impose travel restrictions on China and Europe, adding: “I can’t imagine that under any circumstances that anybody could be doing more.”
In April, Fauci disappointed reporters during a White House briefing when he noted that President Trump supported many of the recommendations presented by himself and other public health officials. “The first and only time that I went in and said we should do mitigation strongly, the response was, ‘yes, we’ll do it,'” he said. Fauci, once again, pointed out in May that when he and Dr. Birx made formal recommendations to institute strong mitigation measures, “the president listened and went to mitigation.”
This past summer, Dr. Fauci revealed that he had been pleased with the president’s renewed COVID-19 briefings, particularly for being “short and crisp.” He told The Washington Post:
“They’ve been short and crisp, which I think is good when you’re trying to get a message across. So I think the last I think it’s three times that the president has been out. I think it’s important that that continues: short, crisp, have defined the message that people can understand, such as wearing masks and staying away from crowds.”
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Now that the press is apoplectic about Trump downplaying the severity of the highly infectious respiratory illness, Fauci came to the president’s defense again, telling Fox News: “I didn’t get any sense that he was distorting anything. In my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had. We related that to him. When he would go out, I’d hear him discussing the same sort of things.”
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 public health crisis, Fauci has repeatedly uttered positive things about Trump’s handling of the outbreak. The physician and immunologist has made statements that were either taken out of context or blown out of proportion by the media to portray Trump in a negative light. Unless Fauci publishes a tell-all book in the next couple of years and tells the press what it wants to hear – that his rave reviews of Trump were embellished – his statements to date have been mostly complimentary.
What Did Trump Not Do?
The latest narrative on the left is that President Trump lied to the American people because he did not deliver doom and gloom press conferences since day one. This, his critics decry, resulted in the deaths of 200,000 Americans. But this concept defies logic because his administration did act, from border closures to enacting the Defense Production Act (DPA) to helping states with whatever they needed. The only measure he did not employ was to institute a national mask mandate, which is something that Biden originally called for and then backpedaled after he realized it is a state and local issue.
During a recent CNN town hall, Biden claimed: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive. All the people. I’m not making this up. Just look at the data.” Sure, Mr. Biden.
But how did Trump not perform his job? Better yet, what could he have done to prevent four million Coronavirus cases and achieve zero deaths? As Liberty Nation recently reported, everything Biden demanded the president do in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has already done, even spending $25 billion to formulate a plan to distribute a vaccine to the population:
“How would Biden handle the pandemic differently from President Trump? By doing everything Trump is doing. This is comparable to when the former V.P. told wealthy donors that everything would essentially remain the same if he were elected to the Oval Office. From plagiarizing speeches to replicating ideas, does Biden have an original bone in his body?”
Listen to the Democrats?
Leftists shriek to the heavens that we need to “listen to Fauci” and “listen to the experts.” However, we should only listen when it is convenient for the left. If the scientists contradict a Democratic talking point, it is either swept under the rug or dismissed as coercion. Trump may not have been urging the public to seek shelter, pray to the heavens, and expect the worst, but his government still took action, even without correct information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and China. Whether the actions were too dire or not can be debated, but is acting better than pontification? Remember, it was the Democrats opposing Trump’s travel restrictions, telling the people to ride the subway, encouraging the public to attend celebrations, and sending seniors to Coronavirus-infected nursing homes. And yet, it is Trump who has refused to listen to the science? Science ostensibly only works if it undermines Trump.
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