Each day that passes after former president Donald Trump has announced that he’s running again for the White House, I get angrier and angrier. All of you know that I was one of PJ Media’s loudest and proudest MAGA supporters going into the 2016 and 2020 elections. My criticisms of him were pretty light until the end when a series of bad decisions soured my opinion of him. (You can read about those on our VIP side here). But one I didn’t touch on, perhaps because it rips a bandaid off a wound that is still festering in my soul, is his ridiculous and cowardly response to COVID-19. We’ve had enough distance now from 2020 that it’s time to talk about it.
I wrote a response to The Atlantic’s stupid essay about “COVID amnesty” that certain people on the left want from those of us who were the targets of their vicious policies. That column was harsh (and 100% accurate). And I called for criminal trials for the people who instituted those policies that harmed liberty and trampled the Constitution with vaccine mandates and dictates by emergency orders and threats from unelected health ministers. But I forgot someone. I left out the most culpable person in the whole ordeal.
Donald J. Trump.
Now, Trump will probably kiss and make up with Crooked Hillary before he ever apologizes or admits guilt for anything, but I’m reaching out now to say that if he wants a chance at another presidency, there is some major apologizing he needs to do for us — his supporters. The hits we took for him are incalculable and continue to this day. We have been smeared as “Nazis, white supremacists, domestic terrorists, racists, homophobes, insurrectionists,” and more. But we would have born all of that happily if he had fought for us when it was critical that he do so.
Why did Trump allow Anthony Fauci to become the unelected Health Czar of America? Within two months, this man showed he was not fit to be elected dog-catcher, let alone be allowed to fiddle with the nation’s economy. But allow it, Trump did. He deferred to Fauci and his cohort Dr. Deborah Birx. Both of them misled Americans multiple times over masks, lockdowns, and the risks to children and pushed idiocy like “social distancing” which had no basis in science or reality. It’s Trump’s fault we were all forced to stand on stickers at the grocery store.
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(There was a bar we visited during COVID that literally installed 4×3 sheets of plexiglass on top of beer kegs that they shoved in between stools at the bar. It was RIDICULOUS. Anyone without brain damage could see that none of this stuff was protecting anyone from an airborne virus.)
Trump had other advisers close to him who were trying to tell him that Fauci and Birx were batsh*t crazy, like Dr. Scott Atlas, who called for a much less radical approach to the Wuhan Flu. But Trump didn’t sideline Fauci with someone like Atlas, though he had no obligation to give Fauci a microphone. Instead, we suffered. And suffered. And suffered.
The difference between DeSantis’s response to Atlas’s information and Trump’s is stark. According to Atlas, DeSantis quickly realized that following the accepted theories about lockdown was going to harm his state, so he reversed course. Trump, on the other hand, refused to admit he made a mistake even though Atlas says he surely knew it.
At first, Atlas tried to advise from California. He paid close attention to what Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the COVID task force, was saying publicly. Atlas quickly noticed the disconnect between what Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, another task force member, were saying and the impression he had from his first meeting with Trump. He writes, “I also sensed, even in this initial conversation, that he [Trump] was frustrated — not just at how the country was still shut down, but that he had allowed it to happen, against his own intuition.” Atlas states his initial view of Fauci: he “kept focusing on what might happen, stressing what we didn’t know with absolute certainty, rather than underscoring what we did know about the virus based on months of evidence, including the most fundamental biology.”
Why didn’t Trump reverse course like DeSantis did after looking at Atlas’s information? What stopped him? Was it fear of being re-elected? That’s how it felt to me, that Trump’s failure to act and rock the boat and take a risk was because his election was coming up and he thought he was playing it safe. But he played at the expense of our livelihoods and our children’s futures.
My daughter, who is turning 17 soon, absolutely despises the idea of a Trump presidency now. She rightly blames him for the ruined high school years, the friends she wasn’t able to make through a computer screen, the dances she didn’t get to go to, the experiences that were robbed from her, the masks that gagged her, and the anxiety that it all caused, which she lives with every day now.
She doesn’t blame Democrats (though she’s not a fan of them either), but she blames the Republican president who was the guy in charge who let it all happen and who should have known better. She’s not wrong. She was fourteen at the time, and she knew that everything the government told us to do was a ridiculous farce. The buck stopped with Trump. If he had fought those people instead of handing over the reins to them, I doubt she (or I) would feel this way.
“Fifteen days to stop the spread,” he said. When that turned out to be a lie, he did it again. “We’ll be open by Easter,” he said. And with each empty promise to re-open our economy and get our mom-and-pop shops declared “essential” instead of allowing big corporate giants to eat them alive or to open our schools and get back to normal — my daughter noticed. And so did many other Trump voters.
He didn’t even fight to open our churches. Meanwhile, bars and strip clubs stayed open. He allowed the enemies of liberty to shred the Constitution on his watch. And then he rushed a bunch of useless vaccines to market and didn’t fight to keep governors from threatening us with our jobs if we didn’t take them. Why didn’t he push for federal legislation to outlaw government mandates for experimental vaccines? He said he was against it, but he didn’t really try to stop it.
Remember when Trump promised to open on Easter of 2020 and then didn't? I do. He should apologize for letting that troll Fauci destroy our economy and liberty. How am I supposed to trust him after this? pic.twitter.com/P7fuloCHRg
— Megan Fox (@MeganFoxWriter) November 17, 2022
Donald Trump allowed the destruction of our economy through his weakness and fear of dealing harshly with political operatives who were doing what they did so they could win an election. There’s no other explanation for it. The data is in. The failed COVID policies didn’t stop COVID at all. He could be forgiven in the beginning when we didn’t know what was about to happen. But by Easter of 2020, we knew that only the very old or the medically fragile were dying from COVID. We knew the initial estimates of the death rates were way off. We knew COVID had almost no effect on children. And yet he did nothing to correct the course he had taken. The states that opened had the same results as (or better results than) the states that locked down.
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What was Trump doing instead of fighting like hell to reopen America? He was cucking around on a dais with Anthony Fauci, a man who despises him and who helped Joe Biden get elected by screwing up Trump’s COVID response. What a terrible judge of character Trump is! He stood there side-by-side with Fauci as that little troll destroyed America, erased all the Trump gains, harmed our children, and set fire to liberty. He just stood there and nodded and agreed. Then he told us he didn’t care that we didn’t like him. He liked Fauci. That was all that mattered.
Trump knew we didn't like or trust Fauci. He didn't care. He liked him and that's all that mattered to him. He ignored our warnings. He ignored our pleas. He chose his enemy over his constituents. He is responsible for the Fauci-led destruction of American liberty and $$$ pic.twitter.com/j8DfJjJHxh
— Megan Fox (@MeganFoxWriter) November 17, 2022
The only way I will forgive him for that is if he admits that what he did was a huge mistake and asks for an apology and vows in the future to listen to the people who want to see him succeed instead of the people who want him to fail. But knowing Trump the way I do, that’s a fantasy. Not only will he not take responsibility for being weak and manipulated, but he has already started throwing stones at the governor who did fight for freedom, who did open his state, and who has proven himself to be someone who listens to the constituents who put him where he is.
Ron DeSantis did not cower to the medical establishment. He chose his medical leaders carefully. He didn’t choose lifelong Democrats with grudges and political agendas. He chose loyal, normal, rational people to fill those positions. And we can all look at the scoreboard and see where Florida ended up in all of this.
I’m not saying DeSantis should run for president yet. With Trump there sucking up all the oxygen in the room, I think the right move is to stand back and let him do what he does — put himself and his goals ahead of everyone else. It’s just who he is. Can he grow? Can he admit he failed us at a critical time in our history? It’s doubtful.
I remain hopeful that he will attempt to right these wrongs and earn our votes back, but it’s going to take a real sea change in how he behaves toward constructive criticism. We are not your enemies, Mr. Trump. We are the canaries in the coal mine, and if you would just set aside the need to be right all the time, you might discover that humility and a willingness to listen to valid criticism can repair this rift.
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