Can We Please Have Some Honesty About Trump’s Lockdowns?

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Source: Brownstone Institute

Can We Please Have Some Honesty About Trump’s Lockdowns?

By Alan Dowd

June 15, 2023

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The salvos being lobbed between former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over their respective handling of the COVID-19 pandemic are at once troubling, encouraging, and revealing. Citizens who believe in individual liberty, individual responsibility, and constitutional government should listen to what these men and all policymakers are saying about COVID-19 today—and equally important—remember how they responded in 2020.

Causes and Consequences

With global health experts initially warning that the virus was killing 3.4 percent of those infected—and the now-disgraced British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson churning out computer models that offered policymakers a false choice between mass death or mass lockdowns—Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services drafted a document aimed at containing COVID. It was on March 13, 2020.

Stamped “not for public distribution or release” and indeed kept from public view for several months, that document would guide decision-makers at every level of government and every sector of the economy in dealing with COVID-19.

In March 2020, the Trump administration unveiled elements of the document under the banner “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” Among other things, the document introduced us to phrases like “social distancing,” “workplace controls,” “aggressive containment,” and “non-pharmaceutical interventions” at the federal, state, local and private-sector level. These would include “home isolation strategies,” “cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings,” “school closures,” and “stay-at-home directives for public and private organizations.”

A PDF sheet handed out at the March 16 press conference said: “In states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

This was the blueprint for locking down and closing down our free and open society. With that one sentence, an attempt to nationalize the pandemic response, the Bill of Rights became a dead letter, free association was abolished, and free enterprise itself was put on hold.

It’s no surprise that, when faced with estimates of such a high infection-fatality rate (IFR) and such terrifying computer models, some of the people advising the president would recommend locking down.

What is surprising and telling is that, apparently, the president didn’t respond to those recommendations with questions that would serve to defend individual liberty, encourage individual responsibility and challenge the default position of locking down—questions like: “Haven’t we, as a society, dealt with viruses like this in the past? Didn’t something like this happen in the late 1960s and late 1950s?

What did government do—and not do—back then? How dependable are those IFR numbers? Can we trust those computer models? Are the costs of locking down—economic, societal well-being, individual well-being, constitutional, institutional—worth the benefits? Are there any computer models on that? What are the trade-offs? Is there anything in the scientific canon that challenges this lockdown strategy?”

Americans don’t expect their Presidents to have all the answers. What they expect—and need—from their Presidents is a breadth of knowledge and experience to ask those kinds questions, the capacity to build a diverse team to help answer such questions and to challenge the answers, the ability to instill a sense of calm in the face of chaos, and enough wisdom to navigate a crisis without first worsening it.

Trump did not display any of those characteristics in mid March 2020, which came as no surprise to some of us. There was a revealing moment during the 2016 campaign when Trump was asked, “Who do you talk to for military advice?” Candidate Trump answered, “I watch the shows”—as in the cable-news shouting matches, where the loudest voice or scariest scenario or biggest bang or best one-liner or sharpest elbow or nastiest rejoinder or last word wins. That’s no way to learn about or understand issues of war and peace, life and death. But it revealed much about how a President Trump would respond in a time of crisis.

He seemed to have no intellectual curiosity, no sense of history, no nuance or depth, no wisdom, not a modicum of humility to ask questions. And so, when the COVID crisis slammed into America, Trump was influenced by the last words he heard, impressed by the most maximalist course of action, and drawn to the loudest, biggest-bang advisors—people who had no interest in anything beyond their enclaved neighborhood of expertise, no grasp of the law of unintended consequences, no desire to try to balance public health with individual liberty.

The consequences were devastating—far worse than COVID-19 itself. Aimed at saving life, the lockdowns—ironically but predictably—were a hideous destroyer of life and living. The evidence is literally everywhere: a 25.5 percent increase in alcohol-related deaths, a 30 percent surge in homicides, huge spikes in domestic violence and child abuse, thousands of preventable cancer deaths and heart-disease deaths, decreased life expectancy and decreased earnings for a generation of children, every level of government utterly failed, hundreds of thousands of businesses shuttered, millions left jobless, tens of millions of Americans barred from gathering for worship, the devaluing of work, the expansion of government, the acceleration of dependency.

As a recent study conducted by scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Lund University concludes, the lockdowns were a “policy failure of gigantic proportions…the biggest policy mistake in modern times.”

Yet in the wake of all that wreckage and destruction, we are left to conclude that Trump has no second thoughts, no regrets, no apologies, no lessons learned, no remorse, no sense of responsibility.

While he claims, “I never was for mandates,” and his campaign gushes that “President Trump saved millions of lives, opposed mandates and embraced the federalist system to allow states to make the decisions best for their people,” his record and rhetoric say otherwise.

For example—ignoring factors such as age, comorbidities and population size—Trump recently jabbed, “How about the fact that [DeSantis] had the third most deaths of any state having to do with the China virus? Even [New York Governor Andrew] Cuomo did better.”

He’s comparing here a lockdown state—a state that followed his HHS “guidelines,” quarantined the healthy and tried to control a virus through government coercion—with an individual-liberty state. And he’s applauding the former while criticizing the latter.

“I did the right thing,” he has said about his response to COVID. Almost boasting, he huffs, “We closed the country down…I had to shut down.”

But it wasn’t the right thing to do—not in light of the prescient warnings of people like Donald Henderson, not in light of the Constitution, not in light of history.

He did not have to shut the country down. Other free societies did not imitate the PRC and lock down in response to deadly new viruses—Taiwan, South Korea and Sweden in 2020, America in 1957 and 1968.

And while Trump says he never imposed mandates, his administration drafted and disseminated the blueprint for locking down—a blueprint almost every state followed. If he “had to shut it down,” to use his words, did he do so with gentle suggestions? In fact, Trump himself used the bully pulpit to publicly scold governors for ending lockdowns, especially Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As Kemp tried to pry open his state after a month of lockdowns, Trump warned him he was “in violation” of the administration’s “phase one guidelines.” This had a chilling effect on other governors who wanted to follow Kemp’s lead. So much for “the federalist system.”

The reality is that by bringing in Scott Atlas—who was using reason and facts to fight the mass psychosis unleashed by the lockdown herd—in August 2020, Trump was tacitly admitting his mistake in handing over the reins of America’s government and economy to unelected public-health officials.

But by then it was too late. In their refusal to allow a return to normalcy and their Orwellian lexicon—“15 days to slow the spread…30 days to slow the spread…the next two weeks are critical…essential workers…together apart…follow the science…six feet apart or six feet under…shelter in place…no mask no service…proof of vaccination required…get the shot and get back to normal”—we were reminded of the human tendency to control other humans, the penetrating potency of fear, and the state’s default desire to expand its reach and role. Once these pathologies are let loose, as they were in March 2020, they are not easily or quickly subdued.

The New Normal

DeSantis—a kind of stand-in for all of us who have a default belief in individual liberty and individual responsibility—initially deferred to Washington’s mandates and threats masquerading as “guidelines.” He says he regrets not challenging Trump and the high priests of scientism from the outset. He deserves credit not only for admitting his initial reaction was wrong, not only for changing course once he recognized what the lockdowns were doing to America and Americans, but also for making this a front-and-center issue today.

Although the Trump camp has resorted to a “My opponent did it too” defense, the New York Times reported in spring 2020 on DeSantis’s “resistance to closures throughout the coronavirus pandemic.” DeSantis reopened and returned his state to normalcy so early that people like Cuomo attacked him: “You played politics with this virus, and you lost,” Cuomo preened in mid-2020. In his backslapping exchange with Trump, Cuomo recently added, “Donald Trump tells the truth…Florida’s policy of denial allowed COVID to spread, and that’s why they had a very large second wave.”

But the numbers tell a different story. “Florida had less excess mortality than California or New York,” as DeSantis points out. Plus, a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, using CDC data, found free Florida’s age-adjusted COVID deaths per 100,000 (265) to be far lower than locked-down New York’s (346).

“Leaders,” DeSantis argues, “don’t subcontract out their leadership to health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci.” He bluntly calls “Fauci-ism” and its lockdowns “wrong” and “destructive.” He openly wonders why Trump—best known before his presidency for his trademark tagline “You’re fired!”—couldn’t bring himself to fire Anthony Fauci or at least shut down the White House Coronavirus Taskforce. And he challenges Americans—the tens of millions who were impoverished, broken, left alone by the lockdowns—to wrestle with an unsettling idea: “If [Trump] thinks Cuomo handled it better, that’s an indication if something like this were to happen again, he would double down and do what he did in 2020.”

This isn’t about supporting DeSantis or any other candidate. It’s about discovering who has learned from history and who would repeat the mistakes of March 2020. Every candidate running for every federal office and statewide office should be asked where they stand on this fundamental issue—because there will be other viruses, other pandemics, other computer models that tempt or terrify those in power. In a nation founded on individual liberty and individual responsibility, lockdowns cannot become the new-normal response to such events.

Author

Alan Dowd is an essayist and a Senior Fellow at the Sagamore Institute in Indianapolis. His writing, which focuses on the defense of freedom at home and abroad, has appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, World Politics Review, Real Clear Defense, Fraser Forum, American Legion Magazine, Providence, Military Officer, Claremont Review of Books, By Faith, Washington Times, Baltimore Sun, Washington Examiner, National Post, Wall Street Journal Europe, Jerusalem Post, Financial Times Deutschland, American Interest, National Review, and the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics.

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Source: Daily Mail

Trump has promised to ban child gender transitions - but owns stock in the Big Pharma companies he's promised to investigate for 'illegally marketing' hormone therapies and puberty blockers

Trump held between $600,003 and $1,251,000 in three companies that make gender-affirming therapies and hormone blockers
Trump has called gender transition care 'child abuse,' 'left-wing insanity' and 'mutilation' — while pledging to pass a federal law to outlaw it

By Morgan Phillips,

4 June 2023

Even after he's promised to go after Big Pharma for pushing such drugs to minors, former President Trump has held stock in three companies that make the puberty blockers that are essential for children undergoing a gender transition.

'The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse, very simple. Here is my plan to stop the chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth,' Trump said in a campaign speech on February 1.

But as recently as the end of last year, Trump held between $600,003 and $1,251,000 in three companies that make gender-affirming therapies and hormone blockers, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of his financial disclosures.

He also financial stakes in Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson - a fact that could be seized on by Ron DeSantis' campaign as the war of words over COVID records heats up in the 2024 race.

Trump has called gender transition care 'child abuse,' 'left-wing insanity' and 'mutilation' — while pledging to pass a federal law to outlaw it.

The former president and current GOP 2024 candidate promised on 'Day One' to revoke President Biden's 'cruel' policies on gender-affirming care, signing a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that 'promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.'

He's promised to urge Congress to pass a law 'prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states' and claw back Medicare and Medicaid funding from any hospital that provides gender transition care for minors.

Trump then promised to have the Department of Justice investigate Big Pharma 'to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side- effects of 'sex transitions' in order to get rich.'

Trump said the DOJ would investigate whether Big Pharma 'illegally marketed hormones and puberty blockers.'

'No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender—a concept that was never heard of in all of human history—nobody's ever heard of this, what's happening today,' Trump concluded.

Children as young as eight who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria can be given medication to halt the puberty process: an increasingly controversial practice as transgender issues and sex and gender education in schools have been launched front and center to GOP politics.

According to Trump's most recent disclosures, which cover his investments between January 2021 and December 2022, he held between $350,002 and $750,000 in Pfizer - the drug company that makes feminizing therapies depo-estradiol, depo-provera and male hormone suppressant aldactone.

Aldactone's active ingredient spironolactone is the most commonly prescribed male hormone suppressant.

Most of these medications can have other uses beyond gender transition as well: estradiol can be used to treat postmenopausal symptoms and for women who have had hysterectomies. Spironolactone can be used to treat high blood pressure and heart failure.

He also invested between $250,001 and $500,000 in Novartis, a company that makes gender-affirming therapies Vivelle and Vivelle Dot - where estradiol is the active ingredient. Estradiol is the primary estrogen used in feminizing therapy.

Novartis' subsidiary Sandoz also made puberty blocker leuprolide acetate. According to Planned Parenthood, 'There are two kinds of puberty blockers: A flexible rod called histrelin acetate that goes under the skin of the arm and lasts for 1 year. A shot called leuprolide acetate, which works for 1, 3, or 4 months at a time.'

The former president invested up to $1,000 in Abbvie - a drug company that makes puberty blocker Leupron, otherwise known as leuprolide acetate.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton last year ordered Abbvie to hand over materials related to the sale of puberty blockers to children.

Between $950,000 and $2 Million in Trump's portfolio is dedicated to two companies that created coronavirus vaccines: Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson.

Trump himself is vaccinated and it was his administration that pumped funds to these companies through Operation Warp Speed to get a vaccine to market. But many of his supporters remain leery of the jab - and the former president has even been booed at events where he promoted the coronavirus vaccine.

A voter tore into Trump at a campaign stop in Iowa this week: 'We have lost people because you supported the jab.'

Trump has walked a fine line between boasting that it was his administration that got a vaccine to market and placating a base more skeptical of the jab. He's emphasized his opposition to vaccine mandates.

'Everyone wanted a vaccine at that time, and I was able to do something that nobody else could have done — getting it done very, very rapidly. But I never was for mandates; I thought the mandates were terrible,' the former president said.

'Trump responds by praising the COVID mRNA shots, doesn't acknowledge any of the adverse effects,' the DeSantis War Room wrote on Twitter, highlighting the interaction.

The Trump and Ron DeSantis campaigns have assailed each other over their candidate's Covid-19 records, with each claiming the other was more friendly to lockdowns.

In December the Florida governor even called for a grand jury investigation into alleged 'crimes and wrongdoing' on the part of vaccine manufacturers in peddling the shot to Americans.

On Tuesday the Trump campaign put out a long list entitled 'Ron DeSantis' lyin' record on COVID,' which took direct aim at the governor for promoting the vaccine.

The campaign stated: 'President Trump saved millions of lives, opposed mandates, and embraced the Federalist system to allow States to make the decisions best for their people. Ron DeSantis continues to lie about his record, as he personally oversaw mass vaccinations and imposed radical lockdowns.'

DailyMail.com reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.