During the CNN town hall with Donald Trump in May, the former president ran circles around the silly reporter. The reason: she hit him with a stream of ridiculous left-wing talking points about which actual voters in the Republican primaries care nothing. They centered on January 6th stuff, various indictments, incendiary comments, and the like. Trump knocked it out of the park, of course, to the cheers of the partisan audience.
The left-wing critique of Trump is boorish and tendentious. It studiously avoids grilling Trump on policies that the left favored when he did them. This is for obvious reasons. Both the mainstream media and Trump himself tacitly agree not to make issues of the COVID response, the spending, the money printing, hospital protocols, and tax-funded experimental shots part of the debate. They both have an interest in keeping this subject out of the talking points for the coming election.
Why should this matter at all? Because all the major national problems the United States faces today—inflation, learning loss, ill-health, cultural confusion, demographic disruption, professional instability, tech censorship, and widespread substance abuse—all trace to the lockdowns that began under Trump’s rule, especially that fateful day of March 16, 2020 (oddly, the day following the Ides of March, when Caesar was killed).
This country cannot heal until we get some truth about this calamity.
Tucker Carlson is in a unique position to break the silence on these important topics. He soon sits with Trump for a full hour or more during the time when Fox News is airing a debate between the other primary challengers. It’s a clever tactic for both of them simply to show the power of independent media and demonstrate the commanding lead that Trump has in the polls.
Tucker simply must be the one to ask burning and intelligent questions of this man, all of which trace to his last year in office when the White House signed off on a program that caused the biggest and fastest loss of liberty in American history by far. No previous administration ever embarked on an audacious program to shut down the U.S. economy, first for two weeks, then another thirty days, and then for longer still.
It was a decision for the ages. Shouldn’t we know more about what led to it and why all of this happened?
Whatever changed his mind likely happened on March 10, 2020. What was that? To whom did he speak and what did they say? By chance, was he told that this was indeed a bioweapon from China and yet the pharmaceutical companies were working on the antidote and all he needed to do was lock down until it arrived and then he could be the hero? Was that his thinking?
If that was not his thinking, what precisely did he hope to achieve by locking down the entire country by executive edict? How did he imagine that he was personally going to stop the spread of a virus in the United States that was already everywhere on both coasts and likely had been for the prior six months? Did it ever occur to him to call up some independent experts on infectious disease? If not, why not?
Two days later, he ordered a stop to all flights to and from Europe, the UK, and Australia. He announced this in a televised address that evening. When he was giving this address—which looked like a hostage video—did it ever occur to Trump that he was embarking on an exercise of government power never before seen? Millions of families and travel plans were shredded and panic ensued throughout the world. What led him to believe that it was within his legal rights as president to do that?
Did Trump know what was happening around him? Did anyone come to him and tell him of this large document, which, to this day, is the only blueprint we have for what government was trying to do with its COVID response? Had he ever seen this before publishing? If so, did it not strike him as odd that the National Security Council would be given primacy over the public health agencies themselves?
That weekend, March 14–15, 2020, every report we have says that Trump huddled in the White House with son-in-law Jared Kushner, two of Jared’s college buddies, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Mike Pence. Whom else did he consult on this weekend? At this point, national security had already been given primacy in policy, so surely the military and intelligence community were represented at the White House. Who and what did they say?
How much did Gottlieb’s opinion matter to Trump and did Trump ever consider perhaps that Gottlieb, as the voice of Pfizer, might have had a conflict of interest? What else does Trump remember about this weekend?
All of this really matters because on Monday, March 16, Trump held a national press conference together with Fauci and Birx. At this event, they handed out a PDF to the press which in turn was issued to every public health agency in the country. It read as follows:
“Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission, even if those areas are in neighboring states.”
“All states should follow Federal guidance and halt social visits to nursing homes and retirement and long-term care facilities.”
“Bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”
Read those words carefully. That sounds like a federal edict to close churches, schools, and essentially put the entire country under house arrest. Indeed, the restrictions on human association also pertained to houses, which in many states were restricted in the number of people who could gather inside them. Only one state, South Dakota, refused to go along.
During the press conference, Trump waffled a bit on whether he was shutting everything down but Fauci stepped in to clarify that, yes, the Trump administration was in fact shutting down the whole country, Bill of Rights be damned.
What precisely was going on here? To whom was he waving? Did Trump even know about the edict that was being issued that day, that he was effectively using his power as president to close churches and impose universal quarantine on the population? If so, how was this consistent with his promise to make America great again?
The next day, the Trump team got busy on hospital protocols, which amounted to the mass production and distribution of ventilators plus giving out the deadly drug Remdesivir. Who was it that told Trump that intubating people was the best way to deal with this virus? Why did they believe that, given that people who are intubated are very likely to die either from the procedure or the secondary bacterial infection that likely followed?
Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force companies to make more ventilators, which they did. Today these are mostly scrap metal, of course, and most hospitals and doctors abandoned the practice once it became clear that it was killing thousands. Why did Trump seize on this whole idea to begin with? Who was advising him and why did it not occur to him to call any one of thousands of people with hands-on specializations in respiratory viruses for a second opinion?
If Fauci and Birx tricked him into wrecking his presidency and the country, why not just admit that? To this day, Trump continues to swear that he did everything right. There is not one shred of evidence from anywhere in the world, outside the lies told by the CCP, that lockdowns achieved anything in terms of public health. Does Trump agree with the CCP?
If he swears that he was right to greenlight lockdowns, why should voters trust that he would not do it again? What does he believe the limits to government power are?
Moving to the fall, Trump wisely allowed himself to be schooled in medical realities by Scott Atlas, who arrived at the White House to talk some sense into the crazy people who were running the show. Trump seems to have been convinced. But meanwhile, the whole country was in ruins with millions of businesses closed, the kids not in school, and the whole population in a state of trauma at the loss of liberty.
There were two months remaining before the November 2020 election. During his campaign stops, he dropped the lockdowns, called for openings, but largely left the subject off the stump speech entirely, as if nothing had ever happened. Going into the election, COVID was largely off the agenda but for the media and Democrats who urged further lockdowns, which they implemented once in power.
Trump should explain what was going through his head during these months. Did he know what was actually going on in the country, how many businesses had been boarded up, how many kids denied in-person education, how many churches were closed, how many families had been broken up with travel restrictions? Further did he worry that his spending and money-printing policies, plus trillions in stimulus payments, would fuel inflation after he left office?
This is just the start of the unanswered questions. If Tucker Carlson avoids them completely, and lets Trump drive the talking points, that will tell us all we need to know. It’s a sad fact that this interview might be the last chance we have to discover what really happened. If it is not part of the interview, GOP primary voters have every reason to be very disappointed. It will tell us more than we wanted to know. It will also raise serious questions about Carlson’s status as an independent journalist.
