RUTHFULLY YOURS

Epidemic illnesses are always going to be scary. That scariness is there even when we marshall the facts. One good fact is that this is the flu, with a probable top mortality rate of 4.6 percent, not the Black Death, with its 40-90 percent mortality rate. Another good fact is that the 4.6 percent rate is dropping because we can track the virus better. We’ve always known how many people died, but we’re learning that more people were sick than was first assumed. As the number of recovered sick people expands, the mortality rate drops.

What makes this outbreak exceptionally frightening, though, is the number of people who want it to be awful. Some of them are just drama queens, reveling in the horror of the moment and the even more horrific possibilities of the future. These people are toxic and need to be avoided.

Worse, though, are those people who see this as Trump’s Waterloo. The problem for them, though, is that the only way Trump can measurably fail is if lots of people die and the entire American system collapses. These people, therefore, are cheering on the possibility of death, economic collapse, and social chaos. That’s not just toxic, that’s evil.

One of the things the Waterloo-wishes are doing is attacking everything Trump has said or done. When he banned flights from China and quarantined people, he was racist. When coronavirus still made it to America, he was ineffective. And when he announced that he was closing flights from Europe, people announced, without a scintilla of evidence, that it was too little too late.

Even before Trump’s latest announcements about slowing the spread of coronavirus and securing the economy, Ronna McDaniel, the GOP Chairwoman, had put out a short thread reminding America what Trump was doing, even as the Democrats were attacking him:

On a larger scale, Trump protected America beginning three years ago when he started cutting the economic ties that left America so dependent on China. Just imagine the hit to our economy had Trump not started companies on the road to leaving China before coronavirus even showed the dangers of that dependency. Writing at The Hill, Maidson Gesiotto, an attorney on the advisory board of Trump’s campaign, explains:

Donald Trump has been insisting for years that our country has been too economically dependent on China, so it is sad that it took a global public health crisis to prove he was right all this time. When he began imposing strategic tariffs on China in response to its long history of abusive trade practices, the liberals all of a sudden became free trade fundamentalists, predicting that this new “trade war” would harm the American economy because we have relied so heavily on cheap Chinese imports for so many years. Instead, it was the Chinese economy that took a hard hit, while our economy at home surged to its strongest performance in half a century.

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The coronavirus outbreak around the world could dramatically accelerate the manufacturing exodus from China, as companies begin to recognize the perils of giving the authoritarian country so much power over their supply chains.

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Businesses that followed the lead of the president, however, were already ahead of the curve. The executives understood those artificial advantages that China always utilized to prop up its economy were going to disappear under the pressure of his tariffs, and the steps they took in anticipation of that, such as relocating production to other countries, ultimately reduced their exposure to the coronavirus crisis and its damaging consequences.

Trump is a farsighted man, infinitely more so than the Democrats swirling around in New York and D.C., wishing for America’s collapse so that they can win an election. (As a side note, they probably also hope for a collapse to create the kind of crisis that will enable them to impose socialist policies on America.)