“Chameleons Who Masquerade as the Media” Sydney Williams
Mainstream media spent the last three and a half years trying to destroy President Trump, or, if not him personally, his Presidency. He was accused of having had Russia interfere in the 2016 election on his behalf; a two-year, $35 million investigation by Robert Mueller exonerated him. Second, he was impeached and tried in the press for abuse of power and obstruction of justice. He was found innocent. Then, he was said to be responsible for thousands of deaths because of his slow response to COVID-19. One snarky reporter asked him if he deserved another term, as more people had died from the virus than had died in the Vietnam War. No mention was made of the 100,000 Americans who died in 1968 of the H3N2 virus. Mr. Trump has been accused of racism, misogyny and xenophobia. He is said to be scientifically illiterate with demagogic tendencies. Yet none of the charges have proved legitimate and none of them have caused him to change his behavior. The media remains undeterred. In Ground Hog Day fashion, they persist in their assassination of his character. Like chameleons, they change to suit the goal.
By the end of June, other concerns will face Mr. Trump’s opponents, among which will be the Durham report. His critics will be looking for other ways to expose his weaknesses. By the end of July, second quarter preliminary GDP estimates will be out and his critics will accuse him of causing a second Great Depression. The preliminary estimate for the first quarter, reported on Wednesday, showed an annualized decline of 4.8%, a quarter that included only two weeks of lockdown. Early estimates for the second quarter range from –20% to –30% by Kevin Hassett, former economic advisor to the President, to –40% by J.P. Morgan, with unemployment expected at 20%. In fact, in the past six weeks 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment, almost 20% of the 160 million labor force. These numbers rival or exceed what happened during the Great Depression. During that time, U.S. GDP declined 15% between 1929 and 1932 and unemployment reached 25 percent. For political purposes, the economy will supplant COVID-19 as the focus of the media. And who will be deemed responsible for that decline? Why, Mr. Trump, of course.
Mr. Trump is not a man without faults. But his critics are unprincipled. Consider the Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign in 2016, the politization of the IRS, FBI and the CIA by the Obama Administration, or the abuse of power by Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) in his futile impeachment of the President. Consider the financial ties of the Bidens’ to Ukraine and China, and the Clinton’s financial dealings with Russia. Politics is a rough game, often played by the unprincipled whose sole goal is to win. With power as the objective, patronage is the lubricant with which loyalties are formed and votes are secured. The bureaucracy of the administrative state wields enormous influence and Trump, an outsider, was always a threat to the comfortable way of life of those who reside inside the beltway.
As for COVID-19, facts about death rates have been manipulated and used to justify lockdowns: According to NPR on April 20, 58% of deaths in New York State from COVID-19 occurred in nursing homes in New York City. The CDC says that 80% of deaths occur in those over age 65; other organizations put that number higher. According to broadcaster WBEZ, 81% of deaths in Chicago are individuals with hypertension, high blood pressure or diabetes. The total number of deaths has been exaggerated: On April 8, Dr. Deborah Birx said: “…if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.” Perspective is needed. While COVID-19 is a novel virus, we still have been fed a diet of misinformation with a sauce of fear. A rational policy reaction that protected the vulnerable, practiced commonsensical health practices, like social distancing, masks where needed and scrubbing one’s hands would have allowed the economy to adjust naturally. The assumption that people are irresponsible – that they need to be under the tutelage of government officials – is the way of dictators to justify a totalitarian state.
The result is the economic downturn we have been in for the past several weeks. As George Gilder, Senior Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote recently: “President Trump had better take notice. He will soon own this gigantic botch of policy and leadership. No one will notice that his opponents urged even more policy blunders.” This recession (depression) will become the story over the next several weeks, one even “blue-state” governors will be unable to ignore. Connecticut, for example, is a small state of 3.5 million people, but it includes 8500 restaurants with 160,000 employees. Ninety percent of them are out of work. Most of the restaurants are small, family-owned places. Many will go bankrupt. Restoring the economy must be Mr. Trump’s priority.
President Trump must pivot to the economy. He had better understand the risk if he does not, and I suspect he does. He cares, I believe, for what has happened to out-of-work families. He is anxious to set the economy free, or, at least, freer than it has been. He has had a surfeit of advisors, not all with good advice. As for the public, misinformation has been the common experience. When models, which were proved inaccurate, showed devastating consequences, stringent measures were imposed, like shutting off flights from and to Europe and the UK and shutdowns of businesses, sports venues and schools. Throughout January and into March, the media never questioned the models and/or the conflicting assumptions made by medical experts and scientists. They took on faith what China said. Their interest was Trump destruction, not truth. The media has, as the song goes, “a chameleon soul” with no moral compass to drive their opinions. As a result, Americans never received a true picture of the virus.
While the press is filled with tragic stories of loss and happy stories of survival, at least two aspects of our three-and-a-half-month experience with COVID-19 do not show us in a good light: one is the willingness of people to obey without question those in positions of authority; the second is an on-going pessimism for the future, already reflected in declining marriages and birthrates. Both are in contrast to traits that helped create the American nation. We are told to wear masks, for example. So, people wear them, even outdoors when alone where the mask interferes with healthy air breezes. The optimism embedded in the image of a “city on the hill,” memorialized by John Winthrop in 1630 and then by Ronald Reagan in 1989, has become what Daniel Henninger called a “mind-set whose instinct is to diminish hope.”
Yet there are those who look at the facts and see promise. Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, recently sent a letter, “sober about the certain problems COVID-19 virus represents,” but welcoming students in August. Other voices of optimism are governors and those who plan to open, under guidelines, their businesses. It would be good to hear President Trump give one of his speeches – not a bickering exchange with the press – but one like those he gave in Warsaw, London and Davos, where, in grandiloquent terms, he elevated hope, not away from reason but toward a way out of the mire of negativity into which we have fallen, with COVID-19 and our excessive response. With a “can-do” attitude, the economy just might come back, perhaps stronger than ever.
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