by Jeffrey Tucker via Brownstone.org All sources we have so far testify that Trump greenlighted nationwide lockdowns the weekend of March 14-15, 2020, under the influence of Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, Jared Kushner, and a few others. Brownstone has documented this weekend in great detail. This disastrous decision culminated in the
It’s too bad that Trump won’t publicly admit and apologize for his responsibility in this. He seems blind to the idea such a public admission could be seen as a sign of strength, not weakness. This is perhaps his main Achilles heel for me.
really broke my heart when Trump advocated for lockdowns and slammed the people were against them. He never spoke out about the worst of the worst governors either, like Newsom who controls the largest population. He instead chose to target governors who were low hanging fruit and whose decisions were inconsequential, like Kemp, as compared to Newsom’s CA where we had some of the strictest and most ridiculous Covid policies that affected 40 million+ people. The man is a coward and a fraud. I’ve lost all respect I once had for him.
He stood for nothing, so he fell for anything. That’s the tragedy of Trump and the acolytes he pulled along for the ride. Read Graham Greene’s inexplicably unknown book “Dr Fischer Of Geneva” for the best explanation of how so many folks who should have known better got sucked in.
That is why we are supporting and voting for Ron DeSantis. Trump did a lot of good things but he is blind to anything he got wrong which means he wont learn from his mistakes. He doesn't believe he makes mistakes... Ever. That is not a man of God that is a man who thinks he is God.
Thanks for a great article. The ability to understand what is happening in real time around oneself, make decisions based on that information, assess said information in real time and admit when those decisions are not working or have to be changed is the fundamental basis for effective problem solving. (In a nutshell.) also assessment of resources, their reliability, and also the accountability and allegiance of these resources is key to having a plan which works.
The best in whatever field, you name it… Doctor, Lawyer, engineer can be the brightest smartest in their field and even understand the plan precisely and in detail, yet if their allegiance lies elsewhere your plan is doomed to failure and you will appear inept because of this. Now if you have the ability to do the assessment, AND, are you ready for it, drum roll please, can honestly come out and say, “ The original plan here, although what seemed at the time to be based on good information, was actually based on false information from some bright people who had a whole other agenda in place all along not necessarily what was best for the American people, they have been relieved of their positions and another team is in place and here is our plan. I was fooled and for that I am wrong and we are going to make this right starting here and now.”
Maybe or something to that effect, just walking away and ignoring the situation makes one seem impotent, as opposed to important, sorry had to go there.
Here’s were I will get lambasted but again, proper assessment of the facts is key to operational success.
Donald Trump has a flaw, as I see it, and that is he thinks he has this Svengali like spell he can cast on people and they will all just magically do as he expects, shocker to report this, Washington and the world for that matter don’t work like that. You can not leave smart people in positions of power who do not have allegiance to your cause and expect good things to happen. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet, you have to get down and dirty and not worry about appearances if you want to get a job done.
Prior to the White House the man was known for, “You’re fired You’re fired” and then he gets into the White House and you expect a house cleaning and all you here is, “It’s gonna look bad if I get rid of them,” and “They’ll come around,” well guess what, they didn’t come around and you ended up looking bad.
Now I will end with this, I voted for the man twice, if he were the finally candidate for the Republican ticket I would probably vote for him again, because right now I don’t see anything resembling a president appearing on the horizon from the other side. But at some point I think Trump needs to get honest and stop whining about how bad other people are doing and change his tone and talk about the failures, his failures that caused the breakdowns in his administration, which ultimately cost him the election and put us where we are today. Remember something, whether you think the election was stolen or not,( which just for the record, Brandon was almost out of the primary before super Tuesday then rebounds magically and amasses 81 million votes without even campaigning, yea sure ok, are you interested in buying the Brooklyn Bridge.) the policies which were laid down as a result of the lockdowns led to the mail in voting fiasco and the social distancing which allowed the vote counting areas to be locked down and votes counted in secrecy with no oversight. It all began with,” 15 days to flatten the curve”
This is why I will not support Trump again. He had his opportunity and he blew it. He thought he could BS his way through it just like he has his whole life. He failed to realize that Fauci and Birx were better BS artists than he was. Time to move forward and get behind some one younger and vital and who made the correct decisions for his state with regards to Covid-19
Reading these details of Trump's lockdown decision/indecisions makes me suspect that his daughter and Jared Kushner were the ones who influenced Trump's COVID policies the most.
Equally important, just think if Trump would have installed people who insisted that sick people would have been treated with off label drugs and supplements and insisted that people would not have to wait until they couldn’t breathe. Think of the lives that could have been saved.
The Tucker article shows, if correct in it's analysis, that Trump can very easily be manipulated by smart (evil, but smart) people who know that all you have to do is stroke that ego, tell him he is going to be "the most fabulous president that ever walked the earth" and that is just too enticing to him to actually stop, think, get smart people in the room, etc. The irony is that if he had stuck with his originally correct instincts (this is a bad bad flu that we can smartly manage) he WOULD be considered an amazing president. To me, this completely and totally disqualifies this man from ever stepping foot in the White House ever again.
I still cannot believe this happened and that we all complied. By mid April, many of us knew the dire predictions were wrong. Is there a "leader" running now that you think would have told Fauci and Birx to pound sand? I can think of one: Thomas Massie.
Since we're conjecturing, I believe this presentation is strong, but doesn't look far enough back to present important information that Tucker shared in his conjecture. Let's take a trip back to an earlier time for that.
Trump's initial travel ban from China was at the end of January, 2020. It went against all previous pandemic planning guides, including the CDC and WHO's. Travel bans for respiratory infectious disease like influenza were demonstrably and acknowledged as ineffective. Strongly cautioned against because they are political acts that destabilize world order. Remember, he was called xenophobic for issuing that travel ban. The ineffectiveness of them known prior to 2020 turned out to be true, no jurisdiction could seal itself off. Not even remote islands.
It was a political act. Which provoked a political response. It was the moment that infectious disease became a political weapon, just as pandemic health experts had warned against for decades before 2020. Political infectious disease was going to be diagnosed and treated with political social and behavioral science. Instead of natural medical and virological science.
A quick look back a little further reveals that Pres. Trump had just made two high profile speeches, to the UN and WEF in the weeks ahead of the China travel ban. In those speeches he threw down the gauntlet, "America would never be socialist!" A white glove tossed at the global socialist feet. A challenge to a duel in bygone days.
After Trump's travel ban global actors and domestic political opportunists formulated a behavioral science pandemic response plan, abandoning the medical science plans produced by the best minds and large research budgets for decades. Epidemiology is also informed by behavioral sciences, not just medical. And immediately adopted the Nonpharmaceutical Intervention tool/weapon of fear. Weaponized fear. Under the cover of behavioral science that declared populations needed to have their flawed risk perceptions "fixed" so we would behave properly and avoid each other, comply with edicts that eliminated essential rights and liberty. Follow The Science (TM) - just not the type of science you believed they meant, hiding psychological manipulations in the ambiguity of the word, "science."
Behaviorists diagnosed us as suffering from "optimism bias." We suffered from optimism! So we needed to be sufficiently frightened. Media and Big Tech were enlisted to amplify fear, long known for the "if it bleeds it leads" news model. Intentionally amplified fear. Also known as "terrorizing." The only efficacy that any science shows about masks if they amplify fear, hidden faces do that to the amygdala. Which is why bank robbers and hijackers were the only ones we saw masking faces before 2020. Nine out of ten terrorists prefer wearing masks for a reason greater than hiding their ID. Which is why they've become an essential tool/weapon of the pandemicists.
Behavioral Science is also known as "the Science of Totalitarianism," described as such in the UK Guardian in revelations in March, 2021 by SPI-B behaviorists frightened by how effective and dangerous its application had been on the once free liberal democracy the UK was. Same in the US.
The global socialists saw Trump's challenge, Trump's white glove throw down as an opportunity to win that war for the future of global governance before Trump could figure out what hit him. Foreign and domestic malign actors collaborating to take down western liberal democracies without firing a shot.
Trump was already a bruised and battered president, isolated in his own administration, unable to trust the guidance of his own inner circle. A conjured impeachment trial was just wrapping up as news of Wuhan Flu circling the globe made headlines.
For whatever reason, we can only speculate, this is all speculative, save for the behavioral science protocols we know were deployed, Trump made his fateful decision to shut us down in March. By then the die was cast. And Fauci and Birx...and Jared...knew they held every advantage. America was destined to be a socialist nation, a totalitarian nation, from that moment on. Trump's gambit lost. Or is losing badly. And will take every bit of American and global resolve for freedom fighters to overcome the Leviathan that we're now up against.
Whether Trump's known germophobia, his political calculus, his dislike of China, whatever his reasons influenced that key decision we'll never know. His ego apparently too large to admit how disastrous it was. He knows he wants freedom, Americans want freedom. But he remains asea about why we got here in the first place. Flailing about trying to pin blame elsewhere
With this conjecture of mine shaping my understanding of history I have dissonance in pinning it all on him. He had saboteurs all around him, including his own family (Jared and Ivanka). He's a tragic figure in that sense. And he's struggled and fought harder for a restoration of our constitutional rights and values, individual liberty than most anyone since. He's the only figure with the stature and command to hold the flag of liberty high enough for freedom lovers to rally under. Not even DeSantis can command the energy and fortitude needed to inspire us to regain our freedoms lost. So it's hard to completely reject him.
Problem is, was, that initial moment of hesitation, that flicker in the flame of eternal liberty that he indulged which led us to the present. The totalitarian beast of fear is hard to get control of when let out of its restraints. It runs wild in the public mind, with political opportunists trying to ride it to power and to achieve their agendas. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And it is up to us, We The People, to reclaim our freedom and liberty that are our birthright. It won't be easy. And casualties abound. But we must. A test of if we truly are the land of the free and home of the brave. Will we "pay any price, bear any burden...for the cause of liberty"?
I hope readers find this conjecture that precedes Tucker's timeline thought-provoking. And assertions I make in it that are definitive and not just conjecture come from highly credible sources, happy to share with the curious.
Donald Trump is reliably inconsistent about everything. His White House made bad recommendations, but Trump didn't actually shut anything down. South Dakota remained open. They never had any lockdowns or mandates -- not even in the spring of 2020 when DeSantis was down in Florida shutting down the beach to prevent COLLEGE STUDENTS from having spring break OUTSIDE (the lowest risk group in the lowest risk setting). The States that had the most stringent lockdowns and mandates tended to be governed by Donald Trump's political opponents.
Trump didn't have any real authority. Trump asked for "15 days to flatten the curve" and South Dakota stayed open. Trump tweeted "Liberate Michigan" and Michigan stayed locked down. At the end of the day, Donald Trump said things about the pandemic that were wrong, and his White House made bad recommendations. He should own up to that (but he's so arrogant that he won't). But at the end of the day I'm not too concerned with condemning the man for something he didn't have any real power over in the first place.
If you didn't like the COVID response, the #1 person you should be blaming is your governor because that's who really had the power.
Even when I liked things that Donald Trump did, I always hated that he was so abrasive and such a poor communicator that he couldn't win-over skeptics and make the case for what he wanted to do even when he was right.
By May 18th, New York City had seen almost 25,000 extra people die in two months -- thanks to panic, propaganda, public health messaging, policies, and protocols did that (versus the alleged sudden spread of a deadlier-than-flu respiratory virus).
It’s too bad that Trump won’t publicly admit and apologize for his responsibility in this. He seems blind to the idea such a public admission could be seen as a sign of strength, not weakness. This is perhaps his main Achilles heel for me.
really broke my heart when Trump advocated for lockdowns and slammed the people were against them. He never spoke out about the worst of the worst governors either, like Newsom who controls the largest population. He instead chose to target governors who were low hanging fruit and whose decisions were inconsequential, like Kemp, as compared to Newsom’s CA where we had some of the strictest and most ridiculous Covid policies that affected 40 million+ people. The man is a coward and a fraud. I’ve lost all respect I once had for him.
He stood for nothing, so he fell for anything. That’s the tragedy of Trump and the acolytes he pulled along for the ride. Read Graham Greene’s inexplicably unknown book “Dr Fischer Of Geneva” for the best explanation of how so many folks who should have known better got sucked in.
That is why we are supporting and voting for Ron DeSantis. Trump did a lot of good things but he is blind to anything he got wrong which means he wont learn from his mistakes. He doesn't believe he makes mistakes... Ever. That is not a man of God that is a man who thinks he is God.
Thanks for a great article. The ability to understand what is happening in real time around oneself, make decisions based on that information, assess said information in real time and admit when those decisions are not working or have to be changed is the fundamental basis for effective problem solving. (In a nutshell.) also assessment of resources, their reliability, and also the accountability and allegiance of these resources is key to having a plan which works.
The best in whatever field, you name it… Doctor, Lawyer, engineer can be the brightest smartest in their field and even understand the plan precisely and in detail, yet if their allegiance lies elsewhere your plan is doomed to failure and you will appear inept because of this. Now if you have the ability to do the assessment, AND, are you ready for it, drum roll please, can honestly come out and say, “ The original plan here, although what seemed at the time to be based on good information, was actually based on false information from some bright people who had a whole other agenda in place all along not necessarily what was best for the American people, they have been relieved of their positions and another team is in place and here is our plan. I was fooled and for that I am wrong and we are going to make this right starting here and now.”
Maybe or something to that effect, just walking away and ignoring the situation makes one seem impotent, as opposed to important, sorry had to go there.
Here’s were I will get lambasted but again, proper assessment of the facts is key to operational success.
Donald Trump has a flaw, as I see it, and that is he thinks he has this Svengali like spell he can cast on people and they will all just magically do as he expects, shocker to report this, Washington and the world for that matter don’t work like that. You can not leave smart people in positions of power who do not have allegiance to your cause and expect good things to happen. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet, you have to get down and dirty and not worry about appearances if you want to get a job done.
Prior to the White House the man was known for, “You’re fired You’re fired” and then he gets into the White House and you expect a house cleaning and all you here is, “It’s gonna look bad if I get rid of them,” and “They’ll come around,” well guess what, they didn’t come around and you ended up looking bad.
Now I will end with this, I voted for the man twice, if he were the finally candidate for the Republican ticket I would probably vote for him again, because right now I don’t see anything resembling a president appearing on the horizon from the other side. But at some point I think Trump needs to get honest and stop whining about how bad other people are doing and change his tone and talk about the failures, his failures that caused the breakdowns in his administration, which ultimately cost him the election and put us where we are today. Remember something, whether you think the election was stolen or not,( which just for the record, Brandon was almost out of the primary before super Tuesday then rebounds magically and amasses 81 million votes without even campaigning, yea sure ok, are you interested in buying the Brooklyn Bridge.) the policies which were laid down as a result of the lockdowns led to the mail in voting fiasco and the social distancing which allowed the vote counting areas to be locked down and votes counted in secrecy with no oversight. It all began with,” 15 days to flatten the curve”
Sorry I had to get that off my chest
As always, Be Well, Blessings Always
“Seeker”
This is why I will not support Trump again. He had his opportunity and he blew it. He thought he could BS his way through it just like he has his whole life. He failed to realize that Fauci and Birx were better BS artists than he was. Time to move forward and get behind some one younger and vital and who made the correct decisions for his state with regards to Covid-19
Reading these details of Trump's lockdown decision/indecisions makes me suspect that his daughter and Jared Kushner were the ones who influenced Trump's COVID policies the most.
Equally important, just think if Trump would have installed people who insisted that sick people would have been treated with off label drugs and supplements and insisted that people would not have to wait until they couldn’t breathe. Think of the lives that could have been saved.
The Tucker article shows, if correct in it's analysis, that Trump can very easily be manipulated by smart (evil, but smart) people who know that all you have to do is stroke that ego, tell him he is going to be "the most fabulous president that ever walked the earth" and that is just too enticing to him to actually stop, think, get smart people in the room, etc. The irony is that if he had stuck with his originally correct instincts (this is a bad bad flu that we can smartly manage) he WOULD be considered an amazing president. To me, this completely and totally disqualifies this man from ever stepping foot in the White House ever again.
I still cannot believe this happened and that we all complied. By mid April, many of us knew the dire predictions were wrong. Is there a "leader" running now that you think would have told Fauci and Birx to pound sand? I can think of one: Thomas Massie.
Since we're conjecturing, I believe this presentation is strong, but doesn't look far enough back to present important information that Tucker shared in his conjecture. Let's take a trip back to an earlier time for that.
Trump's initial travel ban from China was at the end of January, 2020. It went against all previous pandemic planning guides, including the CDC and WHO's. Travel bans for respiratory infectious disease like influenza were demonstrably and acknowledged as ineffective. Strongly cautioned against because they are political acts that destabilize world order. Remember, he was called xenophobic for issuing that travel ban. The ineffectiveness of them known prior to 2020 turned out to be true, no jurisdiction could seal itself off. Not even remote islands.
It was a political act. Which provoked a political response. It was the moment that infectious disease became a political weapon, just as pandemic health experts had warned against for decades before 2020. Political infectious disease was going to be diagnosed and treated with political social and behavioral science. Instead of natural medical and virological science.
A quick look back a little further reveals that Pres. Trump had just made two high profile speeches, to the UN and WEF in the weeks ahead of the China travel ban. In those speeches he threw down the gauntlet, "America would never be socialist!" A white glove tossed at the global socialist feet. A challenge to a duel in bygone days.
After Trump's travel ban global actors and domestic political opportunists formulated a behavioral science pandemic response plan, abandoning the medical science plans produced by the best minds and large research budgets for decades. Epidemiology is also informed by behavioral sciences, not just medical. And immediately adopted the Nonpharmaceutical Intervention tool/weapon of fear. Weaponized fear. Under the cover of behavioral science that declared populations needed to have their flawed risk perceptions "fixed" so we would behave properly and avoid each other, comply with edicts that eliminated essential rights and liberty. Follow The Science (TM) - just not the type of science you believed they meant, hiding psychological manipulations in the ambiguity of the word, "science."
Behaviorists diagnosed us as suffering from "optimism bias." We suffered from optimism! So we needed to be sufficiently frightened. Media and Big Tech were enlisted to amplify fear, long known for the "if it bleeds it leads" news model. Intentionally amplified fear. Also known as "terrorizing." The only efficacy that any science shows about masks if they amplify fear, hidden faces do that to the amygdala. Which is why bank robbers and hijackers were the only ones we saw masking faces before 2020. Nine out of ten terrorists prefer wearing masks for a reason greater than hiding their ID. Which is why they've become an essential tool/weapon of the pandemicists.
Behavioral Science is also known as "the Science of Totalitarianism," described as such in the UK Guardian in revelations in March, 2021 by SPI-B behaviorists frightened by how effective and dangerous its application had been on the once free liberal democracy the UK was. Same in the US.
The global socialists saw Trump's challenge, Trump's white glove throw down as an opportunity to win that war for the future of global governance before Trump could figure out what hit him. Foreign and domestic malign actors collaborating to take down western liberal democracies without firing a shot.
Trump was already a bruised and battered president, isolated in his own administration, unable to trust the guidance of his own inner circle. A conjured impeachment trial was just wrapping up as news of Wuhan Flu circling the globe made headlines.
For whatever reason, we can only speculate, this is all speculative, save for the behavioral science protocols we know were deployed, Trump made his fateful decision to shut us down in March. By then the die was cast. And Fauci and Birx...and Jared...knew they held every advantage. America was destined to be a socialist nation, a totalitarian nation, from that moment on. Trump's gambit lost. Or is losing badly. And will take every bit of American and global resolve for freedom fighters to overcome the Leviathan that we're now up against.
Whether Trump's known germophobia, his political calculus, his dislike of China, whatever his reasons influenced that key decision we'll never know. His ego apparently too large to admit how disastrous it was. He knows he wants freedom, Americans want freedom. But he remains asea about why we got here in the first place. Flailing about trying to pin blame elsewhere
With this conjecture of mine shaping my understanding of history I have dissonance in pinning it all on him. He had saboteurs all around him, including his own family (Jared and Ivanka). He's a tragic figure in that sense. And he's struggled and fought harder for a restoration of our constitutional rights and values, individual liberty than most anyone since. He's the only figure with the stature and command to hold the flag of liberty high enough for freedom lovers to rally under. Not even DeSantis can command the energy and fortitude needed to inspire us to regain our freedoms lost. So it's hard to completely reject him.
Problem is, was, that initial moment of hesitation, that flicker in the flame of eternal liberty that he indulged which led us to the present. The totalitarian beast of fear is hard to get control of when let out of its restraints. It runs wild in the public mind, with political opportunists trying to ride it to power and to achieve their agendas. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And it is up to us, We The People, to reclaim our freedom and liberty that are our birthright. It won't be easy. And casualties abound. But we must. A test of if we truly are the land of the free and home of the brave. Will we "pay any price, bear any burden...for the cause of liberty"?
I hope readers find this conjecture that precedes Tucker's timeline thought-provoking. And assertions I make in it that are definitive and not just conjecture come from highly credible sources, happy to share with the curious.
What I’ve learned in six months as a Substack writer. Two: Substack writers support one another; Substack itself is the biggest media story in years.
Also, The Brownstone Institute and writers like Justin are leading the good fight. I also think "our" side is growing faster than "their" side.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/what-ive-learned-in-6-months-on-substack
Donald Trump is reliably inconsistent about everything. His White House made bad recommendations, but Trump didn't actually shut anything down. South Dakota remained open. They never had any lockdowns or mandates -- not even in the spring of 2020 when DeSantis was down in Florida shutting down the beach to prevent COLLEGE STUDENTS from having spring break OUTSIDE (the lowest risk group in the lowest risk setting). The States that had the most stringent lockdowns and mandates tended to be governed by Donald Trump's political opponents.
Trump didn't have any real authority. Trump asked for "15 days to flatten the curve" and South Dakota stayed open. Trump tweeted "Liberate Michigan" and Michigan stayed locked down. At the end of the day, Donald Trump said things about the pandemic that were wrong, and his White House made bad recommendations. He should own up to that (but he's so arrogant that he won't). But at the end of the day I'm not too concerned with condemning the man for something he didn't have any real power over in the first place.
If you didn't like the COVID response, the #1 person you should be blaming is your governor because that's who really had the power.
Even when I liked things that Donald Trump did, I always hated that he was so abrasive and such a poor communicator that he couldn't win-over skeptics and make the case for what he wanted to do even when he was right.
By May 18th, New York City had seen almost 25,000 extra people die in two months -- thanks to panic, propaganda, public health messaging, policies, and protocols did that (versus the alleged sudden spread of a deadlier-than-flu respiratory virus).
Remind me: Where is Trump from?
"Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion."
Check out my tweet from May 2020. I saw it and said it:
https://twitter.com/joeepopp/status/1257118857053036544
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-they-convinced-trump-to-lock-down/