Serving COVID-19 and Making Sense
By Michael Reagan
It’s lucky I’m being such a good American and sheltering at home.
Every day I’ve been able to watch President Trump’s coronavirus White House press briefings and the press conferences of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
It’s been tough keeping up with all the scientific, financial and political twists and turns of our national war on the coronavirus.
On Monday, I was ready to dump all my stocks and start hoarding cash when I heard predictions of 37 million unemployed and concerns about the coming of another Great Depression.
But I calmed down after watching the president and his medical experts at their Tuesday press conference.
There were a lot of crazy charts with curves and coronavirus numbers flying around.
And to be honest, I’m not sure I remember exactly what Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said, other than that the latest real-time data on the virus shows the U.S. death toll will be much lower than originally projected by the doomsayers – between 100,000 and 200,000, maybe even lower.
That good news for our spooked and shut-down country did little to reduce the number of gotcha questions from the liberal media rats in the White House press room, who spend most of their time trying to trip up Trump.
It’s fine for journalists to be critical, probing and even adversarial. That’s their job.
And nobody expects the liberal media to applaud Trump for little miracles, like slashing bureaucratic red tape at the FDA or getting private companies like GM and Libby to quickly crank out stockpiles of ventilators and instant COVID-19 test kits.
But unless you’re hopelessly blinded by “Trump derangement syndrome,” as too many liberal journalists still are, you have to admit that President Trump has become a pretty good “war general.”
He’s made several huge strategic decisions, unleashed trillions of federal dollars, put together important public-private partnerships, delegated lots of power to governors and surrounded himself with some of the best medical and health experts in the country.
In fact, if you ask me, we’re lucky we have Trump as president.
He’s a lifelong businessman – not a lifelong politician – and he acts that way, thank God, for good and bad… but mostly good.
Can you imagine if an aging swamp creature like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden were our president right now?
Hillary would have appointed Bill, head of the Coronavirus Task Force in February and he’d still be out in Las Vegas interviewing show-girls for his staff.
OK, that might be a little unfair to what’s left of Clinton Inc. But can anyone imagine President Joe Biden as our coronavirus-killer-in-chief?
Before he took any action, to appease the AOC-Sanders wing of his party, Biden would form an ethnically diverse, politically correct and perfectly color-balanced 35-person commission composed of union bosses, Yale law professors, illegal immigrants, Nation magazine editorial writers and Mr. and Mrs. Joe Scarborough.
Then before the commission did anything, it’d take two months to decide if it was really fair of us to blame the global spread of the coronavirus on the lies and secrecy of China’s communist government without more proof from the World Health Organization.
Seriously, though. Nobody saw this new coronavirus pandemic coming in time.
Not President Trump. Not the CDC. Not Dr. Fauci. Not Dr. Pelosi. Not even the brilliant Dr. Rachel Maddow.
Shutting down the country so quickly and tightly may turn out to have been a gigantic blunder caused by a perfect storm of bad data, bad modeling, bad journalism, bad politics and bad decision-making by the people in charge.
But it’s too late to turn back the clock. We did what we did and now we’ll have to pay the steep price.
But if your state doesn’t have enough ventilators and masks, it’s not Trump’s fault.
It isn’t the federal government’s fault, either. Or your state’s fault. Or Gov. Cuomo’s fault. No one was ready for this pandemic, so let’s quit pointing fingers.
And another thing.
Until this nightmare ends, which I hope is very soon, please don’t just shelter in your home. Shelter in your own state.
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Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
It’s unfair to make predictions about what Joe Biden would or would not have done as president unless your crystal ball is much clearer than mine and others’. We cannot know if Biden would have made better or worse decisions. We only have Trump’s actions to evaluate. You can feel he’s done a fine job but many of us see his wasted time early on as more than a little troublesome as those who lost loved ones already may be thinking, too. We may not lose the 100,000 to 200,000 that were predicted but the loss of the lives we have witnessed so far is perhaps more than needed, and his removal of the man who would have overseen the distribution of $2.2T is very troubling. Will his rich cronies be at that feeding trough with no oversight? Actually, too many of his actions during this time have been more than a little troubling. During his presidency he’s gone off script generally with his political tirades and now he can’t even speak from the heart to the American people but must speak from script. Somehow he has it backward. Now is when the American people need a leader who can actually give them some hope in a powerful and heart-felt way.