The level of media opposition and snark against President Trump is simply so ridiculous at this point there’s a desperation to it.  So let us consider…

From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:

1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States.  A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States.  A return to economic independence.
3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products.  China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

Donald Trump was alone on these issues.  No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.

Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?

In early 2017 President Trump and his administration coined the phrase: “economic security is national security”, and the economic team set about starting a very complex process to ensure the past three decades of trade policy was reversed.

One month after taking office, February 2017, President Trump met with labor unions and assembled a corporate manufacturing council, telling all of them they needed to change their thinking about manufacturing overseas.

The members of the council didn’t like the conversation; many of them were Wall Street multinationals who were themselves part of the historic shift in moving jobs to Asia and beyond.  Several months later the council disbanded amid the policy contention; but Trump persisted with the America First agenda.

President Trump, never wavered; he warned the corporate CEO’s they needed to adjust their thinking and bring back their manufacturing jobs.  Trump warned them to reorient their supply chains because they had become too dependent on China; and that dependency was manifesting as geopolitical risk if the U.S. and China were in conflict.

Time after time, conversation after conversation, in the background of events where few media were paying attention, President Trump spoke privately and publicly about the issue of over-reliance on Chinese products and critical goods from southeast Asia.

Then, after months of warnings, came the tariff hammer.

Those same manufacturing council executives and their Wall Street pundits screamed into every microphone they could find that President Trump was going to collapse the economy; that consumer prices would skyrocket; that Steel and Aluminum tariffs would mean everything from beer to soup would no longer be affordable.

Team Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and USTR Robert Lighthizer didn’t waiver.  President Trump accepted the criticism of “Tariff-Man”; he owned the downside and then expanded the tariffs even higher upon more goods.  The CEO’s shrieked louder, but eventually, reluctantly, some started moving supply chains out of China.

While Team Trump renegotiated trade with South Korea and Japan; and while Trump renegotiated NAFTA with Mexico and Canada; the president kept the pressure on those U.S. corporations and multinationals to return critical manufacturing to the United States.

Now, with the global pandemic known as Coronavirus, people are starting to awaken to the real dangers of our medicines, pharmaceuticals and critical health care products being made overseas.  Right now we see the clear reasons why President Trump was so adamant about a conversation no-one wanted, Wall Street hated, and few were paying attention to.

Heck, it is only now that most Americans realize just how many critical products are at risk…. and instead of thanking President Trump for the foresight, the incredible prescience he exhibited, the professional political class are criticizing him for over minor details in addressing an issue they allowed to happen.  In many cases those who are now criticizing are the same people who participated in assisting the dependency, for decades.

The criticism is not only unreal to witness, it’s maddening in the scale of its hypocrisy.

On January 30th while Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer were literally trying to impeach President Trump; on that very day President Trump was assembling a task force in advance of his authorization for HHS Secretary Alex Azar to declare a proactive national health emergency.

On the exact same day the Senate was debating whether to call more witnesses for the Senate impeachment trial, the newly assembled Coronavirus Task Force was holding a press conference to outline: in accordance with the national health emergency declaration, at 5:00 p.m. EST; Sunday, February 2nd, the U.S government would implement temporary measures to increase detection & containment of the coronavirus proactively:

Any U.S. citizen returning to the United States who was in Hubei Province in the previous 14 days was/is subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine. Any U.S. citizen returning to the United States who was in the rest of Mainland China within the previous 14 days was put through proactive entry health screening at a select number of ports of entry, and up to 14 days of monitored self-quarantine. All foreign nationals, other than U.S. citizens and permanent residents, who traveled in China within the prior 14 days were denied entry into the United States.  (link)

Simultaneous to this joint HHS, CDC and NIH announcement, on the other side of Capitol Hill, the U.S. Senate voted on whether to add additional impeachment witnesses; and what the impeachment process would be moving forward.

Guess which event the media covered?….

So perhaps it’s not a surprise that most Americans did not know about the proactive steps that President Trump was taking.  After all, the entirety of the media focus was on a ridiculous Senate impeachment trial while the White House Coronavirus mitigation effort was happening.

However, it sure is blood-boiling to watch the media now. To see the media cheer-leading for a national health crisis -literally with smiling faces as they hope for an economic collapse- for the exact same gleeful reason they cheered the impeachment effort.   The level of U.S. media vitriol against President Trump is sickening.

The American mainstream media truly is the enemy of a prosperous and thriving America.

These times will never be forgotten.

God bless President Trump….

….And Thank You Prescient Trump.

We will never forget.

“Together we are putting into policy a plan to prevent, detect, treat and create a vaccine against coronavirus to save lives in America and the world. America will get it done!”

– President Donald J. Trump

President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to protect the health of Americans in response to the coronavirus.  The President is leveraging all of our resources to respond to the coronavirus, bringing together government and private industry in a collaborative response.

The Trump Administration declared a public health emergency in January to bolster response efforts.  President Trump took early action to help curb the spread of the virus from other countries to the United States, providing important time for response and preparations.

• In January, President Trump acted quickly to restrict travel from foreign nationals traveling from China.
• In February, the President restricted travel for individuals recently traveling from Iran.
• The Administration put into place mandatory screening for all travelers coming into the country from Italy and South Korea.
• Travel advisories for severely impacted areas like Italy and South Korea have been raised to their highest level.
• President Trump is issuing a proclamation under section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to restrict travel to the United States from foreign nationals who have recently been in certain European countries.

The President directed his Administration to make general-use face masks available to our healthcare workers.  This action will help make millions of general-use respirators available to keep healthcare workers safe & mitigate transmission of the virus.

• President Trump signed into law more than $8 billion to fund response efforts.
• The Administration has taken bold steps to incentivize the development of therapeutics and vaccines to treat and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
• Working across the public and private sectors, the Trump Administration continues to drastically expand testing capacity using Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp.
• More than 1 million tests have been distributed nationwide, with another 4 million tests being shipped out by the end of the week.
• Testing is now available in every State lab in the country and commercial labs are now deploying tests, which will help generate a dramatic increase in availability.
• The Trump Administration has released guidance on how to keep businesses, schools, community gathering places, and families safe.
• From the start, President Trump has made keeping the public informed a top priority.  There are daily 5:30pm briefings from the Coronavirus task force.
• The Administration met with health insurance companies and announced that health plans with health savings accounts will be able to cover coronavirus testing and treatment without co-payments.

The President is announcing an economic assistance package to help support businesses and workers who have been harmed by this outbreak. President Trump has also instructed the Small Business Administration (SBA) to exercise available authority to provide loans to businesses affected by the coronavirus.

• These loans will help overcome disruptions caused by the coronavirus.
• The President is calling on Congress to increase funding for this program by an additional $50 billion.

The President will be instructing the Department of the Treasury to defer tax payments for certain individuals and businesses negatively impacted by the coronavirus. This action will provide more than $200 billion of additional liquidity to the economy.

• President Trump is calling on Congress to immediately pass payroll tax relief.
• The President announced that he will soon be taking emergency action to provide financial relief for workers who are ill, quarantined, or caring for others due to the coronavirus.
• The President also called on Congress to take action to extend this relief for workers.

The Supreme Court announced today the Trump administration may continue to enforce the “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico pending a review of their claims.

A lower court deemed the program illegal and ordered a suspension that was scheduled to take effect Thursday.  However the Supreme Court stay allows the Trump administration Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) to remain in force:

(White House) – Today’s order from the Supreme Court is a major victory for the Trump Administration. By allowing the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) to remain in effect, the Court has prevented dangerous chaos at the southern border, avoided a significant escalation in public health threats, and mitigated damage to foreign relations.

MPP, which faithfully implements section 235(b)(2)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, has been crucial to our success working with Mexico to control rampant illegal migration, smuggling, and cartel-driven human trafficking, all of which present wide-ranging risks to both our countries and to the migrants themselves. Open borders do not serve the American public, and we will always strongly enforce the laws at our borders and airports.  (Link)

Good news.  President Trump has endorsed Tommy Tuberville over Jeff Sessions for the Alabama senate race.  This is a resounding message to Sessions showing just how badly his tenure at the DOJ is considered by President Trump:

Congratulations Tommy Tuberville.  Additionally, a recent poll today showed Tuberville leading Jeff Sessions by 12 points (52/40) in Alabama. [LINK]

Earlier today President Trump and VP Mike Pence traveled to Capitol Hill to brief congress on the efforts of the Coronavirus task force and hold discussions on what legislative measures might be needed.  [Video and Transcript Below]

.

[Transcript] – THE PRESIDENT: So we just had a great meeting. Tremendous unity in the Republican Party. And we’re working on a lot of different things. We’ve also had some very good updates on the virus. That’s working out very smoothly. Tremendous people. It’s a tremendous task force. They have done a great job — not a good job, a great job.

As you know, it’s about 600 cases, it’s about 26 deaths, within our country. And had we not acted quickly, that number would have been substantially more. But we — we just had a meeting on stimulus, and you’ll be hearing about it soon. But it was a great meeting.

There’s great unity within the Republican Party.

Q Mr. President, Republican senators yesterday, they seemed rather skeptical of this. They weren’t sure that they wanted to do it on a payroll tax holiday. How do you convince them? Is that the right approach?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I was just with the Republican senators, and there was — they were just about all there, mostly all there — and there’s a great feeling about doing a lot of things. And that’s one of the things we talked about.

Q And what about the ideas proposed by Nancy Pelosi? It raised some —

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we’re going to see. They came in very chopped up. A lot of them are things that she wanted to get for other things, and we’re looking at the people. We’re looking at solving this problem.

Also, some very good numbers coming out of some countries where it started earlier. And we’re seeing some fairly good numbers come out of those countries — that’s a good thing — including China. And they’ve released numbers, and we’ve gotten some numbers from China that look pretty promising. So we’ll be able to further report.

Please.

Q But why not get tested yourself? I mean, you’ve interacted with Matt Gaetz and Doug Collins in the last few days.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don’t think it’s a big deal. I would do it. I don’t feel that — any reason. I feel extremely good. I feel very good. But I guess it’s not a big deal to get tested. And it’s something I would do.

But again, I spoke to the White House doctor — terrific guy, talented guy — he said he sees no reason to do it. There’s no symptoms, no anything.

And you know what? If there were, you people would be the first to know it. You would — you would maybe even tell me about it.

Yes, please.

Q Mr. President, have you been briefed that up to 100 million Americans would ultimately be exposed to the virus?

THE PRESIDENT: I’ve been briefed on every contingency you can possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of —

Q But that number.

THE PRESIDENT: — a lot of positive. Different numbers. All different numbers. Very large numbers. And some small numbers too, by the way.

Look, right now, I guess we’re at 26 deaths, and if you look at the flu — the flu, for this year — we’re at 8 mil- — we’re looking at 8,000 deaths. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of cases, but we have 8,000 deaths. So you have 8,000 versus 26 deaths, at this time.

With all of that being said, we’re taking this unbelievably seriously, and I think we’re doing a really good job. And, again, the task force, headed up by the Vice President, has been fantastic.

Q Why has the U.S. been so slow with testing? Other countries have tested tens of thousands.

THE PRESIDENT: No, I think the U.S. has done a very good job on testing. We had to change things that were done, that were nobody’s fault. Perhaps they wanted to do something a different way, but it was a much slower process from a previous administration. And we did change them. We made the changes. But the testing has gone very well. And when people need a test, they can get a test. When the professionals need a test, when they need tests for people, they can get the test. It’s gone really well.

Look, the biggest thing that we did was stopping the inflow of people early on, and that was weeks ahead of schedule, weeks ahead of what other people would have done. In fact, other people, mostly, would probably not have done it even until now. And that’s made a big difference.

Q Are you planning to fire anyone —

THE PRESIDENT: For what?

Q — because of the spread of the virus in the United States. The numbers have changed —

THE PRESIDENT: No, I think the people are doing a fantastic job. In fact, just today — I have it inside — Governor Newsom, Gavin Newsom of California, said tremendous — there’s an article that just came out; I had it inside and I showed it to the senators, and I showed them other articles too — where governors — Democrat governors are saying we’ve done a fantastic job.

Gavin Newsom said there’s not a thing that he’s asked for that we weren’t able to get him. And, you know, he’s been — he’s a critical guy, like we all are. But it was a very positive statement.

Many Democrat governors have said that the task force and the federal government, what we’ve done, has been terrific.

Q Mr. President, how long should Americans be prepared for the economy to suffer?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, this was unexpected. This was something that came out of China, and it hit us and many other countries. You look at the numbers; I see the numbers with just by watching you folks. I see it — it’s over 100 different countries. And it hit the world.

And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.

We want to protect our shipping industry, our cruise industry, cruise ships. We want to protect our airline industry — very important. But everybody has to be vigilant and has to be careful.

But be calm. It’s really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen. The consumer is ready, and the consumer is so powerful in our country with what we’ve done with tax cuts and regulation cuts and all of those things. The consumer has never been in a better position than they are right now.

So a lot of good things are going to happen. Thank you very much, everybody.

END 2:02 P.M. EDT

Stay Calm and MAGA