How they tricked Trump into locking down the US

How they tricked Trump into locking down the US. By Jeffrey Tucker.

On March 9, 2020, Trump was still of the opinion that the virus could be handled by normal means.

Two days later, he changed his tune. He was ready to use the full power of the federal government in a war on the virus.

The official story from the participants who are talking is that everyone around him wore him down and just convinced him.

Something about this story has never really added up. How could one person have been so persuaded by a handful of others such as Fauci, Birx, Pence, and Kushner and his friends? He surely had other sources of information — some other scenario or intelligence — that fed into his disastrous decision. …

It was Debbie Lerman who first cracked the code: Covid policy was forged not by the public-health bureaucracies but by the national-security sector of the administrative state. She has further explained that this occurred because of two critical features of the response: 1) the belief that this virus came from a lab leak, and 2) the vaccine was the biosecurity countermeasure pushed by the same people as the fix.

Knowing this, we gain greater insight into 1) why Trump changed his mind, 2) why he has never explained this momentous decision and otherwise completely avoids the topic, and 3) why it has been so unbearably difficult to find out any information about these mysterious few days other than the pablum served up in books designed to earn royalties for authors like Birx, Pence, and Kushner.

Based on a number of second-hand reports, all available clues we have assembled, and the context of the times, the following scenario seems most likely.

On March 10, and in response to Trump’s dismissive tweet the day before, some trusted sources within and around the National Security Council (Matthew Pottinger and Michael Callahan, for example), and probably involving some from military command and others, came to Trump to let him know a highly classified secret.

Imagine a scene from Get Smart with the Cone of Silence, for example. These are the events in the life of statecraft that infuse powerful people with a sense of their personal awesomeness. The fate of all of society rests on their shoulders and the decisions they make at this point. Of course they are sworn to intense secrecy following the great reveal.

The revelation was that the virus was not a textbook virus but something far more threatening and terrible. It came from a research lab in Wuhan. It might in fact be a bioweapon. This is why Xi had to do extreme things to protect his people. The US should do the same, they said, and there is a fix available too and it is being carefully guarded by the military.

It seems that the virus had already been mapped in order to make a vaccine to protect the population. Thanks to 20 years of research on mRNA platforms, they told him, this vaccine can be rolled out in months, not years. That means that Trump can lock down and distribute vaccines to save everyone from the China virus, all in time for the election. Doing this would not only assure his reelection but guarantee that he would go down in history as one of the greatest US presidents of all time.

This meeting might only have lasted an hour or two — and might have included a parade of people with the highest-level security clearances — but it was enough to convince Trump. After all, he had battled China for two previous years, imposing tariffs and making all sorts of threats. It was easy to believe at that point that China might have initiated biological warfare as retaliation. That’s why he made the decision to use all the power of the presidency to push a lockdown under emergency rule. …

It only took a few weeks for Trump to become suspicious about what happened. For weeks and months, he toggled between believing that he was tricked and believing that he did the right thing. He had already approved another 30 days of lockdowns and even inveighed against Georgia and later Florida for opening. …

He did not fully change his mind until August, when Scott Atlas revealed the whole con to him. …

To top it off, the vaccine failed to arrive in time for the election. This is because Fauci himself delayed the rollout until after the election, claiming that the trials were not racially diverse enough. Thus Trump’s gambit completely failed, despite all the promises of those around him that it was a guaranteed way to win reelection.

To be sure, this scenario cannot be proven because the entire event — certainly the most dramatic political move in at least a generation and one with unspeakable costs for the country — remains cloaked in secrecy. Not even Senator Rand Paul can get the information he needs because it remains classified. If anyone thinks the Biden approval of releasing documents will show what we need, that person is naive. Still, the above scenario fits all available facts and it is confirmed by second-hand reports from inside the White House.

It’s enough for a great movie or a play of Shakespearean levels of tragedy. And to this day, none of the main players are speaking openly about it.

Great story, fits the facts.

But it gets worse. Nowhere do Americans discuss the obvious — closing borders was the simple and cost effective way of beating covid in the first year or two when it was somewhat deadly. It’s as though Americans have been brain-washed into believing the only two responses are “lock down” or “not lock down.”

If the US closed its borders sufficiently to keep out the virus, then it would also keep out illegal immigrants. Obviously, that cannot be contemplated.

The US right wing missed a great opportunity here to talk about — and close — borders. Totally missed. So oblivious, they don’t even seem to have noticed. Tricked.