Election 2024: Both Biden and Trump embrace COVID tyranny

As the 2024 election draws near, the duopoly run by Democrats and Republicans for the benefit of Democrats and Republicans have decided that Joe Biden and Donald Trump we be their standard bearers. With that in mind, I have updated a recent five-part series showing the lack of discernable policy differences between the two. In Part I, we take a look at their embrace of COVID tyranny and the liberty-killing consequences.

After initially accusing Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus “pandemic,” Trump released his guidelines for “15 days to slow the spread” on March 16, 2020, instructing “Governors of states with evidence of community transmission [to] close schools in affected and surrounding areas.” The guidelines also called for people to work from home “whenever possible,” avoid restaurants except for takeout, and avoid discretionary travel and shopping. Trump later extended the guidelines to 30 days, urging the public to “listen and follow all directions from [their] state and local authorities.”

After allegedly delegating authority on these matters to the states, Trump declared on April 10, 2020, that the decision on closing or reopening schools was his and his alone:

“I’d have to look at the numbers, but again, I like to allow governors to make decisions without overruling them, because from a constitutional standpoint, that’s the way it should be done. If I disagreed, I would overrule a governor, and I have that right to do it.” (Emphasis mine)

A few days later when governors were thinking about reopening, Trump tweeted, “it is the decision of the President,” not governors, to “open up the states.” In a press briefing later that day, Trump said, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be.”

….It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2020

Following his lockdown directives, Trump launched Operation Warp Speed (OWS) in May 2020, a private/public program funded with $10 billion made available by the CARES Act to support companies in the development, manufacture, and distribution of 300 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine.

The CARES Act was a $2.2 trillion behemoth designed to stave off the threat that government’s tyrannical response to coronavirus was about to create a second Great Depression. The CARES Act was only part of Trump’s spending spree in the early days of the so-called pandemic; additional spending included the Families First Coronavirus Response Act ($350 billion) and a CARES Act fix to the SBA Paycheck Protection Program ($500 billion).

Immediately after he signed the CARES Act into law, Donald Trump began pushing for a “VERY BIG & BOLD” $2 trillion infrastructure plan as Phase 4 of his COVID response:

With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2020

On his last day in office, Trump issued commendations to a number of people for their contributions to Operation Warp Speed, including Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx despite Fauci’s Marxist approach to dealing with COVID:

“There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision for the greater good of society.”

There were also some BC (before COVID) tyrannical actions taken by Trump that impacted liberty after COVID. For example, Trump lifted an Obama-era funding ban on gain-of-function (GOF) experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. This move allowed government to “identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.” (Emphasis mine)

Another example is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency created in November 2018 by Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress to operate under the umbrella of DHS and be “responsible for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.” However, just as government abused the PATRIOT Act post-9/11 to fight COVID, CISA became a tool to “track COVID-19 disinformation” — Washington politispeak for identifying and persecuting people who rejected COVID tyranny — and to determine who in the workforce was essential or non-essential when it came to lockdowns.

Clearly, COVID mandates and the vaccines began with Donald Trump, but things really took off under Joe Biden.

About a month before his inauguration, Biden praised Trump for launching Operation Warp Speed (OWS) and credited his predecessor for providing the tools necessary for mass distribution of the COVID vaccine (via New York Post):

President Biden praised former President Donald Trump Tuesday for publicly saying he received a COVID-19 booster shot and credited his predecessor’s administration with helping create vaccines against the deadly virus.

Trump’s administration also helped develop the three US-approved COVID-19 vaccines by pouring billions into research and development through Operation Warp Speed, a fact Biden also noted in his remarks.

“Let me be clear,” the president said. “Thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America was one of the first countries to get the vaccine. Thanks to my administration and the hard work of Americans, we led a rollout that made America among the world leaders in getting shots in arms.”

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in December 2020, when Trump was president, and he frequently boasts of his role in pushing federal officials to move quickly. (Emphasis mine)

While grateful for OWS, Biden didn’t think Trump did enough in the area of mass distribution, so he restructured and renamed the program as the HHS-DOD COVID-19 Countermeasures Acceleration Group to address what then-press secretary Jen Psaki called the “failures” of the Trump team to vaccinate the American public:

OWS is the Trump team's name for their program. We are phasing in a new structure, which will have a different name than OWS. Many of the public servants will be essential to our response, but urgent need to address failures of the Trump team approach to vaccine distribution

— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) January 15, 2021

Under the guise of searching for a “solution” to the so-called pandemic, President-elect Biden spoke with global leaders on how to best use COVID to essentially turn America into a police state to make it easier for government to control the virus populous. Biden also appointed John Kerry as his “climate envoy” — they considered coronavirus and global warming related issues — and this led to Kerry’s declaration at a World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering that Biden was committed to the Great Reset project.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab saw COVID as a perfect opportunity to advance his globalist ambitions via the Great Reset during the organization’s 2021 meeting in Davos:

“COVID-19 has accelerated our transition into the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We have to make sure that the new technologies in the digital, biological and physical world remain human-centred and serve society as a whole, providing everyone with fair access.

“This global pandemic has also demonstrated again how interconnected we are. We have to restore a functioning system of smart global cooperation structured to address the challenges of the next 50 years. The Great Reset will require us to integrate all stakeholders of global society into a community of common interest, purpose and action. We need a change of mindset, moving from short-term to long-term thinking, moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder responsibility. Environmental, social and good governance have to be a measured part of corporate and governmental accountability.” (Emphasis mine)

By the way, the World Economic Forum is another area where there is little difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden because Trump was connected to the WEF and the Great Reset before Biden was.

Though not all of the items listed below are directly tied to Joe Biden, COVID tyranny took off in the first few months of his presidency:

• January 2021 – Using guidelines established by Jared Kushner’s “Patriot Act for Healthcare” program developed under Trump, digital COVID vaccine passports were jointly developed by a group of health and technology companies to provide proof a person’s vaccination status.
• January 2021 – After an increase in student suicides due to remote learning after public schools were closed, school administrators addressed the problem by spying on children via their government-issued remote learning computers.
• March 2021 – Climate scientists published a report documenting how, in order to the meet goals spelled out in the Paris Climate Agreement, pandemic lockdowns needed to occur every two years to end global warming and keep the earth at “safe” temperature levels.
• March 2021 – Government-mandated COVID vaccine passports begin rolling out in select cities in America and around the world.
• March 2021 – Joe Biden signed the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, a COVID relief package that included bailouts for public employee pension programs under-funded before the pandemic but made worse afterwards.

As I documented during their 2020 matchup, arguing the differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is like arguing about how to pronounce tomato (tomayto or tomahto); in the end, they are both the same kind of political fruit.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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