Five years later: Remembering how Trump unleashed COVID tyranny

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Donald Trump COVID tyranny liberty

Five years later: Remembering how Trump unleashed COVID tyranny

Five years ago, Donald Trump, in a failed attempt to save his long-shot reelection in 2020, launched an all-out attack on liberty when he unleashed COVID tyranny and destroyed small businesses, padlocked churches, closed down schools, and essentially placed the majority of the American people under house arrest.

Five years ago, 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.”

Having allegedly delegated 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 began working on ways to begin “reopening” their states, 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.”

In the days that followed 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 COVID was about to create a second Great Depression. However, 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:

On the last day of his first term, 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.” ~ Dr. Anthony Fauci (Emphasis mine)

There were also some BC (before COVID) tyrannical moments taken by Donald Trump that impacted liberty after COVID’s arrival. 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 was 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 the Department of Homeland Security (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.

There is other evidence of Trump’s COVID tyranny from his first term in office. For example, Trump and his bipartisan buddies in Congress took the lessons learned from 9/11 and applied them the so-called pandemic in order to expand government’s power over our lives while destroying liberty in the process.

Trump & Co. made Ivanka’s feminist socialist dream of government-mandated paid family leave a reality. One of the first coronavirus bailouts — Families First Coronavirus Response Act — included taxpayer-funded paid family leave and provisions for taxpayer-funded sick leave.

During Trump’s first term, socialist ideals such as prison reform, so-called gun control, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal also saw major advances.

9/11 brought us the PATRIOT Act, so it was with a bit ironic that COVID tyranny brought us a Patriot Act for healthcare. Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, worked with his father-in-law to form a government/private sector partnership to create a new “surveillance and data collection system” used to track the coronavirus Americans.

For those ready to go all MAGA on me for pointing out Trump’s role in creating COVID tyranny, I would like to point out that none other than Joe Biden himself praised Trump for launching Operation Warp Speed (OWS) and 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)

Here’s something else to consider: World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab identified 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)

Donald Trump was connected to the WEF and the Great Reset even before Joe Biden was, and it was the work done by Trump that provided the foundation for Joe Biden’s version of COVID tyranny:

  • 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 of a person’s vaccination status.
  • January 2021 – After an increase in student suicides due to remote learning when 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.

It’s been five years since Donald Trump introduced America to COVID tyranny. And looking back, one can only wonder what the next round of his tyrannical ambitions will look like . . . and where they’ll lead.

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. 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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