Prescient Trump

sundance at cth

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.