Joe Biden’s Trump-like fabrication on COVID-19
He is staking his legacy on the lie that the pandemic was out of control until the day of his inauguration.
The return to the limelight of a certain former US president has triggered an unfortunate but probably inevitable relapse for the Trump addicts of our news-gathering class.
They’d gone cold turkey for a whole month and there were tentative, encouraging signs that the cure might be taking. Deprived of their favourite drug, some were gingerly discovering other, more wholesome pursuits: tackling the mountain of evidence that New York governor Andrew Cuomo might be a mendacious, incompetent, bullying sex pest; investigating the slight but tantalising possibility that not all of America’s social and economic woes can be attributed to white supremacy; slowly weaning themselves off the urge to ask penetrating questions of the White House about Joe Biden’s rescue dog.
But you knew it wouldn’t last. You could almost feel the jolt of opiate relief that went surging through their veins on Monday (AEDT), when Donald Trump strutted his stuff at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Suddenly there they all were, happily tripping again on that seemingly limitless supply of indignation and moral censure the former president generously supplies them.
Trump is a little intoxicating for all of us, in both senses of the term. The CPAC performance was a reminder we didn’t need of the uniquely compelling and uniquely pernicious roles he plays not only in Republican politics but in the wider American discourse. This rehab is going to be delayed a while.
The primary problem with having Trump back is that it allows the media to focus again on the many deceptions of the 45th president while conveniently ignoring the large, central deception that is intended to define the administration of the 46th.
The Biden team is concocting a fiction, elaborately developed and assiduously repeated. It is designed to cement the new President’s legacy, ensure the political success of his party and ineradicably defame their opponents.
It is that before January 20, the COVID-19 pandemic was out of control, threatening an even larger catastrophe than the one that had already claimed more than 400,000 lives and destroyed so much productive economic capacity. It had been allowed to do so, the narrative asserts, by Biden’s callously indifferent predecessor, who ignored the virus, disparaged science and did nothing to protect Americans. Only the heroic efforts of the Biden team, with deference to science and carefully targeted economic relief, averted catastrophe.
It is a preposterous fabrication.
COVID-19 cases peaked in the US at the end of the first week of January and by the time Biden took office had already fallen by a third.
The claim that the administration inherited no vaccine program at all, initially propagated through the ministrations of a kindly reporter, is so at odds with the evidence that even the most friendly newspapers were obliged to call it out.
So developed was the vaccination program already in place when Biden took office that it was close to achieving his supposedly ambitious goal of a million shots a day. Credit the pharmaceutical companies (institutions Democrats love to despise) and the incentives provided by a capitalist market (a system Democrats love to despise). But the Trump administration gets much credit too — for identifying the opportunity early, and crucially for committing public funds to minimise the risks for the drug makers.
So it is with the economic salvation Biden promises. Not only is the $US1.9 trillion ($2.45 trillion — COVID-19 relief bill a kind of fiction — its provisions have less to do with relief from coronavirus than with relief to Democratic constituencies. It is supernumerary, and perhaps dangerously so, to the economy’s needs. If any credit is to be awarded for fiscal response it should go to the $US3 trillion in support already enacted last year — passed by a Republican Senate and signed by Trump.
The economy seems poised to catapult forward later this year, without any assist from Biden and the Democrats, as businesses reopen, travel and hospitality resumes, and consumers rush to spend the pent-up savings from a year of lockdown.
The Biden Fabrication demands, at least for now, a steady drumbeat of negative COVID-19 news from the administration — itself another cruel deception on a nation desperate for the good news that is actually the truth. The President tells a town hall not to expect much before Christmas, and the way Dr Doom, aka Anthony Fauci, speaks, you could be forgiven for thinking that we may all be triple-masking well into 2022.
It was only during the Trump administration, apparently, that our media discovered that presidents deceive. The larger truth is that all of them — some more than others, for sure — tell whoppers. Biden is pitching his entire administration on an especially large one.
The Wall Street Journal
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