The Caesarist Danger In Plain Sight, Part 2

We shouldn’t mince words. Donald Trump is unfit for the Presidency (or any public office) because he is the ultimate Caesarist politician. He craves power in mega-doses purely for the satisfaction of his Brobdingnagian ego, yet has virtually no policy principles that might constrain any lunge into state action that strikes his fancy.

As it has happened, today’s stagflationary economic mess, ship-wrecked central bank and impending fiscal calamity are all the fruits of exactly that kind of Caesarist lunge into unhinged statist intervention and aggrandizement. We are referring, of course, to Donald Trump’s disastrous final year in office when he endeavored to be the Great Man who vanquished the Covid pandemic.

Indeed, that’s how we got the hellacious lockdowns, quarantines, public hysteria, mask mandates and foolhardy stampede into mass forced injections of an unproven and evidently dangerous vaccine.

To be sure, all of this Covid-fighting mayhem was cooked up by Deep State apparatchiks led by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. But they got turned loose on the American economy and public only because the Donald latched onto their misbegotten schemes to “stop the spread” as an opportunity for the Great Man in the Oval Office to rescue the nation from an alleged existential threat to society.

Except, covid wasn’t a Black Plague at all and didn’t merit extraordinary Federal intervention. Any even moderately principled conservative could have found plenty of evidence for that truth in February and March 2020 when the lockdowns and public hysteria were being unleashed.

In the first place, conservative principles would have strongly militated against even consideration of coercive one-size-fits all, state-driven mobilization of quarantines, lockdowns, testing, masking, distancing, surveilling, snitching and ultimately mandated mass vaxxing. That would have been the last resort option, meaning that it would have taken overwhelming evidence of a Black Plague style exigency to even table these collectivist actions.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, however, there were legions of pedigreed epidemiologists and other scientists—many of who later signed the Great Barrington Declaration—who disputed an alarmist view of Covid-19. They correctly held that viruses cannot be extinguished via draconian quarantines and other clumsy public health interventions; and that when it came to coronaviruses in particular, it was doubtful whether even vaccines—which had never previously been successful with coronaviruses—could defeat the latter’s natural propensity to mutate and spread.

From day one, therefore, the logical and pro-liberty course of action was to allow the virus to spread its own natural immunity among the public at large, and to focus available resources on the small minority that owing to age, compromised immune systems or comorbidities were vulnerable to severe illness.