The Donald’s Disastrous Fourth Year—But Don’t Blame The Covid

The Donald’s fourth year in the Oval Office was a disaster. The US economy literally collapsed after February 2020, but there is no way that Trump gets a free hall pass for the Washington-instigated economic mayhem that transpired.

Donald Trump’s original sin was his whole-hearted embrace from the Bully Pulpit on March 16th of the “two weeks to flatten the curve” scheme, which was actually never about two weeks.

It is now evident that Fauci’s deputy came back from China in February 2020 singing the praises of its brutal lockdowns in Wuhan. Consequently, Washington’s incipient Virus Patrol was quickly assembled by Fauci et. al. out of the bowels of the Deep State and set about imposing chicom-style “non-pharmaceutical” policy interventions—that is, statist control schemes—across the length and breadth of the land.

However, unlike any actual Republican who might have occupied the Oval Office at this crucial moment–even a RINO like George Bush Sr.—the Donald was constitutionally incapable of resisting the sweeping implementation and indefinite extension of Fauci’s two-weeks ploy and the reason isn’t hard to fathom. To wit, the Donald was copacetic with these devastating assaults on personal liberty and private property because he accompanied them with massive fiscal and monetary relief and bailout measures. And while these egregious “stimmies” were an anathema to conservative doctrine, they were right up the middle of the Donald’s philosophical fairway.

In fact, the record leaves no doubt that Trump never cared a whit about Federal spending and borrowing. Likewise, he had rarely, if ever, mentioned the words “liberty” or “limited government” in his entire adult life.

To the contrary, he had been a crude, anti-market protectionist since the 1970s, possessed an abiding fondness for easy money and, upon his entry into national politics in 2015, eagerly embraced an odious anti-immigrant nativism. His policy credentials, in fact, consisted mainly of his claim to be a business titan after having gambled his way to (dubious) paper wealth in the real estate sector via massive accumulation of cheap debt fostered by the Fed after the mid-1990s.

In a word, without the Fed’s printing press, the Donald would have never gotten out of Fred Trump’s bailiwick in Queens, nor have remotely gained the opportunity to betray the GOP’s core principles on Federal spending and borrowing.