21 Apr President Trump Must Announce: “The Federal Govt Mistakenly Over-Reacted”

The most compelling argument for immediately lifting the lockdowns and social distancing requirements is the simplest: facts we have learned in the intervening time since they were first imposed tell us they were the wrong prescription and an over-reaction from the beginning. That’s why it’s okay to back off from them, and back off quickly.

Until President Trump steps up to make that admission in the plainspeak he is known for,  Americans have absorbed weeks of assessments and rationalizations and justifications that make it nearly impossible for them to climb down off the cliff of fear. How can we possibly move quickly to drop the restrictions that we have been told were essential to saving thousands or maybe millions of lives?

Yes, the Pravda MSM would seize on an official admission of mistaken over-reaction to pummel President Trump, but they do that every day for any reason and no reason, and the American people have tuned them out. More importantly, it’s rock solid leadership to step up to acknowledge when a mistake has been made—it’s the exemplification of American wisdom: we don’t stay stuck on stupid.

What are the facts we have learned in the intervening time? Consider:

1. The presence of antibodies in random sample studies in places as disparate as Santa Clara County, CA; Chelsea, MA; and Los Angeles, CA tell us the coronavirus did not spring on America in early 2020 but was here in the fall of 2019. Wuhan investigations can run their course and America can decide on appropriate responses to CCP behavior in lying and covering up whatever took place to aggravate the situation, but the panicked presumption of a possible Stage 4 virology lab-leak that justified going to hazmat battle stations was wrong. And strategies for building herd-immunity—which do not embrace social distancing—were probably right.

2. Multiple commentators have sorted actual data on the coronavirus to show that if the data surrounding the unique hotspot of New York City (crowded subways being one enormous unique factor, and JFK airport as the landing spot of Wuhan flights being another) are taken out of US data as a whole, the picture in the US is not dire, or anywhere close to dire.

3. As of yesterday, April 20, 2020, there were 495 total coronavirus deaths in the State of Texas—out of a population of just under 29 million.   Texas is a critical engine of the American economy—and the whole state is under lockdown. Yet “cause of death” data for Texas in 2015 (apparently the latest year for which such data is available) show the following:

Nobody needs an advanced degree in anything to see that the continued lockdown of the entire state of Texas over 495 deaths due to a virus that has been in the US since fall 2019 is just flat-out stuck on stupid.

But let’s get the tone of this admission of mistaken over-reaction right. Congressman Dan Crenshaw set an example in this video (which President Trump retweeted).

Let’s give everyone—Drs. Fauci and Birx included—a pass for good faith judgments based on limited information in what appeared to be a disease of possibly nefarious origin with unknown lethality. (If later facts turn up which question that good faith, appropriate action can be taken then).

Let’s acknowledge that President Trump, not being a doctor, did what every President would have to do in the face of a medical crisis—he turned to the nation’s medical experts for advice. And when Fauci and Birx told him 1.5M to 2.2M Americans were likely to die absent strong ‘horizontal interdiction’, Trump acted in a way you would want and expect an American President to act: move quickly and strongly to protect the American people.

But that was then, and this is now. We now have more and better information; we have enough to know we were mistaken at the beginning; we are smart enough and courageous enough to admit error and act to correct.

As former National Security Council official Rich Higgins succinctly pointed out:

This virus is not and never was a true strategic security threat……the economics of the response and the derivative human and political costs are.

The left/Democrat/media mob will think they’ve arrived at nirvana with a public admission by President Trump of a federal government mistake and over-reaction. Their frenzy of ‘idiot Trump’/Orange Man Bad noise would be yet another amazing phenomenon of the times, but the majority of Americans have their heads on straight, and would simply wave it off. The President would be acting like a leader who got bad advice from people he had reason to believe were advising him in good faith in crisis conditions that did not permit long periods of indecision.

So the right response is not to hate the advisors or indulge in recrimination games for Beltway advantage. It’s to do right by the American people. Be honest. Admit error. Recognize the enormity of the error, and the strategic security threat it has created. Fix it!

Eric Georgatos and wife Debbie operate the America, Can We Talk? media platform, with 4 day a week video podcasting by Debbie, and weekly written commentary, all centered around the importance and value of preserving America under her founding ideals.