Serving the High Plains

Trump not at fault for shortages

It’s lucky I’m being such a good American and sheltering at home.

Every day I’ve been able to watch President Trump’s coronavirus White House press briefings and the press conferences of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

It’s been tough keeping up with all the scientific, financial and political twists and turns of our national war on the coronavirus.

On Monday, I was ready to dump all my stocks and start hoarding cash when I heard predictions of 37 million unemployed and concerns about the coming of another Great Depression.

But I calmed down after watching the president and his medical experts at their Tuesday press conference.

There were a lot of crazy charts with curves and coronavirus numbers flying around.

And to be honest, I’m not sure I remember exactly what Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx said, other than that the latest real-time data on the virus shows the U.S. death toll will be much lower than originally projected by the doomsayers — between 100,000 and 200,000, maybe even lower.

That good news for our spooked and shut-down country did little to reduce the number of gotcha questions from the liberal media rats in the White House press room, who spend most of their time trying to trip up Trump.

It’s fine for journalists to be critical, probing and even adversarial. That’s their job.

And nobody expects the liberal media to applaud Trump for little miracles, like slashing bureaucratic red tape at the FDA or getting private companies like GM and Libby to quickly crank out stockpiles of ventilators and instant COVID-19 test kits.

But unless you’re hopelessly blinded by “Trump derangement syndrome,” as too many liberal journalists still are, you have to admit that President Trump has become a pretty good “war general.”

He’s made several huge strategic decisions, unleashed trillions of federal dollars, put together important public-private partnerships, delegated lots of power to governors and surrounded himself with some of the best medical and health experts in the country.

In fact, if you ask me, we’re lucky we have Trump as president.

He’s a lifelong businessman — not a lifelong politician — and he acts that way, thank God, for good and bad … but mostly good.

Can you imagine if an aging swamp creature like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden were our president right now?

Seriously, though. Nobody saw this new coronavirus pandemic coming in time.

Not President Trump. Not the CDC. Not Dr. Fauci. Not Dr. Pelosi. Not even the brilliant Dr. Rachel Maddow.

Shutting down the country so quickly and tightly may turn out to have been a gigantic blunder caused by a perfect storm of bad data, bad modeling, bad journalism, bad politics and bad decision-making by the people in charge.

But it’s too late to turn back the clock. We did what we did and now we’ll have to pay the steep price.

But if your state doesn’t have enough ventilators and masks, it’s not Trump’s fault.

It isn’t the federal government’s fault, either. Or your state’s fault. Or Gov. Cuomo’s fault. No one was ready for this pandemic, so let’s quit pointing fingers.

Michael Reagan is the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact him at:

http://www.reagan.com