Questions for Trump About Covid

Unfortunately, it seems no one will confront Trump on his administration's pandemic response. Yet many crucial questions remain unanswered.

Illustration by Anthony Freda...

Note to Substack readers: this is an updated version of an article first published on brownstone.org.

Donald Trump will likely become the Republican Presidential nominee in 2024, without ever having to answer any questions about his administration’s disastrous pandemic response.

If there were any accountability, and any real journalists insisting on it, these would be some of the questions Trump would have to answer:

Should you have stuck with a public health response?

• Before Covid, your Presidency was going pretty well. You had a good shot at winning another term. Would you agree that the pandemic pretty much reversed that?

• Actually, it wasn’t just the pandemic. It was your administration’s response to the pandemic. The Democrats won by claiming you had botched the whole thing. They said hundreds of thousands of people died because you did not lock down soon enough and refused to wear a mask. They said the US should have behaved more like China than like Sweden. Do you agree?

• A lot of Republicans now think you should have run the pandemic more like DeSantis did in Florida (even though they might not have said it at the time). It seems that before March 10th, 2020, you were planning to run it that way. And you were listening to your public health advisors from the CDC and NIH. Is that correct?

Why did you agree to spend trillions of dollars to keep everything shut down?

• It was shocking when you seemed to pivot 180 degrees in just a few days, from saying that it would not be worse than a bad flu season, to announcing that we would throw everything we had at it, locking down the whole country — a devastating step that had never been taken before, for any reason, including war. It was especially surprising that you agreed to the economic shutdown. What made you change your mind?

Should you have allowed the security state to take over?

• A lot of information has come out suggesting that you changed your mind because your National Security Council, and related military and intelligence leaders, told you the virus was a potential bioweapon that leaked from a Chinese lab. Is that what you were told? Did they tell you millions of people would die and you would be responsible, if you didn’t follow their plan?

• In a Time Magazine article you were quoted saying “I can’t tell you that” when you were asked about why you thought the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. You said “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Who was not allowing you to speak openly about the possibility that it was a lab leak? Can you speak openly about it now?

• Who made the decision in the middle of March 2020 to invoke the Stafford Act in all 50 states at the same time (which had never been done before), and to put FEMA in charge as the Lead Federal Agency for pandemic response, when FEMA had no warning and no experience in this area at all? Who decided to remove HHS from the role of Lead Federal Agency, which it was supposed to have according to every public health pandemic planning document before Covid? Did you make those decisions or did the NSC or other military or intelligence advisors tell you to take those steps?

Who was actually in charge?

• When you brought Scott Atlas in, he advised you to open the country back up immediately. It seems like you really wanted someone in the White House with an opinion that was different from the one you were hearing in favor of lockdowns.

  But, for some reason, there was enormous resistance to bringing any experts in. There was even supposed to be a meeting at the end of March (long before Atlas arrived) with top epidemiologists that mysteriously got canceled. Why did you have so little control over who advised you about the pandemic? Why didn’t you follow the advice of Scott Atlas if, as he reported in his book, you pretty much agreed with him that the lockdowns were disastrous? 

• Most people think Fauci was in charge of the pandemic response. But in his book, Dr. Atlas reports that you said the main problem wasn’t Fauci, it was Deborah Birx. Is that because Birx was in charge of coordinating the NSC/DHS response, and Fauci was just a front to make it seem like a public health response?

• A few months into the lockdowns, you sounded as if you had lost control of the situation, like in the tweet from May 18th 2020 when you wrote in all caps: REOPEN OUR COUNTRY! You’d think if anyone could have ended the lockdowns, it would have been the President. But you seemed to feel helpless to reverse what was happening. Is that because there had been a sort of silent coup of the NSC and Department and Homeland Security? 

Was it a biodefense or a public health response?

• If the answers to all the previous questions are classified, that would confirm that the response to Covid involved secret machinations of national security entities, or what you often refer to as the Deep State. Can you at least confirm that much?

Did the Deep State effectively stage a coup against your administration?

• You recently said: “Either the Deep State Destroys American, or we destroy the Deep State.” Are you mad at all career bureaucrats, or frustrated because the National Security Council, DHS and DoD seized control of the Covid response and you feel they did not behave in the best interests of all Americans?

• Here’s my guess as to what the Deep State told you about Covid:

  “We, your biowarfare and bioterrorism experts, are hereby informing you that the novel coronavirus is a potential bioweapon that unfortunately leaked from a bioweapons lab into the civilian population in China. It sounds bad, but luckily we’ve spent many years planning for just such an eventuality. If you don’t do what we say, millions will die and you will be blamed. If you follow our plan, you might very well become the President who takes credit for a scientific miracle that will rid the world of pandemics forever.”

  Is this a fair representation of what you were told?

Did you participate in censorship and propaganda?

• Were you aware of the massive censorship and propaganda that were happening to make people accept the lockdowns and vaccines? Do you feel like you were part of that campaign to convince people? Or do you feel like you were somehow forced to participate in it?

• On March 7, 2020, Tucker Carlson came to warn you that “someone who works in the U.S. government, a nonpolitical person with access to a lot of intelligence” told him the virus would kill millions of people if you didn’t lock down immediately and wait for vaccines. Do you know who warned Tucker and, most likely, urged him to warn you?

Did you engage in international coordination of the response?

• Were you in touch with leaders of other allied countries to coordinate the response to the pandemic? It’s pretty astonishing how all our closest allies ended up doing exactly the same thing at the same time. If you were not the one who was coordinating with foreign leaders, were you aware of that type of coordination going on – especially with the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Germany, and other NATO allies?

What’s your position on the mRNA injections?

• Were you told by your biodefense team that mRNA technology was a miraculous platform that would end the threat of pandemics, among other amazing accomplishments?

• You have repeatedly expressed great pride in the “success” of Operation Warp Speed, which produced mRNA shots that were supposed to prevent Covid infection (as stated explicitly in the contracts signed by the DoD and the pharma companies under your administration). The injections were actually administered only once Biden became President, so one could argue that he was responsible for whatever happened after that.

  

  Would you agree that the Covid mRNA vaccines failed to accomplish what they were supposed to?

• When it became obvious that they prevented neither infection nor transmission, and when evidence emerged of extensive harm from side effects, including death — did you change your mind?

And, of course, the most important question of all: If faced with a similar crisis, would you do the same thing again?