by Sean Hannity
“The risk [of coronavirus in America] is low. The risk, however, for the flu is through the roof.”—Dr. Jennifer Caudle, CNN Newsroom, February 15, 2020
“So if you’re freaked out at all about the coronavirus, you should be more concerned about the flu.”—Anderson Cooper, CNN, March 4, 2020
Once the virus’s impact became undeniable, the blame-Trump media brigade changed course and decided the outbreak was a historic catastrophe caused by Trump. Because they believed the deeper the crisis was, the more damage it would do to the president. Shockingly, many of them sounded like cheerleaders for the virus. MSNBC host Nicole Wallace claimed the virus could have a “silver lining” because it caused “all of the president’s sins from his first three years to catch up with him.”67 They’d even show contempt for the American people and denigrate our whole country when it was useful for bashing Trump. Referring to media reports that Trump once referred to certain places as “sh*thole countries,” GQ Magazine’s Julia Ioffe asked, “Who’s the sh*thole country now?” while retweeting a report that America had the world’s highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases.68 It’s like the media was trying to prove me right that they’re a purely destructive force for the country.
The coronavirus crisis came at just the right time for the media mob, because they were in desperate need of a new line of attack on the president. They had failed in two separate efforts to remove Trump from office—once through the Russian collusion hoax and once through the appalling impeachment on the Ukraine hoax. The coronavirus outbreak presented a third opportunity to get rid of Trump, this time by making him unelectable in 2020 by blaming the virus on him.
And the mob went all in. An analysis of the first hundred days of coronavirus-related stories on the Washington Post’s front page showed that negative stories about Trump outnumbered positive ones by an incredible 25–1 ratio. “Trump’s error-filled speech rattled rather than reassured” and “70 days of denial, delays and dysfunction” were typical attacks—and mind you, these were supposedly news stories, not opinion columns—while the only two positive stories did not even focus on the president but on Dr. Anthony Fauci and Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.69 The Post also argued that the economic damage of the virus shutdown somehow diminished Trump’s previous stellar economic record, claiming, “The Coronavirus crisis is exposing how the economy was not as strong as it seemed.”70
The get-Trump strategy was clear in the media’s hysterical response to the China travel ban. Citing critics warning that travel bans “are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people,” the Atlantic warned that Trump might now “double down on xenophobic suspicions.”71 CNN also worried that the ban would have the “backfire” effect of “stigmatizing countries and ethnicities.”72 Apparently, travel bans are politically incorrect, and as always, political correctness takes priority over everything else for the media, including even Americans’ health and safety. Trump’s later travel ban on Europe was harder to portray as being racist, but the media attacked it anyway, with CNBC reporting, “Trump’s travel ban on many European countries is ‘politically motivated,’ analysts say.”73
The media’s racism accusations reached a comical extreme. Trump haters were outraged when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the virus the “Wuhan coronavirus,” referring to the Chinese city where the outbreak began. They were also crazed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s tweet referring to the “Chinese coronavirus.” “Academics have ranted the practice leads to stigma and racism,” reported the Guardian.74 Ferreting out the real important news as a deadly virus was spreading worldwide, CNN published an article denouncing the “lack of diversity” in a photo of officials briefing President Trump on the pandemic.75
When Congressman Paul A. Gosar announced on Twitter that he would self-quarantine after having been exposed to someone who had tested positive for the “Wuhan Virus,” the race-obsessed media mob went ballistic. Apparently unaware that the mainstream media had been using the term “Wuhan virus” for weeks, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called Gosar’s tweet “astoundingly gross,” and David Gura called it “racist.”76 The media also exploded when Trump referred to the coronavirus as a “foreign virus”—which of course it is. CNN’s Jim Acosta raised the specter of “xenophobia,”77 while New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser took offense at Trump’s “militaristic, nationalistic language.”78 Amazingly, after China somehow birthed this virus, covered it up, and lied about it, the American media viewed it as an abomination to talk about its origins in China.
When Trump justifiably denounced the Democrats’ politicization of the virus as “their new hoax,” the media widely misreported Trump as having said the virus itself was a hoax. During a presidential press conference on the virus, Daily Caller writer Chuck Ross noted that reporters asked Trump two questions about his use of the term “hoax” and asked no questions of the assembled experts about how the disease might spread through the United States. “This press conference is insane,” Ross said.79
Ross was right. Trump’s daily press conferences were an object lesson in media bias. While the president and his experts tried to inform the American people about the virus’s trajectory, the government’s economic assistance efforts, and prospects for reopening the economy, many reporters were busy trying to pin the blame for the virus directly on Trump. In one exchange, New York magazine correspondent Olivia Nuzzi asked Trump, “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be re-elected?”80 Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer criticized Nuzzi’s question on Twitter, noting that it was designed purely to “provoke,” not to provide any useful information to viewers. Showing the class and restraint typical of the mob, Nuzzi replied by tweeting at Fleischer, “Oh shut the f*ck up.”81
Reporters in the briefings were completely indistinguishable from Resistance activists. They developed a strategy of trying to drive a wedge between Trump and his medical experts, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, by encouraging the doctors to contradict the president or disagree with his policies or actions. At an April 13, 2020, press conference, Dr. Fauci tried to clear the air after the media attacked Trump over a comment Fauci had made indicating that more lives would have been saved if mitigation efforts had been enacted earlier. Fauci explained he was not accusing Trump of a late response—in fact, he said, Trump enacted strong mitigation measures after the first time Fauci recommended them. Robbed of another get-Trump narrative, a reporter asked Fauci if he was providing that explanation voluntarily or if Trump put him up to it. Disgusted, Fauci put his hands up and said, “Everything I do is voluntarily—please, don’t even imply that.”82 The press conference enraged CNN, which displayed these captions on the screen:
“Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history on coronavirus response”
“Trump melts down in angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings”
“Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes”
“Trump attacks media after series of reports he ignored warnings as virus spread”
“Angry Trump uses propaganda video produced by government employees at taxpayer’s expense”
“Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session”83
So CNN was angrily melting down as it accused Trump of having an angry meltdown.
The mob was also provoked by Dr. Birx, who had the audacity to express agreement with the president and support his policies. For the media, that’s over the line. The only acceptable position toward Trump on every issue and every controversy is outright condemnation—anything short of that is treason against the press corps. When Dr. Birx questioned predictions of a shortage of ventilators and hospital beds—a shortage that never happened—reporters tried to smack her back into line. The New York Times’ Noah Weiland and Maggie Haberman claimed Dr. Birx has “accommodated herself to the political winds with the kind of presidential flattery that Mr. Trum
p demands from aides.”84 In a tweet pitching her story, Haberman all but portrayed Dr. Birx as having been brainwashed. “An astute Trump adviser once described the president as ‘turning’ people so they start to adopt his views, in a binary Trump sees as him vs media. Some fear Dr. Deborah Birx is the latest example,” she said.85 More bluntly, when Dr. Birx praised Trump’s attention to detail and understanding of the relevant data, Vox’s Aaron Rupar denounced her comments as “shocking, hackish stuff.”86 Viewing Trump as some sort of superhuman force for evil, Mother Jones’s David Corn chimed in, “Trump ruins everything and everyone he touches.”87
Later, when Dr. Birx criticized the media for blatantly taking out of context Trump’s comments about studying the possibility of using disinfectants and ultraviolet light to fight the virus inside infected patients, Rolling Stone’s Peter Wade accused her of “pandering.” “The public’s need to trust the media during a pandemic is of utmost importance, and one of America’s top health officials sowing seeds of distrust is dangerous,” Wade warned.88 You got that? That’s the media warning you that no one should question the media.
In case that point is too subtle, the Atlantic ran a story by two professors in which the authors approvingly cited increased online censorship of coronavirus topics and argued for Chinese-style internet censorship in America. “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network,” they said, “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”89
Who can argue with that Orwellian “logic”—that we need “significant monitoring and speech control” to have a “flourishing internet”? Seeing the American media argue for censorship is shocking, but they obviously think it’ll be their political opponents who will be censored, not them. And I’m sure that would be true at first. But this is a dangerous door to open, and it’s easy to imagine how what begins as “limited” speech restrictions against conservatives will expand and eventually boomerang against the mainstream media in one way or another.
The unhinged media tried again and again to get Americans to understand that President Trump was responsible for people dying. They sounded ghoulishly gleeful when an Arizona woman claimed her husband had died after the pair responded to Trump’s hopeful comments about hydroxychloroquine by drinking a fish tank cleaner containing a chemical with a similar name. The woman stated that they drank the chemical after seeing Trump on “every channel” on TV saying it was “basically pretty much a cure.” She warned afterward, “Don’t believe anything the President says.”90 The media understood that was their cue. “The president has blood on his hands. There’s literally no debate about it,” said the Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan.91
For the get-Trump media, the story was too good to check. But in interviews with the Washington Free Beacon, people who knew the couple cast doubt on the story. One said it was hard to believe the man would foolishly swallow fish tank cleaner since he was an intelligent, retired mechanical engineer.92 It also seems strange that the woman would drink hydroxychloroquine supposedly at Trump’s command, considering she had donated thousands of dollars to Democratic causes and candidates during Trump’s presidency. Although she initially blamed her own actions on Trump, she later backpedaled and told the Beacon, “We weren’t big supporters of [Trump], but we did see that they were using [hydroxychloroquine] in China and stuff.” Police are now investigating the incident, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is more to come on this story.93
It was inevitable that the mob would extend these accusations to Fox News—the only network that didn’t blame Trump for a virus spreading out of China. In a column titled “Fox’s Fake News Contagion,” the New York Times’ Kara Swisher accused Fox News generally and me personally of spreading “dangerous misinformation” in the early days of the coronavirus crisis. Using her own elderly mother as a prop for the story, Swisher explained that her mom refused to believe Swisher’s warnings about the danger of the virus because of misinformation her mother heard on Fox News. Her mom got her information on the virus exclusively from Fox, Swisher said, to the point that “it sometimes feels like Fox News is eating my mother’s brain.” But don’t worry, the story had a happy ending because eventually her mom began disbelieving Fox, even though she continued watching it.94
You almost have to admire the nerve Swisher shows in completely rewriting history just a few months after the fact. First, any Fox viewer knows that our coverage from the beginning was informative and reflected the best scientific understanding of the virus as it broke out and spread. I had three different physicians including Dr. Fauci on my January 28 radio show to discuss the virus’s likely trajectory, the challenges of tracking its spread, the incubation period, and its asymptomatic transmission. This was my whole approach to the virus from the beginning—to get out the facts. But Swisher, and a lot of the rest of the media herd, portrayed any criticism of the media’s get-Trump coverage of the virus as an evil attempt to “play down” the threat. This is the real misinformation, but you know that only if you actually watch Fox News or listen to my radio show, which the target audience for this propaganda do not regularly do.
In her hit piece, Swisher totally ignored huge parts of the public record that contradict her imaginary world where Fox downplayed the virus while the mainstream media got it right. There’s no mention of Vox guaranteeing there would be no pandemic, or BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and Anderson Cooper insisting the flu was a bigger threat, or Swisher’s fellow New York Times columnist denouncing Trump’s China travel ban and asking whether it was even necessary. There was no reference to Nancy Pelosi encouraging tourists to congregate in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the end of February, the same time Swisher claims she was so concerned about her mom. No, in Swisher’s fake universe, none of that happened, and everyone reported responsibly except the brain-eating conservatives at Fox News who were corrupting her helpless mother.
The Democrats and the media mob are working overtime to ensure the virus brings down Trump’s presidency and torpedoes his reelection. But his handling of this crisis, in fact, has been his finest moment. Can you imagine if Sleepy Joe Biden were in charge of the response? They’d trot him out once a week to mechanically read a dumb speech off a teleprompter, and meanwhile no one would have any clue who was really calling the shots. With Trump, it’s crystal clear who’s in charge. And if you look outside the mainstream media, it’s also clear how incredibly effective his response has been.
CONCLUSION
When I began writing this book the coronavirus had not yet reached pandemic proportions, but the American left’s rapid acceleration toward socialism had long since begun. While President Trump’s America-first, capitalist agenda was making great strides in beating back this socialist menace, the national emergency fed the left’s enthusiasm for an expansion of federal powers. They eagerly exploited the crisis to try to cram their massive leftist agenda down our throats, including a smorgasbord of transformative Green New Deal items that had zero connection to the virus. Nancy Pelosi even said the coronavirus should open the door to adopting a universal basic income.1 Their response to the crisis should have focused on saving lives and minimizing the economic damage, but it only whet their appetites for more federal control over our money and our lives.
As the virus was approaching peak levels in America, with hundreds of thousands being infected and tens of thousands dying, President Trump urged governors to take charge of their own states, assuring them that the federal government would provide adequate production and stockpiling of equipment for distribution to the states as needed. Some criticized Trump for being too authoritative while others were demanding he be more so. Though Trump threatened to put the federal hammer on certain recalcitrant companies to up their pr
oduction of certain supplies, the threats themselves were usually effective without further action, and throughout he assured Americans he strongly preferred to defer to the governors to manage their own states.
So even during a declared federal emergency, President Trump’s conservative instincts guided him to resist exercising excessive power—and this applied not just to management of the medical supply chain but also to decisions to shut down and reopen economies, which he largely left to the discretion of the states. While the success of Trump’s approach validates our federalist constitutional structure, Democrats will argue that only the federal government could keep the nation financially afloat during this period, and that this proves the glories of central planning.
The left will look back on this dark period as evidence of the wonders of federal power without lamenting the loss of individual liberty that always ensues. Conservatives, by contrast, will regard it as a time that conclusively shows that the American private sector—small and large businesses, individual entrepreneurs, manufacturers and industries, and white- and blue-collar workers throughout the land—is the lifeblood of the American economy; not the public sector, which creates no wealth on its own. Conservatives will reflect with pride on the American spirit and the essential role of the private sector in ramping up production to meet government needs. They will celebrate Americans’ eagerness to reopen the economy and resume their lives as proof of their dedication to liberty and their precious constitutional rights. Though President Trump has been given little credit for this, the virus exposed America’s precarious dependence on foreign nations for necessary essentials and vindicated Trump’s long-held determination to restore America’s self-sufficiency as a manufacturing powerhouse.
You get the point. The left is relentless in pushing their extreme agenda. They were horrifyingly committed to statism before the virus; they are even more so today. You can count on it, which makes this year’s presidential and congressional elections exponentially more important than they already were. The left has now fully unmasked itself. The American electorate will face a clear choice in November between those who love America and want to protect it, and those who resent it and want it to become another failed socialist state. The Democrats’ media machine may try to downplay the party’s extremism, but there’s no longer any denying it, as I’ve shown throughout these pages.