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September 15, 2023
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On Thursday, former President Trump sat down for a lengthy interview for Megyn Kelly’s podcast. You can see the entire interview here:

The subjects ranged from Trump’s famous response to a “nasty” question Kelly asked him during a 2016 debate to the classified documents case against him to his opinion of Biden’s mental capabilities (he wouldn’t say Biden is too old for the job because some people are very sharp in their 80s while some people lose acuity in their 40s, but he did say that Biden is incompetent. That seems like an uncontroversial choice of words.)

While Democrats are ripping Trump's answers, as expected, he’s also getting some criticism from the right for his response to Kelly’s questions about his handling of COVID and whether he regrets some of those decisions, like putting Dr. Fauci in charge and letting him have too much power. His denials suggested that he still doesn’t grasp the problem. It has some conservatives expressing concerns that he might make the same mistakes again if he gets back into office. Paula Bolyard at PJ Media sums up those concerns well.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2023/09/14/megyn-kelly-grills-trump-on-covid-response-his-answers-dont-exactly-inspire-confidence-n1727158

I’m not as inclined as some to blame Trump for the wrongheaded, heavy-handed and freedom-crushing power grabs that the pandemic inspired, or for overreacting to the threat and making bad decisions early on. From the start, I understood that this was a new, potentially deadly disease, we didn’t know much about it, and I’m sure most medical experts were acting in good faith and trying to protect the public with very limited knowledge (remember when we were told to disinfect our groceries? I miss disinfectant-flavored oatmeal.)

But it soon became apparent that much of what we were being told was nonsense (churches shut down while liquor stores stayed open, people arrested for walking alone on the beach without a face mask, the government pressuring social media to silence any doctors who questioned their extremely questionable dictates.) Once it became obvious that people were exploiting pandemic fear to increase government power, then common sense criticism was fair game (even though it got a lot of our newsletter articles banned by Internet gatekeepers – and I stand by all of them.)

In short, it’s not a sin to say you did your best, but you got some things wrong. Mistakes can be positive, if you learn from them. But first, you have to admit they were mistakes. I think admitting he got some things wrong then, knows better now and will never let it happen again would help Trump much more than denial and braggadocio. And I think we’d all like to hear him say he’s very sorry he never said, “You’re fired” to Dr. Fauci.

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Comments 1-1 of 1

  • Peter Hain

    09/15/2023 06:39 PM

    Mike - As much as he might have liked to, Trump couldn't merely "fire" Fauci because he was under Civil Service regulations, which meant to "fire" , Trump would have needed to provide incontrovertible "cause" . . . difficult to prove w/o lots of legal action and would have taken a ton of time.