On Wednesday evening, Trump, the ex-president, once again issued a statement, a typically Trumpian one:<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope everyone remembers when they\u2019re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn\u2019t President, you wouldn\u2019t be getting that beautiful \u2018shot\u2019 for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn\u2019t be getting it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s not exactly how I remember it. I remember a year of Trump doing little more than hoping and wishing and thinking happy thoughts while making one bad and fact-free prediction after another.<\/p>\n
I remember February 2020, when he should have been deploying America\u2019s scientific community and the White House pandemic team (if he hadn\u2019t disbanded that team<\/a> in 2018) to go all-out against the impending pandemic and was instead doing absolutely nothing but making one ludicrous statement after another:<\/p>\n \u201cWe pretty much shut it down, coming in from China,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the virus is going to be\u2014it\u2019s going to be just fine,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He said, \u201cLooks like by April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.\u201d<\/p>\n Still in February, he said, \u201cI think it\u2019s a problem that\u2019s going to go away,\u201d and when the U.S. had its first 15 cases<\/a>, \u201cThose 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down close to zero.\u201d<\/p>\n And exactly how was that going to happen? Without getting tangled up in the intricacies of medical science and the whole messy business about how viruses work, Trump put it in terms that a lay person could understand: \u201cIt\u2019s going to disappear. One day, it\u2019s like a miracle, it will disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n I remember mid-March when the stay-at-home order<\/a> was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom and I was sent off into the desert for 80 days and 80 nights writing columns by the fireplace with my dogs at my feet, while Trump declared, \u201cI just wanted to stop it as it pertains to the United States, and that\u2019s what we\u2019ve done. We\u2019ve stopped it.\u201d<\/p>\n Not that it was his fault to begin with, you\u2019ll recall. \u201cI don\u2019t take responsibility at all,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I remember the Promise of Easter: \u201c”I would love to have the country, opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” Trump said in the Rose Garden.<\/p>\n I remember (with a little research to jog my memory) that the day before Easter, Covid deaths in the U.S. passed 10,000, and five days later deaths exceeded 20,000; four days later, more than 30,000 and five days after that, 40,000.<\/p>\n You might recall that on April 23, Trump said, \u201cStates are starting to open up now and it\u2019s very exciting to see.\u201d The following day, deaths from COVID passed 50,000. Five days later, 60,000. On that day, Trump said \u201cIt\u2019s going to go away, this is going to go away.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t forget mid-May, when Trump maintained that \u201cwe\u2019ve done a great job on COVID response, but the lamestream media doesn\u2019t want to go with that narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n I remember that by the end of May Trump had terminated the United States\u2019 relationship with the World Health Organization<\/a> and COVID deaths passed 100,000.<\/p>\n Mid-June, remember, Trump said, \u201cIt\u2019s fading away. It\u2019s going to fade away.\u201d And, \u201cIt\u2019s dying out. The numbers are starting to get very good.\u201d<\/p>\n Surely you haven\u2019t forgotten the cancellation of summer, when we all stayed indoors throughout the season with beaches closed and the coronavirus death rate passing 130,000 a couple of days after the ironically termed Independence Day. Then 140,000, then 150,000.<\/p>\n On Aug. 3, remember, Trump said about COVID, \u201cIt is what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n Aug. 6: 160,000<\/p>\n Aug. 16: 170,000<\/p>\n Aug. 26: 180,000<\/p>\n Trump had grown bored and, despite the fact that he and the First Lady had tested positive for COVID<\/a> as October began, he had had his fill of the media\u2019s reportage of the disease and its rapid worsening.<\/p>\n \u201cCovid, covid, covid. That\u2019s the unifying chant of the fake news lamestream media.\u201d<\/p>\n On Oct. 24, five days after U.S. COVID deaths had passed 220,000, you should remember that Trump tweeted, \u201cTurn on televisions: covid, covid, covid, covid, covid. A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don\u2019t talk about it\u2014covid, covid, covid, covid.\u201d COVID, indeed; every three to five days in the fall (you remember we lost Thanksgiving, and Christmas wasn\u2019t looking jolly) the deaths in America from COVID advanced by another 10,000 souls.<\/p>\n In mid-December\u2014remember?\u2014Trump, now a lame duck but refusing to admit it, boasted that 20 million people would be vaccinated<\/a> by the end of the year. The Centers for Disease Control tracker showed that 2 million were vaccinated.<\/p>\n