A viral takedown of Donald Trump?

James D. Veltmeyer, MD

They tried Russia. They tried the Steele dossier. They tried emoluments. They tried the 25th Amendment. They tried Ukraine. They tried impeachment. The globalist elites and their handmaidens in the Democrat Party establishment and the kept press have tried every phony trick in the book to bring down President Trump.

Yet, he’s beaten them back every time. Somehow all of these politically- inspired witch hunts and manufactured scandals were no match for a roaring economy, low unemployment, a soaring stock market, and rising wages in the minds of the American voter.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures. A Democrat Party that is now split between two near-octogenarian presidential candidates, one a dedicated Marxist rabble-rouser and the other a barely-coherent artifact of an arteriosclerotic political establishment, requires some kind of once-in-a-lifetime event to panic the public and scare skittish voters into their camp.

Apparently, faking a sudden landing of Martians atop the Empire State Building failed to materialize, so they’ve resorted to the X-Virus, a new Black Plague just waiting to turn American streets into modern-day cemeteries.

The X-Virus is, of course, the dreaded Coronavirus, a variant of the common cold and flu, which will be laid at the door of President Trump, lead to mass burials in major cities, crash the stock market and dump the planet into a global recession.

As a physician, I’m the last person to dismiss any new disease or virus that emerges on our doorstep. Yet, facts speak louder than mass hysteria. What we already know about the Coronavirus is that it is more contagious than the typical flu bug, but not much more deadly.

With a death rate of 2%, it is far less deadly than SARS or MERS, for example. In fact, that death rate is likely exaggerated as many people who have been infected but have mild to no symptoms are not reporting and are not being treated. We understand that children younger than 15 are not being affected at all.

For perspective, let’s consider that since 2010, between 9 and 45 million Americans have been sickened by influenza every season. The number of deaths has ranged between 12,000 and 61,000 per year.

The Asian flu pandemic of 1957 led to 1.1 million deaths worldwide and 116,000 in the United States. The 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemic led to between 1 and 4 million deaths globally and 34,000 in the U.S.

While the situation could certainly change, the facts as they are today do not justify waves of selling on Wall Street or hordes of shoppers trampling over each other at Costco to buy face masks and hand sanitizers.

A Trump-hating media that fails to report each new case of the flu is now scrambling to scare the American people over every new occurrence of Coronavirus within our borders. In doing so, they are acting irresponsibly and reporting inaccurately, leading to the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth locked in the retirement and stock portfolios of tens of millions of middle-class Americans.

They are deliberating trying to destroy confidence in the Trump economy in a despicable maneuver to trigger a recession and rig an election against the President.

In so doing, the media performs its assigned role as the communications department of the Democratic National Committee, pouring gasoline on the fires already lit by the Pelosis, Schumers, and Bidens who have denounced the Trump Administration for its supposed “incompetence” in dealing with the outbreak. When the day arrives when we need to take lessons in competence from that crowd, America will already be lost.

The Centers for Disease Control aren’t helping matters either, painting frightening scenarios of closed schools, churches and massive lockdowns of all public activity. It may even recommend fallout shelters next. Of course, the CDC too is an integral part of the swamp, a bureaucratic monster whose power and budgets rise in direct correlation to how dangerous they can make a given public health crisis appear.

And, what can one say about the World Health Organization, an organ of the United Nations which will look for totalitarian solutions for any emergency?

The Administration’s actions to date have been sound and responsible. Restricting travel from China in the early days of the virus was something no politically-correct Democrat would have done for fear of being slammed as a “racist.”

Let’s recall that when the gruesome and far-more threatening Ebola virus reared its ugly head in 2014, President Obama refused to restrict air travel from Africa. Did we hear any complaints from CNN or MSNBC? Of course not, regardless of the danger Ebola might have posed to the American people.

What the Coronavirus has really exposed is the extent to which the United States has become dependent on a brutal communist dictatorship for so much of its manufacturing and for so many of its medical supplies and medicines. It is outrageous that innocent Americans here at home should face possible shortages of life-saving drugs because the drugs or their main ingredients are being produced in Communist China.

President Trump has been the first President in recent history to take on China and the cheap labor lobby of the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Through tariffs and renegotiating one-sided trade agreements, the President is providing the greatest benefit possible to the American public – redirecting the supply chains away from Beijing and back to the United States.

That may lead to some temporary loss of profits for the Wizards of Wall Street, but will ultimately result in rising wages and rising living standards for the American people and a nation better able to protect itself against unexpected threats like the Coronavirus.

Dr. James Veltmeyer is a prominent La Jolla physician voted “Top Doctor” in San Diego County in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019. Dr. Veltmeyer can be reached at [email protected]