During his opening monologue for Fox News Channel’s “The Next Revolution,” host Steve Hilton alleged the COVID-19 response proposed by Democrats was steeped in politics, given the timing of being in the throes of a presidential campaign.
Hilton refuted complaints about Trump’s coronavirus efforts from Democrats and blasted the Democrat solutions as “capricious, pseudo-scientific shutdown rules,” adding that they were not about “controlling the virus.” Instead, he said they were “about controlling you.”
Transcript as follows:
HILTON: All right, the election is less than eight weeks away and it’s now obvious how the Democrats and their media stooges are going to play it, nonstop personal smears, gossip, rumor, and bombshells that turn out to be duds. Endless obsession with what Trump says instead of what he does.
This is ridiculous. This is not serious. This is no way to decide who leads the most powerful nation on Earth. So here on this show, we will be different. We will focus on substance, not scandal on policy that actually affects your life.
The election is a choice not just between two people, but between two visions of America and two policy agendas. So every Sunday between now and November 3, we will set out the choice on a different aspect of what’s at stake.
We’ll start with the issue that has dominated everything this year: coronavirus.
Here’s the choice based on the facts. As we all know, the virus started in China initially denied and covered up before Xi Jinping let the virus spread around the world even as his regime shut down travel within China.
Here, as we know, President Trump understood how serious this was. But there’s a massive point missing from the media’s hysterical misinformation over the Woodward book.
Yes, the President’s public statements were designed to avoid panic. So with Dr. Fauci’s, the CDC, even the Biden campaigns, they warned as late as mid-February, about a fear epidemic.
The Democrats now say, Trump wasted two months doing nothing. Really? Let’s do a little fat check. You know, the kind they love over at CNN.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Three questions, but many more lies by President Trump, including when he talked about Hillary Clinton giving money to Andrew McCabe’s wife that is not an accurate description of what happened in that situation at all, and we could go on and on.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: That was Jake Tapper immediately after a Trump press conference last week. Later in that same show, Joe Biden said this about Trump.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: He waved the white flag. He walked away, he didn’t do a damn thing. Think about it. Think about what he did not do, and it’s almost criminal.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: He didn’t do a damn thing. Really? On January 29, the President set up the Coronavirus Taskforce to lead a coordinated Federal response. On January 31, he banned travel from China. On February 6, he issued emergency rules on infection control throughout the nation’s healthcare facilities.
On February 24, he went to Congress for emergency funding. On February 29, he expanded travel restrictions. Days later, he ripped up the rulebook to sort out the testing fiasco created by the bungling CDC.
If the President hadn’t gotten the private sector in at top speed; with Biden, we’d probably still be waiting on his precious government bureaucracy to get it done.
Instead, we have by far the most tests in the world, and even on tests per population. We’re second only to Denmark.
Let’s continue. On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency, just 48 hours after a global pandemic was declared. The same day, he imposed new restrictions to protect nursing homes.
On March 16, the President mobilized the whole country against the virus, 15 days to slow the spread. That was before shutdowns were announced in the UK, in France, even New Zealand, which our media holds up as having the perfect response.
On March 17, the President lifted restrictions on telemedicine to help protect seniors. On March 18, he invoked the Defense Production Act to make sure we didn’t run out of hospital masks. We needed more PPE, so he launched Project Airbridge to fly in shipments of supplies in days instead of months.
We needed more capacity, so within days, hospitals were built, ships were sent; in the end not even used.
We needed ventilators, so the President again invoked the Defense Production Act to get them made here in America. Not a single person who needed a ventilator didn’t get one and now we’re sending them to other countries.
We needed effective treatments, so Trump secured more than half a million courses of remdesivir. Whatever we needed, Trump and his team got and no, that is not FOX News, state TV propaganda. It’s these guys.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D-NY): The Federal government stepped up and was a great partner, and I’m the first one to say it. We needed help and they were there.
GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Conversation, commitment, promise made, promise kept.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: And again, no, they weren’t just saying it to suck up to Trump’s or they’d get stuff for their state either.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NEWSOM: I’m not doing it to kiss the ring. I’m not doing it in a way, you know that — I am just being forthright with the President. He returns calls, he reaches out. He’s been proactive.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: Thanks to the Trump administration’s unprecedented mobilization, we faced this virus better equipped with better treatments than any other country. And you can see the effects of that in the case fatality rate.
Here in America, it was lower than in any other major country, half as much as Spain’s, a quarter of the UKs, lower than France, lower than Denmark, lower than Germany held up as the best in the world.
All this and we haven’t even mentioned Operation Warp Speed, which could be the biggest deal of all.
In the past, it took years to develop a vaccine. President Trump made this a priority from the start. He got the industry together. He cut through the bureaucracy. He made sure the financial incentives were right.
If there’s one moment when it really made a difference, having a businessman in the White House, this was it. As a result, we could have a vaccine in weeks.
These are the facts preposterously described by Joe Biden as doing nothing and here was Jake Tapper’s fact check on that blatant Biden lie.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: He didn’t do a damn thing. Think about it. Think about what he did not do and it’s almost criminal.
TAPPER: Woodward also reports that former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that Trump, quote, “has no moral compass.”
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: What’s criminal is the way these so-called journalists are part of the Biden campaign. They won’t tell you the facts, and that’s why we’re doing it here. We laid out for you the Trump administration’s actions, but the ultimate test is the impact.
The media and the Democrats want you to look at the number of cases, but that’s obviously misleading. It mostly measures testing. Now, as we’ve seen, we test more than anybody.
We’re told relentlessly that America’s outbreak is the worst in the world, that Trump caused our summer spike. Interesting. The Trump also caused the summer spikes in Spain, in France, in the UK and saintly Germany and New Zealand, literally everywhere, they’ve lifted lockdowns and are we really the worst in the world?
Biden aides on TV like Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper, say we have five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the deaths. That is dishonest misinformation, anti-Trump propaganda.
Their calculation includes countries like China and India and Africa, with vast populations where you cannot trust the data either because they deliberately lie or their health systems are inadequate. A fair and honest comparison is deaths per population.
Here’s the Johns Hopkins data. We’re doing better than multiple major countries, including the U.K., Spain and Italy. But America is bigger and more decentralized. The virus response here has varied state by state, add them in, and you get a very different picture.
The worst corona response in the world was New Jersey, run by Democrats followed closely by New York, run by a democrat, Cuomo, who has the gall to be publishing a book next month as he takes a victory lap on the graves of the thousands of elderly New Yorkers he condemned to death by sending COVID patients into their nursing homes.
And oh, look, it’s Republican-led states that the media loves to criticize which have much lower rates. But if there’s one measure that gives the truest picture of America’s overall performance, it is the proportion of excess deaths over normal years, and on that measure, the real measure, how many people died compared to a normal year?
We’re not the worst in the world. We’re not even close to being the worst. We have, in fact, done better than nearly every major country.
But an election is a choice. How would Biden handle something like this? When he faced a pandemic of a highly infectious disease, H1N1, he kept the borders wide open. No surprise that he opposed President Trump’s China travel ban in January.
Biden is so frightened of being called a racist by the Democrats woke activists. He couldn’t protect us against foreign threats. He couldn’t get the vaccines either, last time, he promised 100 million doses but delivered just a tenth of that.
Fortunately, H1N1 was much less deadly than coronavirus, but Biden completely lost control of it, as his top aide, Ron Klain admits.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RON KLAIN, FORMER EBOLA RESPONSE COORDINATOR, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: We did every possible thing wrong, and it’s — you know, 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time.
And it’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right, it just had to do with luck.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: If H1N1 had been as deadly as coronavirus, the Biden death toll would have been close to two million, not 200,000, two million.
And this year, one month after President Trump set up the Coronavirus Taskforce, ban China travel, and all the rest of it, one month later on the night of his decisive South Carolina victory, out of 1,418 words in his victory speech where he talked about guns and Obamacare and a bunch of other issues, out of 1418 words, guess how many Biden’s spent on the pandemic? Zero. Didn’t even mention it.
So on the facts on their records, Trump beats Biden, but the election is a choice about future plans. Let’s compare.
Biden has announced a plan to make sure no one would pay for getting coronavirus treatment, invoked the Defense Production Act to manufacture essential equipment and put a command officer in charge of the vaccine distribution plan.
Every single one of those Trump has done or is doing, but there are differences. Instead of speeding up vaccine development by ripping up bureaucracy, Biden is all about increasing it.
In his platform with Bernie, 19 separate proposals to increase government regulation and bureaucratic control of pharmaceuticals. Biden wants universal nationwide mask-wearing including outdoors. That’s not justified by the science. It is entirely political.
They say Trump killed people because he didn’t show a lead on masks, but many countries have less mask-wearing than we do, even though it was encouraged. Is that Trump’s fault, too?
Some other countries where mask-wearing was least common have some of the best results like Australia. Biden also wants uniform nationwide standards.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: We need real plans, real guidelines with uniform nationwide standards.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: That is insane. There is something called the Constitution. We believe in Federalism, different states have wildly different circumstances. Biden wants to impose the worst rules everywhere. Kamala’s California chaos, coast to coast.
And finally, of course, this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
QUESTION: So if the scientists say shut it down.
BIDEN: I would shut it down.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HILTON: Of course, he would. He’s a Democrat. He wants to control everything. These capricious, pseudo-scientific shutdown rules, they are not about controlling the virus, they are about controlling you.
It was supposed to be about flattening the curve. Biden would flatten the economy and flatten society, too, keeping the schools closed because the Democrats are owned by the teacher unions.
The pain and heartbreak of small businesses closed, health problems on treated opioids, domestic violence, child abuse, 10 times the life years lost to the shutdowns than the virus itself according to the data, that’s what you’ll get from Biden — more misery, more pain and a lot more government as they eagerly swoop in to take the place of the economy and society they crush.
That is the choice on coronavirus with Trump supporting the states and opening the economy. Under Biden, second guessing the states and shut it down. Open the schools or keep them shut. Private sector energy or government bureaucracy.
A second Trump boom or another recession with a Biden shutdown.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor