Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has come to the defense of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, insisting he saved numerous American lives that would have been lost under Joe Biden.
“I got so tired of the dishonesty, the hysteria, and hypocrisy of Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the news media that I felt I had to go back and pull together as a historian the actual record of Donald Trump’s response to COVID this year,” Gingrich says in a video posted on October 12.
“Is the correct assertion that because of Donald Trump’s failure 200,000 people have died of COVID or is the correct assertion that because Donald Trump moved early and aggressively over 2 million Americans are alive today who would have died if he had followed the advice of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and others?” he asks.
“This is one of the most important questions the American people need to explore and reach a decision about in the next few weeks,” he insists. “The fact is that at a very early date the president was advised by key public health figures that we had to move decisively or over 2.2 million Americans would die.”
“The president did move very decisively but when he did, people on the left — Biden, Pelosi, Harris and others — all attacked him. Some ridiculed him. Because they said he was doing too much too fast,” Gingrich notes, while inserting a series of video clips backing up his assertion.
“So, let’s put this in context. Let’s look at the facts. I think you’ll see how big the difference was between what President Trump did and what his opponents would have done,” he declares, before running through the chronology of the president’s actions to curb the spread of the virus and the resistance he faced from the Left.
On January 27, Joe Biden wrote an op-ed for USA Today saying President Trump was in favor of “reactionary travel bans that would only have made things worse.”
On January 31, Biden called Trump’s proposed ban on travel from China “xenophobic.” The following day, Biden tweeted out that “we need to lead the way with science, not Donald Trump‘s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear mongering.”
And the following day, February 2, President Trump put together a ban on travel from China. Meanwhile, on February 24, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was encouraging people to go visit Chinatown, Gingrich demonstrates.
In March, the New York Times said that between 200,000 and 1.7 million Americans could die of COVID-19. On that same day, March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency, Gingrich states.
At that same time, Dr. Deborah Birx said that if we do everything “perfectly” we could keep the fatalities down to 100,000 to 200,000.
In any pandemic, there will be losses, Gingrich observes. “The question is: did President Trump’s actions contribute to those losses or did President Trump’s actions actually contain the losses.”
“Looking at the evidence, I would argue that President Trump probably saved between 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 Americans,” he states.
As the situation got worse, “suddenly the Democrats decided that they had to rewrite history,” Gingrich states. “The Biden campaign even came out to say that Joe Biden had not been against the travel ban when President Trump first came out with it.”
“You end up with a history that is very clear,” Gingrich notes. “Trump reacted early. He reacted based on scientific and medical advice. He took very decisive steps including closing down what had become the best economy in American history.”
“I think the president’s view is that we have to fight the virus and not be afraid of the virus,” he continues. “Biden wanted to hide in the basement and do nothing whereas the president thought that as Americans we need to stand up and enter the battlefield and defeat the virus.”
The question for Americans should be: do you want the guy who probably saved 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 lives? That’s Donald Trump.
“Or do you want the guy who failed during SARS and failed at the beginning of this crisis? He took the wrong positions and would’ve allowed travel from China to continue. He would’ve allowed many more Americans to die,” he states.
“I hope you can see how dishonest the attack on the president is,” Gingrich declares. “Two hundred thousand Americans tragically died despite the most aggressive action we have seen, action that was vastly stronger than anything Biden did when he was the Vice President.”
“And when you look back, you realize that had we followed the Biden-Harris-Pelosi model, we probably would have lost five or six or seven times as many Americans,” he concludes.