President Joe Biden claimed in his speech attacking “MAGA Republicans” on Thursday that “today, COVID no longer controls our lives.” It is an attitude for which Biden and the media attacked Trump — though more have died from COVID-19 under Biden.
In 2020, Trump was excoriated for telling America: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” He made that statement via his now-banned Twitter account as he prepared to check out of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center upon recovering from the coronavirus.
What Trump clearly meant was that Americans should go about their lives as best they could, taking precautions but refusing to live in fear. NBC News published an op-ed by a woman who lost her father to COVID-19, in which she declared: “The tweet showed that he cares nothing about the suffering of families like mine and those who are going to continue to be scarred by the disease — all without acknowledging that he inhabits a health care reality provided to no one else on Earth.”
And yet Biden has made similar statements on several occasions:
“[Our strategy] does not mean that COVID-19 is over; it means that COVID-19 no longer controls our lives. That’s what it means.” – March 30, 2021
“So, today, while the virus hasn’t been vanquished, we know this: It no longer controls our lives.” – July 4, 2021
“Thanks to the progress we have made this past year, COVID-19 need no longer control our lives.” State of the Union, March 1, 2022
Biden made those statements even before he himself contracted COVID — and suffered a “rebound” case. He has adopted the attitude that Trump wanted Americans to have all along — and that Biden, the Democrats, and the media attacked him for encouraging.
The difference, of course, is that Biden is in office, meaning that he no longer has an interest in encouraging panic — though when he describes a country under existential attack from his political opponents, it would be hard to describe his attitude as one of optimism.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.