On Trump and Operation Warp Speed

During times of crisis, emperors, kings, and presidents have always been hemmed in by so-called experts.

During one of his so-called “Table Talk” monologues recorded in the Wolf’s Lair headquarters, Hitler once boasted that he was a great leader “because I have always made a point of never listening to so-called experts.”

In his egomaniacal mind, “experts” about every conceivable matter were useless academics who lacked his extraordinary power of intuition. In military matters, Hitler ultimately committed the ultimate hubris by not listening to the experts who warned him that invading Russia would result in total disaster. In medical matters, it’s noteworthy that he proclaimed that he simply knew cigarette smoking to be terrible for one’s health. It was, he claimed, a matter of simple observation and intuition, and if medical experts failed to understand this, it was further evidence of their uselessness.

Many of our readers have lamented that Donald Trump endorsed and touted “Operation Warp Speed” as the solution to COVID-19, and that he should have told Fauci et al. to shove off. I believe this is an unrealistic expectation. Indeed, we saw what happened to Trump when he tried, in the spring of 2020, to sing the praises of hydroxychloroquine as an inexpensive and readily available way of treating the illness. Referring to Professor Didier Raoult’s first research paper, Trump tried to make the case in his White House press briefings that HCQ seemed to hold promise and that there was no harm in giving it a try.

It was during these press conferences that Anthony Fauci reminded me of the lore of Cardinal Richelieu, who held immense power during the reign of Louis XIII. Richelieu was purported to be an expert on virtually every important public matter, and Louis invariably took his counsel.

Watching Fauci’s subtle and not so subtle insubordination, I realized that the Deep State had succeeded in taming Donald Trump by hemming him in with a public health emergency and supplanting his executive power by Rule of Medical Experts.

In my view, it’s a bit silly of people to proclaim that if they had been president at this time, they would have possessed the vision and the will to tell the so-called medical experts to jump in a lake. While Trump can be amazingly forceful and cunning when it comes to dealing from people from a variety of economic and political sectors, in medical scientific matters, he was fish out of water.

It’s also important to remember that, between March and August of 2020, Professor Didier Raoult and Dr. Peter McCullough were the only major academic doctors in the world who made public pronouncements calling into question the feasibility of making a safe and effective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.

In press interviews in the spring of 2020, Professor Raoult expressed grave doubt that it was possible. In August 2020, Dr. McCullough penned an Opinion piece for the Hill headlined The great gamble of COVID-19 vaccine development. Apart from these two guys, no one who held a major position in academic medicine made such clear statements in the public forum.

Should Trump have told the entire federal scientific-medical bureaucracy and its backers in the Department of Defense to put a sock in it? Should he have instead listened to Drs. Raoult and McCullough?

I believe it would have been great if he’d done so, but it’s hard to imagine from a practical standpoint how he could have pulled this off, especially considering that Drs. Raoult and McCullough were promptly subjected to vicious campaigns of vilification and punishment.

Now the real question is whether Trump will—after he is sworn in—change his tune and proclaim that he is open to considering the evidence that Fauci et al. sold him a bill of goods.