Frontline Fact: Did Trump allow states to decide on lockdowns?

Eliyahu Tulshinski

September 21, 2023

Claim

President Donald Trump claimed, in an interview with talk show host Megyn Kelly, that he never forced a lockdown on the American people, but merely allowed individual states to choose to lock down.

[O]n COVID, if you know what I did, I let the governors run their states and many of the governors opened up their states. Some of them didn't.

Timeline

Politico provided this timeline on Trump's response to the 2019 variation of the centuries-old coronaviruses:

March 17: Trump said in a news conference that for the next 14 days, "we’re asking everyone to work at home, if possible, postpone unnecessary travel, and limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people."

March 19: California orders lockdown for 40 million residents.

March 20-23: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo orders all non-essential businesses to keep their workers home. Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois and many other states issue similar restrictions.

March 24: Trump says in a Fox News town hall he would "love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go by Easter."

March 29: Trump reverses course on relaxing strict stay-at-home guidance by Easter and extends the period to the end of April.

"The peak, the highest point of death rates — remember this — is likely to hit in two weeks," he said. "Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won. That would be the greatest loss of all." [Emphases added].

So while Trump not only gave “stay-at-home guidance” to hundreds of millions of healthy Americans, he then extended it beyond the infamous “two weeks to flatten the curve” he originally promised.

Trump also advised American citizens to avoid all international travel. As noted on CNN, though, the former president did not upgrade his various points of guidance into a mandatory stay-at-home order despite being publicly pressured to do so by then–National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Trump likewise resisted media coercion to mandate masks, despite calling himself a “believer in masks” at one point, leaving it to airlines, for example, to decide mask policy. He also excluded US citizens from his travel bans.

Verdict

Trump's assertion that he “let the governors run their states” is essentially TRUE. That is not to say, though, that his non-mandatory “guidance” was free of effect.

Harm

When the US president speaks, people listen. Trump's COVID “guidance” was no exception. Twenty-two million Americans lost their jobs in March and April of 2020, with minorities and women suffering the most, according to CNN, which published this chart showing millions of lost jobs that were not recovered.

The economic stress created by Trump's "guidance” combined with the social stress of minimized human interactions and the emotional stress of health fears to create a true pandemic of stress-related health problems. On May 19, 2020, emergency room AFLDS Founder Dr. Simone Gold penned a letter, cosigned by more than 500 physicians, to Trump reporting that they were witnessing “a mass casualty incident" as a result of the nationwide lockdown. The physicians warned the president of the already dire situation and of the greater dangers waiting ahead if the president did not change policy.

Millions of Americans are already at triage level red. These include . . . preventable cases of stroke, heart attack, and child abuse. Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%.

. . .

The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse. [Emphases added].

Self-harm? Coronavirus and election fraud

Even as Trump defends his COVID policies, from the lockdown to the vaccine, he himself stands to personally lose from the continuation of those policies. Inherent in the argument for lockdowns, social distancing, masks and the jabs, is the assumption that the coronavirus variant was so extraordinarily dangerous that it called for extraordinary measures. And if the virus is that dangerous, people can't be expected to stand in line to vote, even if spaced 6 feet apart.

The "solution" demanded by Trump's enemies for the 2020 general election was a tremendous expansion of absentee voting, both by mail and via ballot drop-offs, even for people who could easily travel to a polling station. An allowance was also made for extreme time delays, allowing ballots to be accepted up to two weeks after the election in some states, since, they claimed, postal workers could not be endangered with requests to keep to their regular pick up and delivery schedules. ABC News detailed the approved changes ahead of the 2020 general election, which Trump lost after late-arriving mail-in ballots broke heavily in favor of his opponent and cancelled out the leads he enjoyed in several swing states:

For the general election, at least 30 states plus the District of Columbia have made at least some changes that will make it easier and more accessible for voters to cast their ballots from home. These changes include removing strict excuse requirements or allowing COVID-19 concerns to be a valid excuse to vote absentee, allowing ballot drop boxes, offering prepaid postage on election mail and proactively sending all active registered voters applications to request an absentee ballot -- with some even skipping that step and sending the actual ballots.

. . .

The witness requirement was waived for the primary in South Carolina, and a federal judge ruled on Friday that it will not be required for the general election either, citing how severe the pandemic is as the reasoning.

. . .

8 states have postmark-by-date laws on the books, meaning that as long as ballots are postmarked on or before Election Day -- or in some cases by the day prior to the election -- they will be counted, as long as they make it to election officials by a specified deadline, ranging from three to 14 days after the election.

. . .

And in Pennsylvania, not only will mailed ballots that are postmarked on or before 8 p.m. on Election Day and received by 5 p.m. the Friday after it be counted, due to a ruling from the state Supreme Court, but any ballots that arrive within that time frame without a postmark, or with an unreadable postmark, will be presumed to have been sent before the cutoff point. [Emphasis added]

Trump himself endorsed Dinesh D'Souza's film 2,000 Mules, which documented operatives repeatedly delivering multiple ballots to drop boxes and polling stations until his election night leads were overridden, adding that the system “must be fixed.”

2,000 Mules . . . shows the world exactly how the 2020 Presidential Election was Rigged and Stolen. The movie exposes the lies of the Democrats, RINOs, and Fake News who say it was the "most secure election in history."

It was, perhaps, the least secure in history. The ballot box was stuffed, and stuffed like never before—and it's all on video. Ballots were trafficked and sold in a massive operation in each Swing State.

The evidence is so damning, what will the cowards who sat and did nothing about the stolen election say now? The way our votes were taken away is a disgrace to our Nation. It must be fixed. [Emphasis added].

Though calling for the election system to “be fixed,” Trump apparently did not intend to remedy the problem at the center of the broken election system — unattended absentee ballot drop-off boxes. Rather than declaring the virus fears used to justify the use of the drop-off sites to be overblown, Trump told Kelly that a 100 million lives would have been lost to the virus if not for the mRNA injections. Should public health officials declare a new virus outbreak before future elections, Trump's remarks could be used to claim bipartisan support for mandatory masks, lockdowns, social distancing and the expansion of drop-off ballot boxes and late mail-in voting.

Please see out previous articles on COVID