Democratic super PACs are exploiting pandemic panic to bash President Trump. Even if you don’t live in a battleground state, you’re probably seeing these ads, because they’re even running in deep-blue California.
Here is an example, a television ad produced by a super PAC called “Unite the Country.” The ad makes three assertions that are clearly false.
First, the spot claims that Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax.” This is a lie, based on an article published by Politico that misrepresented remarks Trump made at a South Carolina rally on February 24. The Daily Signal published an article on March 2 that debunks the Politico analysis. They write: “An examination of the video and transcript show Trump actually described Democratic complaints about his handling of the virus threat as ‘their new hoax.’”
It wasn’t the virus Trump called a “hoax,” it was the Democrats building yet another fraudulent case against Trump—this time based on his alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. Trump was calling this a hoax similar to the Ukraine hoax, the Russian collusion hoax, and an assortment of other hoaxes, big and small, that have defined media coverage of Trump ever since he declared his candidacy.
Next, the “Unite the Country” super PAC ad claims that Trump “dissolved the pandemic response team.” This is another lie, spread by former Obama Administration officials, based on nothing more than a decision by Trump appointee John Bolton to reorganize the National Security Council.
As explained by Tim Morrison, a former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the NSC, “We consolidated three directorates into one. This eliminated layers in the reporting chain and in the accountability chain.”
So Trump didn’t “dissolve” the pandemic response team. If anything he improved it, by consolidating a few bureaucracies and streamlining the lines of communication.
Finally, this Trump-bashing ad claims the president “allowed the virus to spread across the country.” This too, is a lie, or at the least, a gross distortion, because it ignores the way so many other players were not only slower than Trump to respond to the pandemic but were critical of Trump’s decisive early actions to fight the pandemic.
Good examples of this, including video clips, can be found in a March 27 Tim Pool video in which he describes how New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also delayed the lockdown—aggressively resisted imposing a lockdown, in fact—yet the media is propping him up as a savior while blaming Trump.
Another super PAC, “Priorities USA,” is airing television ads that use the virus crisis to attack Trump. One of the group’s ads, which can be viewed on the Priorities USA Twitter page, selectively quotes the president’s remarks where he allegedly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. But everyone downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, especially Democrats and their media allies. Examples abound.
On February 25, nearly a month after Trump enacted a ban on air travel from China, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made a public appearance in San Francisco’s Chinatown and said, “there’s no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns.”
The initial response by the media was even worse. As reported in Real Clear Politics:
Much of the media response was to downplay this harbinger of the deadly global threat to come. “Don’t worry about the coronavirus,” BuzzFeed wrote on Jan. 29. “Worry about the flu.” On Jan. 31—the same day the Trump administration imposed a ban on incoming visitors from China—the “explainer” news site Vox was telling readers, “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” On Feb. 1, the Washington Post ran an article headlined, “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.” On Groundhog Day, the Post was saying, “Past epidemics prove fighting coronavirus with travel bans is a mistake.”
As for online media, try to find anything on Google about how the media initially downplayed the danger of COVID-19. Apart from Fox News, targeted for its right-of-center programming, there’s almost nothing.
Who Funds the Trump-Bashing Super PACs?
This brings us to the question of who is paying for these ads. Who funds these super PACs? It appears that many of the donors come from Silicon Valley.
For example the million-dollar (or more) donors to Unite the Country super PAC include Californians Reid Hoffman, Richard Blum, and George Marcus. Among the million-dollar donors so far, only one non-Californian is represented: Yaron Minsky from New York.
Donors to the Priorities USA super PAC, somewhat more dispersed, include Donald Sussman from New York, Marsha Laufer from Florida, George Marcus from California, and Seth Klarman from Massachusetts.
It is important to highlight these super PACs and who funds them because they represent yet another outlet for the billions that are pouring into the 2020 election cycle to support Democratic candidates and causes. And that’s important because the financial power of the Democratic Party amplifies every aspect of the threat it presents to Americans.
Of course, politics is dirty and lies are commonplace in political campaigns. But Republicans don’t have a street army of paid union operatives, they don’t have the urban political machines run by and paid for by public-sector unions, and especially since Donald Trump offered voters an economic nationalist agenda, populist Republicans no longer have the backing of large corporations or the financial sector.
And, apart from libertarian super-donors who only back Republicans if they are indistinguishable from globalist Democrats, Republicans do not have the backing of individual billionaire super-donors.
But Democrats do. And perhaps these Democratic super-donors should reflect on what might happen if the populist movement and economic renaissance brewing in America isn’t contained and then broken by things like this most recent and apparently semi-permanent new state of emergency. Because when Democratic lobbyists and liberal think tanks successfully pushed for donor disclosure and transparency, they were making a simple and accurate calculation: conservative donors are more likely to be harassed than liberal donors.
This disparity has played out for years and is worse now more than ever.
If an individual super donor is audacious enough to contribute big bucks to a campaign or cause that threatens the interests of public-sector unions, or any other liberal power center from the plaintiff’s bar to the environmentalist lobby to the identity politics industry—much less the excommunicable sin of questioning “free trade” and “open borders”—they will become victims of relentless and professionally choreographed harassment. Their children will be harassed at school. Busloads of pumped-up activists will descend on their front lawns. Their businesses will be picketed and boycotted. Their vendors and their customers will be threatened. Sometimes this harassment will extend to vandalism and violence. This is a fact of life for conservative donors.
It is not a fact of life for liberal Democratic donors. But these billionaires are the ones who have decided to destroy Trump, not because of his pugnacious disposition, but because of his economic nationalism. Trump’s policies, not his disposition, are helping ordinary working families in America; but these same policies threaten the financial interests of these billionaires. Their business deals with China are threatened. Their insanely profitable climate change scams are threatened. Their ability to import cheap labor and export jobs is threatened.
President Trump, and the movement he’s catalyzed, is an existential threat to globalist billionaires who view this nation the way a Romneyesque corporate raider would view a target company: load it up with debt, replace the workers with cheap substitutes, sell off the assets, take out all the cash as dividends and management bonuses, then fire everyone, declare bankruptcy and walk away with wheelbarrows filled with loot.
Donors to Democratic super PACs should understand that an open secret is not a secret. Everyone knows who is paying for all of this. These Democratic super PAC donors are often the same individuals who own and control and dominate online and offline media, finance, and entertainment. These individuals are the source of money for these despicable ads. These Democratic super donors are the top of the pyramid, with the bottom being Antifa thugs, union bosses, and well-paid ballot-harvesting operatives.
These donors fund a Democratic Party that is creating the up-down coalition and destroying the middle class. While they try to make us blame the president, the mega businesses they invest in are using this crisis to break the will and the solvency of small, independent business owners. It is these American billionaires who implicitly collude with Chinese oligarchs, with whom they have more in common than ordinary Americans, to destroy this nation.