The interview of Donald Trump by Megyn Kelly is extremely interesting and very telling.

First, Megyn Kelly is an excellent interviewer, and knows how to stay focused on a question in order to get an answer. Second, it displays one of Donald Trump’s worst inclinations – the need to always be right. Trump has a serious problem with admitting fault in anything he does. The fault is always within the stars for Donald Trump, never within himself. So when confronted with the most obvious of examples – why did you give Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation? – Donald Trump dodges and says he has no idea who did that.

YOU DID, Mr. President. That is YOUR signature on it. Now, you can say that it was a big list, I didn’t consider the implications, I didn’t think it was a big deal – whatever. What you CANNOT do is deny responsibility for it, and then demand credit for just how well you handled COVID. The “woe is me, I don’t get credit for how COVID was handled” is not going to play well with your own base, let alone the American public.

Trump also takes aim at DeSantis (yet again) for “locking down” Florida. This is a pretty blatant rewriting of history to put himself on the correct side of things. Trump claims that under the federalist system, each state’s governors had the authority to do what they wanted in regards to being open or closed. At the time, he was proclaiming the exact opposite of what he says now.

Trump's actual tweets at the time (I get it, they don't care) pic.twitter.com/TKCbBnSnsw

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 14, 2023

Trump was very loud about his disagreement with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in 2020 about reopening the state. Trump went from being vocally concerned over DeSantis’s plans to reopen, to praising him for getting kids back in school, to now trashing him for closing down anything at all.

And all the while, Trump praised both Florida’s reopening in general and DeSantis by name:
On June 5, Trump praised Florida in the same breath as Georgia, while hailing some of the states with the most ambitious reopening timelines. “Look at what’s going on in Florida, it’s incredible. If you look at so many different places that have opened up … the ones that are most energetic about opening they are doing tremendous business, and this is what these numbers are all about.”

In July, Trump applauded Florida’s decision to reopen schools in the fall.

In late July, during a covid roundtable in Florida, Trump said DeSantis had done “a fantastic job.”

Trump complimented DeSantis’s work on the issue at least three more times in August and September.

But perhaps the coup de grace came in late October 2020. Speaking at a reelection rally in Ocala, Fla., a month after DeSantis ended the all major restrictions, Trump praised DeSantis specifically for not closing down.

“We had surges, and they went up and they went down, and now you’re at your lowest numbers,” Trump said. “And you’re open and you didn’t close, and you’re just amazing — right, this guy?

“So we’re joined today by one of the greatest governors in our country — and I know a lot of good ones, and I can tell you, there’s some really bad ones, too — but this is a great one, Gov. Ron DeSantis.”

Now, a little more than two years later, Trump is attacking the governor he once called “great” for not closing — and whose reopening plan he never expressed any disagreement with (unlike Georgia’s) — and is now claiming DeSantis was too restrictive.

Is Donald Trump aware that voters have memories, access to the internet, and his own previous tweets and statements to directly contradict everything he’s saying now? When Megyn Kelly brings up Fauci, is Donald Trump aware that only a handful of people even knew who Anthony Fauci was, before Donald Trump made him, and Deborah Birx, household names?

Kelly asked the 77-year-old former president why he didn’t fire the controversial Fauci, who was empowered by Trump and allowed free reign to push lockdowns, masks, and vaccines on Americans.

“I didn’t listen to him too much,” Trump interjected.

“Not only did you not fire Fauci, who is loathed by many — millions of Republicans in particular, but also some Democrats — you made him a star,” Kelly shot back. “This is the criticism of you, that you made him the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. That he was out at every presser, that he was running herd for the administration on Covid, and that you actually gave him a presidential commendation before you left office. Wouldn’t you like a do-over on that?”

Trump insisted that he “overrode” many of the things Fauci did. “Now, with that all being said, he’s been there for years. He was respected. He lost a lot of the respect because of Covid. But he was respected.”

Now, it is true that firing Fauci at the time would have been seen as a shocking move. But Trump could have easily sidelined him in favor of other voices, like Dr. Scott Atlas, who was a part of the White House COVID team (who turned out to be much more clear-eyed than Fauci or Birx, and the media loathed him for it). There were many other reputable voices within the scientific community, like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (the Stanford epidemiologist who helped write and the “Great Barrington Declaration“) and Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins. Bhattacharya has been HUGELY vindicated for his COVID stance, and in his fight against government pressure on social media companies to silence him. Makary was serious from the get-go about following where the science led, and when it led against the CDC, he wasn’t afraid to say it. But that isn’t who Donald Trump listened to. That wasn’t who Donald Trump brought with him to press conferences to show how seriously he was taking COVID-19. He brought in Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Birx eventually undermined herself and has admitted to controlling the narrative by lying and altering data. Fauci, to this day, refuses to take any blame for what happened. Trump could, quite correctly, point at Fauci and Birx and say “I had no idea that these medical professionals would lie like this in order to preserve their own status and their own narrative.” But he’s not saying that! He can’t admit any fault within himself, so he tries to deny that he listened “too much” to Fauci at all!

This is gaslighting. Those of us who are still here all lived through every single excruciating day and detail of COVID-19. We dealt with lockdowns, with mask recommendations, to mask mandates, to Operation Warp Speed, to the media hating the vaccines to loving the vaccines once Biden was in office, and most importantly, the school closures. The stripping of our civil liberties due to a “public health emergency” happened on Donald Trump’s watch. His response? “I never got the credit I deserve on Covid.”

President Trump, if you want any credit, then you have to be willing to shoulder the blame as well. And there IS blame to go around.

Donald Trump is running for president again on two main issues: the strength of his record, and his personal vendetta against the Deep State. There’s a lot to run on there in both categories that resonates with voters. The problem is that Trump’s record on COVID, in hindsight, was a failure. He could explain why it was a failure, but what he can’t do is gaslight everyone into believing that he did a great job that deserves credit. If Donald Trump wishes to earn votes, then We the People deserve some honesty from him. And that begins with him admitting that his COVID policy failed the country. Promising that it will never happen again isn’t enough. He can explain why it failed – blame Fauci, say that he was blinded by everyone’s supposed expertise, too many voices in the CDC all saying the same thing, being overly cautious because no one knew what we were dealing with – but he has to admit that it was a failure.

If he can’t do that, then why should he deserve our vote?

Featured image: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, cropped and modified, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)