The president lays out his concerns over the coronavirus economic lockdown and begins to set the battle array to reboot the national economy.

“This was artificially induced,” United States President Donald Trump explained on April 3 to the assembled journalists in the White House briefing room.

What exactly was he was referring to? Locking down the world’s number one economy.

“[T]hey said, ‘Close it down. You have to close it down,’” President Trump continued.

These are similar to statements he made on March 24. Bill Hemmer asked the president what “the moment” was that provoked him to guide the country into a national economic lockdown. The president explained: “[A] few people walk into the Oval Office and say, ‘Sir, we have to close up the country.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’” (emphasis added throughout).

That must have taken place after the president’s March 9 tweet to his followers and before March 13 when he announced the lockdown. In his March 9 tweet, Mr. Trump explained that, at that point, the coronavirus wasn’t even close to being compared to the seasonal flu. As of March 9, the country had 546 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 22 deaths.

In an interview with Laura Ingraham, the president elaborated further on what he told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer: “Two very smart people walked into my office and said, ‘Listen, these are your alternatives.’ And that was a projection [that] 1.5 to 2.2 million people would die if we didn’t close it up. That’s a lot of people.”

It seems President Trump had to obey the doomsday data or else. He was strongly urged to suspend his logic and go with what the experts were telling him to do. But what if those two unnamed experts and the data they were using was all wrong? Well, we no longer have to wonder about that.

Trumpet Daily Radio Show presenter Stephen Flurry has covered so many of these themes, including where these cataclysmic data scenarios started. It started with United Kingdom epidemiologist Neil Ferguson.

Over the weekend of March 7 and 8, he gave his unvetted report to the White House. He also gave it to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) on March 9. At this point, the president was concerned but by no means panicked; he was tweeting his thoughts on the seasonal flu versus the coronavirus.

By March 13 the president’s thinking had dramatically changed. The panic-mongering started with the experts, and they started at the top of the country, working on the president of the United States.

National Emergency Declared

On the same day the president declared a national emergency, the New York Times published a story that included the cdc’s predictions, which were based to one degree or another on Ferguson’s report. How Ferguson arrived at his conclusions is vitally important, especially since China has been purposefully twisting or even destroying its data.

According to the Times’ March 13 story, the cdc predicted that 160 to 214 million Americans might become infected with the coronavirus, which would require 2.4 million to 21 million hospital beds. It also predicted a death rate as high as 1.7 million Americans. Hospitals would need to ramp up capacity and the economy would need to be locked down to mitigate the alarming rate of possible infections and deaths.

On March 13, President Trump declared a national state of emergency: “The spread of covid-19 within our nation’s communities threatens to strain our nation’s health-care systems. As of March 12, 2020, 1,645 people from 47 states have been infected with the virus that causes covid-19. It is incumbent on hospitals and medical facilities throughout the country to assess their preparedness posture and be prepared to surge capacity and capability. Additional measures, however, are needed to successfully contain and combat the virus in the United States.”

These comments are important. They center on the intention to mitigate the spread of the disease to prevent millions of deaths. The chief concern appears to be the potential strain on the nation’s health-care system—something that has not yet happened—and a strain for which the national health-care system was already generally prepared to handle on any given day.

At this moment, the U.S. has over 900,000 staffed hospital beds, of which 300,000 are available on any given day. During the 2018–2019 flu season, over 35 million Americans got sick, which led to over 16 million Americans seeing a doctor. Importantly, according to the cdc, that annual four-to-five-month flu season required over 490,000 hospitalizations and caused 34,000 deaths. Yet no one read about an urgent need for hospital beds or the need to lock down the country.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation provided White House experts with the modeling used to predict hospital capacity and the number of ventilators needed to service the pandemic. The model it released on April 2 predicted that the number of required hospital beds would be 262,092. That’s 130,000 less beds than hospitalizations during the 2018–2019 flu season.

Where Is the Crisis?

Where is the hospital crisis experts predicted? Where is the crisis the president was “artificially induced” into using as the basis for calling a national emergency and locking down the national economy?

The expert predictions have been completely wrong. Yet these are the models White House Coronavirus Task Force experts Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx and others relied on to influence President Trump’s thinking. These are the same models filled with data that reporters were using to whip up hysteria and insinuate that the president was out of his depth.

Mr. Trump had to lock down the economy or tens of millions would be infected, 2.2. million Americans would die, and the nation’s health-care system would melt to the ground. It has been a month since this hysteria was foisted on the nation. Have the experts’ predictions come true?

The president is suggesting we should be asking if they were even honest.

A month out, here is where we stand: Of the over 600,000 confirmed U.S. cases, nearly 31,000 have died. And like the seasonal flu that kills the elderly and those with underlying health problems, many of the recorded covid-19 deaths stem from the same high-risk groups. The data shows that the vast majority of hospitalizations are individuals over 65. And of the 31,000 registered deaths, we cannot know how many of them died with covid-19 rather than from covid-19.

Dr. Birx recently explained that experts (including her) have taken a “very liberal approach” in defining a covid-19 death. If someone has a heart attack and dies because of a long-standing heart problem, or perhaps someone has terminal cancer and dies, but he also has covid-19, or is suspected to have it, the cdc is counting that as a covid-19 death. In other words, these experts are now artificially inflating the death count.

And as for the expert modeling that predicted a major surge in hospitalizations, that also has not happened. The president deployed two Navy hospital ships to two states, but they haven’t been needed.

The Will of the Experts

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading voice in the president’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. He is also a Hillary Clinton supporter, a noteworthy fact during today’s “deep state” war. Throughout the crisis, Dr. Fauci has acted as a foil to the president’s leadership.

On Tuesday, March 24, President Trump told Fox’s Hemmer that he wanted to reopen the country by Easter. On Thursday, March 26, Dr. Fauci went on national television (cnn) and explained that it wouldn’t be a good idea to reopen the country.

“He’s listening to us when we say we’ve really got to reevaluate it in real time and any decision we make has to be based on the data,” Dr. Fauci explained, referring to the data that has been fundamentally flawed from the beginning. He continued, “That’s when you’ve got to hunker down, nail down, mitigate, mitigate, mitigate—get the people taken care of. That’s what you’ve got to concentrate on. You have to go with the data.”

In the name of compassion for the people, you must listen to and obey the experts and their data. Keep the people locked down for as long as it takes to satisfy the experts—months even. No playing at the park with your kids, no going to church, no visiting your neighbors. Dr. Fauci has said that he couldn’t guarantee it would be safe for Americans to vote in November.

As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has explained, whenever we are being asked to just submit to the will of men at the expense of the law, we know something is wrong.

When the president touted hydroxychloroquine as an emerging effective therapy for coronavirus, Dr. Fauci chided him for getting ahead of himself. Yet the president has been proved right.

On Sunday, Dr. Fauci explained to cnn’s Jake Tapper that President Trump could have saved lives if he had acted in February instead of March. Yet on January 26, the very day the president shut down travel into the U.S. from China, Dr. Fauci was telling his fellow Americans that “people should not be worried or frightened by coronavirus. This is a very, very low risk to the United States.”

Can Dr. Fauci continue to be trusted to provide objective advice to the president?

Economic Sabotage

Napoleon Bonaparte once said to never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. So the ongoing silence among the radical left has been conspicuous. Except for the constant bleating in the media, elements of the deep state and the democratic radical left have been unusually quiet.

If the economic lockdown was artificially induced, as President Trump said, who stands to benefit? This has been a drastic turn of events for a man who looked to be riding a sizzling economy to a November 2020 presidential election win.

The shutdown has put a chill in the economy. Many individuals would like nothing more than to take advantage and slow-walk the reopening of the economy in hopes of politically damaging him.

The biggest factor to the president’s first-term economy was not just his once-in-a-generation low unemployment rate, the stock market boom, or even the wealth generated—which are all tremendous positives—but its record low unemployment rate within the minority community, the black and Hispanic communities. “Senate Democrats are privately acknowledging that President Trump will be very tough to beat in November if the economy stays strong and he draws on the substantial advantages of running as an incumbent,” the Hill reported on February 18.

The economy was the one area Democrats acknowledged was in the president’s favor. If it catastrophically failed somehow, it might severely hurt his reelection chances. That’s the descending slope the president is presently on.

In January, President Trump was riding a 19-year economy approval rating. He said he wanted to make America rich again. By January 2020, he had noticeably succeeded. His economic agenda improved the bottom level in the economy, especially those in poverty and in the middle class.

Many voters believe President Trump has been better for young black men than former President Barack Obama was. If Mr. Trump with his strong economy was able to pry away more minority votes from the Democrats in 2020—as it appeared he was well on his way to doing—it would all but guarantee him a win at the national polls.

When the economy was still riding high in October 2019, President Trump explained: “We have the best economy we’ve ever had; we have the best jobs numbers in 51 years, the best unemployment numbers that we’ve had in a half a century. People are working, they’re making money.”

The national economic lockdown has hurt Americans and their president. Sixteen million Americans are now unemployed, and the country has witnessed tens of thousands of people line up across the country at local food banks. In a nation with so much material wealth and affluence, it’s startling to witness how many are living on the edge.

A Ray of Optimism

Last Friday President Trump announced that he would form a council to reopen the country. The announcement capped off comments made earlier last week by some of his closest economic advisers, who explained that the president was considering options on how to reopen the country within the next four to eight weeks.

Optimism, and the economy, is where the president is now focused.

The new council, set to include leading medical and business experts, will be charged with balancing the risk of coronavirus to public health against the nation’s economic misfortune. They will advise the president on what they conclude is the best policy for opening up the country.

When it comes to who will make the final decision, the president made himself clear: He will make it. “I only hope to God that it’s the right decision,” he said.

According to a Fox News poll published late last week, Mr. Trump can now claim his best approval ratings yet since becoming president. Meanwhile he continues to receive strong support from his ardent evangelical base.

Late last week, Attorney General William Barr told a Fox News commentator that Mr. Trump’s leadership has been “statesmanlike” in the face of a partisan “gotcha” media. Millions of Americans likely agree with that assessment.

In making his economic task force announcement, the president also said he was considering soliciting input from some Democratic governors with whom he has had a good working relationship. Those relationships have come by months-long crisis collaboration between the White House and state governors, behind-the-scenes work led by Vice President Mike Pence.

When President Trump appointed Vice President Pence as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force on January 29, he set himself in a compelling position to successfully exit the coronavirus crisis. Mr. Trump has been sensitive to the complex issues facing the individual state governors, but more importantly, he has striven to adhere to the Constitution when some governors have shown themselves unwilling to uphold the rule of law.

At the beginning of the crisis, President Trump reinforced the constitutional firewall between federal responsibilities and state responsibilities—a step that has insulated him from failures, abuses and the temptation to follow human will and emotion through the crisis, as has occurred with some experts and at the state level.

This approach has won him praise from some unorthodox corners of the country. “I can only speak for myself, but I have to be complimentary,” said Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom recently. “Otherwise I would be simply lying to you, misleading you, and that is a wonderful thing to be able to say and I hope that continues.”

The U.S. Constitution limits the president’s say over individual state affairs, including the economy, so good relations with key Democratic governors should feasibly go a long way to moving Mr. Trump’s national economic aspirations forward. Notwithstanding, he won’t be held hostage by any single governor or even a cabal of governors who may try to delay reopening their economies.

What happens next could be a second Trump economic boom, where millions of Americans might come to see the president as the savior in this crisis. Victor Davis Hanson wrote for American Greatness on March 15:

Whatever the ultimate human and economic toll from the coronavirus, there is no doubt that Trump, as president, will be blamed for the economic slowdown of spring and perhaps even early summer. The media despises the president as does entertainment, academia, and the media, ensuring in popular culture and the news that he will be demonized in a way Obama was not, despite reacting far more slowly, to the swine flu threat of 2009. But here are some caveats. Warmer weather and spring, global quarantines, travel bans, more testing and increased knowledge of the virus may all eventually conspire to slow its spread. And when its relative non-lethality is fully digested (perhaps 98 or 99 percent of those in the general population below 65 in previously good health who are infected recover), and the cases begin dropping off, the economy will not just recover but take off.

To stimulate the economy Hanson foresees interest rates lowering—perhaps to equal or best record levels—providing new stimulus for a short-term glut of spending during the summer months. Perhaps it may be somewhat likened to postwar America, where the pent-up energy of the nation explodes in spectacular economic growth—but only for a little while.

Hanson continued:

That ensuing economic uptick will be multiplied by crashed oil prices that are likely to help U.S. consumers while not permanently hurting U.S. frackers, much less the U.S. economy, which is both the world’s largest consumer and producer of oil and natural gas. More likely, it will do more damage to the oil-producing Middle East and Russia. American consumers will receive a huge stimulus of reduced prices at the gas pump, just as summer driving approaches.

What’s next?

We can all be thankful the experts were wrong this time. But as Mr. Flurry explained in his article “Coronavirus and Other Modern Plagues in Prophecy,” they won’t always get it wrong. Plagues in the near future are prophesied to be catastrophic. (Take time to read through the chilling prophecies of Deuteronomy 28.)

While the radical left would love to see the coronavirus crisis spell the end for this president, Bible prophecy indicates he will probably come out of this crisis even stronger, more powerful, more in control of the U.S. government. No doubt radical elements in the bureaucracy have surfaced during this crisis, and they will be purged.

Bible prophecy also indicates that the temporary chill in the economy will probably not spell its end. The national debt will continue its death spiral, inflation will continue to creep, and there will be many shuttered businesses across the country that will not reopen. In the short term, the stimulus money that floods the market will once again give the nation an air of affluence and a temporary return to normalcy, but the new scars on the Main Streets across America should be a warning of how quickly everything can be taken from us.

Blessings come from God—in His love He gives them, and in His love He takes them away. Read Deuteronomy 11:17-22.

Mr. Trump’s latest poll numbers reflect America’s growing pleasure in his leadership during this time of national crisis. As the early summer months lead to warmer weather and the economy begins to find its muscular legs, the president’s popularity may rise accordingly. In that case, America’s temporary resurgence would not yet be complete.

Gerald Flurry explains in his watershed article “Saving America From the Radical Left—Temporarily”:

It is critical that we realize why this resurgence! God Himself is pushing back against the Satan-inspired forces that would have destroyed this nation! He is exposing those forces so we can see them clearly. And He is using a man to save the superpower of prophetic Israel, the United States—temporarily. Yet like anciently, this is only a temporary resurgence. Look at what happened anciently, and you recognize that the short-term gain in the nation was followed by extremely strong correction! … He is saving this nation temporarily—extending mercy for a short while before the punishment is carried out. Use this opportunity to prove this truth, heed the warning, and accept God’s offer of protection to you!

According to Bible prophecies explained by Mr. Flurry, such as those made by God in Amos 7, President Trump’s administration has not yet ascended to the zenith of power, nor has it reached the end of the breadth of control that the president is prophesied to achieve so God can warn America one final time.

The temporary, national resurgence will continue for a little while longer. That means it is still a time of opportunities for you to get right with God and get behind His warning work as never before.

Please take time to read Great Again—it is a stirring and thoroughly optimistic explanation of God’s unfolding plan for America.