Horowitz: Trump promises to defund schools with vax mandates, even though he gave extra funding to keep schools shut down

In between praising Charlie Crist, Donald Trump is sounding like an energetic presidential candidate with some very bold promises. The problem is that, believe it or not, he was actually president during the most pivotal policy in American history. Not only did he fall for the panic at the critical moments of COVID fascism, but he continued the policies emphatically months after the truth was self-evident, and some of those policies he supports to this day. On others, he appears quite confused and muddled. Before we blindly re-nominate him, shouldn’t we at least ask some questions so we can secure confidence that his policies and personnel won’t lead him astray again?

At his Waco rally on Saturday, Trump declared, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” Now, let’s put aside the fact that this is more yesterday’s issue, because very few K-12 schools have mandates now, though many universities do, and the greater issue is the actual safety of those shots. On that front, Trump still believes his beloved vaccines saved 100 million simply because “I have had absolutely no side effects.” But let’s examine the school issue when it actually mattered, which was when he was president.

We just marked the three-year anniversary of the worst legislation in American history – when Trump signed the $2 trillion lockdown bill, which underwrote the lockdowns, Pfizer experimentation, remdesivir, and the masking regime and induced a supply chain and inflation crisis we are still dealing with indefinitely. He viciously attacked Rep. Thomas Massie for trying to force a roll call vote for all of posterity so there would be a record of who voted for the most impactful legislation of all time. However, one could chalk this up to the initial panic. The problem, though, is that months later, he refused the fight the same Fauci and Birx policies, including the funding of schools.

Fast-forward to December, months after we all understood this was a scam and most certainly how immoral it was to shut down schools. Trump did promise during the summer of 2020 to block funding for schools shutting down in-person instruction. Yet tucked away in the omnibus bill was an additional $82 billion for school funding without any precondition that schools open in person. In fact, some of the funding was justified precisely because of the cost of Zooming. The 5,593-page bill, the longest in American history, continued to fund every aspect of COVID fascism with even more funding, including $54 billion to public K-12 schools, $23 billion for higher education, and $4 billion to a governors’ private lockdown slush fund called the Emergency Education Relief Fund. It also contained $10 billion for child care to incentivize school closures rather than dissuade them.

That bill was particularly odious in many ways, and after passing Congress with unanimous Democrat support, it was signed by Trump on Dec. 27, 2020 – so long after we all knew the truth. I had begun warning about the consequences of this bill already in July of that year. It gave an unfathomable $4 billion to GAVI, the Gates-funded international vaccine organization that is responsible for countless injuries and deaths. The behemoth also provided more than $22 billion for the states to continue funding testing, tracing, and COVID mitigation programs.

Trump called the bill a “disgrace” at the time, as he did every omnibus he wound up signing, but his issues were mainly with the non-coronavirus spending and the fact that he wanted bigger “stimulus” checks for the public, not that the bill continued to fund lockdowns and the biomedical security state. The $2.3 trillion bill was the capstone of all four years of his appropriations, which funded woke and weaponized government beyond anything during the Obama years. Trump was obviously in a weaker position as a lame duck with a Democrat Senate, but it was the culmination of failing to make the case for a different direction throughout the year headed into the election.

Then, just one day before leaving office, Trump issued a presidential commendation to Birx and Fauci for their terrible work, along with General Mark Milley, the man destroying our military to this very day (who was so radical that Biden kept him on as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ). That same week, the Tampa Bay Times reports that Trump’s White House pressured the hell out of DeSantis over COVID numbers. Several months earlier, as he was stumping for re-election, Trump was still suggesting his lockdowns saved 2 million lives.

Meanwhile, the Florida Department of Health is the only state not to have promoted the vaccines since 2021. In November 2021, DeSantis signed a bill barring the Health Department from ever forcing people to get any vaccine during a public health emergency. He is also weeks away from signing the first bill to fully ban all mask and vaccine mandates even in hospitals.

This is not just a case of empty rhetoric vs. action but also a case study of a politician’s willingness to learn more details about an issue as they develop. Most policies are not irrevocable like a bullet once fired from a gun. One can make a mistake for a few days or perhaps weeks and often still be able to avoid most of the damage with a swift reversal in course.

The concern everyone should have with Trump is the lack of willingness to learn on the job and change course. So many of us begged him for months on end to stop empowering Fauci and Birx and to take a completely different path on what turned out to be the most significant issue of our time.

Five weeks after the disastrous Trump lockdown commenced, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp became the first governor to rescind shutdown orders. Trump absolutely savaged him, thereby telegraphing the message to other governors not to do the same.

A week later, Trump trashed Sweden by wrongly predicting the country would pay a heavy price for its decision, while some of Trump’s closest supporters were trying to use Sweden as an example of sanity.

Trump can still make the case for another term, but he needs to inspire confidence as to why he won’t make the same mistakes this time and why we are to believe he will appoint better personnel. It’s fine to complain about a problem on the campaign trail, but we need someone with an actual track record of fixing those problems as an executive and putting in place people who share the values of the base voters. Too many conservative commentators who wield influence are too afraid to even demand such transparency from Trump because it’s bad for business. But a lack of accounting of the policies and personnel choices of Trump’s first four years will limit his ability to deliver on these very same promises in a potential second term. Simply asserting that we’d be better off with him than with Biden is not good enough, as the general election is well over a year from now. This is the time to actually demand that all the candidates get on our plantation rather than intimidating and shaming people into blindly staying on theirs.

Editor's note: This article has been corrected to note that DeSantis signed a bill concerning the Florida health department in 2021, not last week.