Trump’s COVID Lies Go Unchallenged

Fawning Podcaster Tim Pool Gives Pharma-Captured Candidate a ‘pass’ on his COVID Record

Donald Trump was interviewed last week by podcaster Tim Pool. In this conversation, he lied about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role in his administration, misled about gain-of-function research, and dodged a question about Elon Musk’s call for Fauci to be prosecuted.

On May 24, during the Libertarian National Convention, Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also sat down with Pool and three other co-hosts for a 2-hour, and sometimes testy, interview. Days later, Trump sat for his own in-and-out 17 minute interview with Pool in which COVID lies and half-truths were left unchallenged or uncorrected for the record.

Minutes into the interview, Pool turned the focus to Trump’s COVID response by noting that a Libertarian presidential nominee said he wanted to see Anthony Fauci as well as executives at Moderna and Pfizer, along with Joe Biden and Trump himself locked up for what they did. But rather than addressing what actually happened during his presidency, Trump tried to deflect and deny any role he may have played in mistaken aspects of the nation’s COVID response.

On Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan

“Well I'm the one that stopped the funding and this was funding from before me, I'm the one that stopped the funding,” Trump claimed in response to tough questioning. 

Pool failed to press Trump on his own COVID record as president, including his administration’s funding support for gain-of-function virus research. 

Although Science Magazine did report that Trump’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) nixed an individual grant to EcoHealth Alliance in April 2020, the Trump administration had previously lifted a blanket moratorium on the controversial, high-risk virus research in December 2017 near the end of his first year in office, as Scientific American reported.

In other words, Trump as president was in fact responsible for gain-of-function research in Wuhan and elsewhere for two years preceding the COVID outbreak. This funding came after a year-long review initiated by the Trump White House in January 2017 had approved the research, according to Science.

On Anthony Fauci

Trump continued: “Fauci wasn't a big player in my Administration like he was after I left. Biden made him the king of everything and if you take a look at that, Fauci was not the big player with me.”

Well, Honest Media took a look at this claim. We found that Fauci was not only on the Trump administration’s COVID task force, but Trump, as the self-proclaimed “Father of the Vaccine,” in fact awarded a Presidential Commendation to Fauci to honor his “exceptional” work on Operation Warp Speed. Trump often gloated over his role in the production and distribution of COVID vaccines.

Further, on the question of lockdowns that shut down millions of small businesses, Trump took credit, claiming, “We closed [the country] down,” in his first presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle against Biden. He did so repeatedly, in fact, as is captured by this viral video on X.

Senator Rand Paul launched an investigation in the Senate that focused on Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, as reported by Fox News. Paul and others have recently called for an independent COVID Commission to investigate all of what happened leading up to, and during, COVID, as reported by Honest Media in April; Paul recently shared on X that he believes Fauci was “in charge of the entire conspiracy.”

Screenshot of Paul’s X post accusing Fauci of a conspiracy

Conclusion: No Fact-Checking by Pool or His Followers

Pool did not challenge Trump’s claims on these topics during their interview, nor has he himself set the record straight in the days since the conversation.

The vast majority of comments on the X-posted interview were nothing more than fawning praise for Pool, who let Trump’s bold-faced lies about gain-of-function research and Fauci supposedly having no significant role in his administration go unchallenged. 

During the slow-motion train wreck of the legacy media’s collapse, popular podcasters have flown high and attained a vaunted status with audiences that often dwarf their network news talking head counterparts. With such status comes a great responsibility, which is to call out a presidential candidate’s outright lies and brazen spin, especially when the host, as we suspect, knows the truth and knows that candidate is lying to his face. At the very least, a post-interview retrospective and analysis is in order for what could have otherwise been a great personal and professional achievement for Pool.

The stakes here are large. With the scales of justice looming over possible crimes of fraud and negligence following millions of deaths, plus grave harm to many millions more (caused by both the COVID virus and vaccine), the imperative is to cut to the truth rather than getting swept up either in the deceptions and obfuscations of the powerful, or in hero worship.

Clearly, Pool was on the right track in echoing clarion calls for a reckoning over the events of COVID. In the end, however, Pool was taken for a spin by Trump and he failed his journalistic duty by fawning over a man he called the greatest US president, rather than holding him accountable for his COVID record and his own words.

Pool boasts 2 million followers on X and over 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube, while the Trump interview has tallied nearly 1 million views. Within the new independent media landscape, podcasts play an essential role in informing the public of stories that other outlets do not cover. Thus, Pool with such a large following, has an outsized responsibility to get it right – especially when given the opportunity to question a former, and possibly future, president.