b'EditorMade in MexicoSome of the finest vehicles on the road are made at the new Mercedes-Benz plant in Aguascalientes. With a new trade deal in place, the time is right to shift industrial manufacturing out of China, and to our brother, Mexico.or allow their daughters in a room alone with him. He never takes responsibility for anything, he blames and demonizes everyone who criticizes him, and he has even said that he has never asked forgiveness from God. Like it or not, thats who he is.On Monday March 16th, however, the evolution of Trump into a serious leader who was willing to deliver bad news while taking command over the national re-sponse to a crisisthe evolution that both he and Republicans had promised would one day happen, acting presidentialactually happened. At last, he became the presi-dent the country needed more than at any time since 9/11, and he led.The president who had avoided the White House press briefing room like the plague for three years, was now present, each and every day, at the coronavirus task force press conference. With two empty seats between the reporters in the room, to exhibit social distancing, President Trumps serious demeanor and on-task attitude was something no one had really ever seen. He very soberly delivered the news that the disruption to the country over Covid-19 could stretch into August.Liberal news media and Democrats were unable to notice Trumps transition and would not comment on it if they had, and conservative media figures would not dare mark the change, as doing so would be an admission of who he had been all along. The continued media criticism was on the administrations late response to Covid-19 and downplaying the threat, despite their own repeated comparisons to seasonal flu as late as early March. In the debate among Democratic presidential primary candidates on February 19th, the virus was not mentioned. At the end of the Weekend Update segment of the February 29th episode of Saturday Night Live, cast member Chris Redd shouted, Black people cant get the coronavirus. Its true!Democratic governors, especially Andrew Cuomo of New York, were publicly excoriating Trump for not providing PPE and respirators that they anticipated need-ing, based on the health crisis that was being predicted by those whose models were being taken as gospel. Cuomo said his state was going to need 40,000 respirators to handle the tidal wave of critical Covid-19 patients that experts were saying was on its wayTrump was raked over the coals for saying he thought that was too many. He was right, once again. Even at the peak of hospitalizations in New York City, not a single patient was denied ICU admission or respiration.Could it have been our blind acceptance of the predictions of healthcare ex-perts that has landed us not into the greatest public health crisis in American his-tory, but into the worst (and fastest) implosion of an economy in the history of the world? As for our local model on Covid-19 infections in the Coastal Bend, we had a chance to ask Dr. Chris Bird about the legitimacy of the model he presented to elected officials on April 10th, in which his graph clearly showed a peak of up to 100,000 infections by the end of April, in his best case scenario of maintaining social distancing orders.First, Dr. Bird denied his graph, saying that his predicted peak was at the end of June and not the end of April, while offering a supplemental graph that still did not show a peak at the end of June. We can all see the graph he presented to the publicand a PhD is not required to read it. Even we dummies can see that it illus-trated a peak at the end of April of almost 100,000 infections. We asked about that in an email after our interview, and we never heard back. We also pointed out that 38 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINEQ2.2020 TheCoastalBend.com'