He made the disease partisan. Before the Great Holy Mask War, when doctors were not recommending masks, Trump said people were only hyping the disease to damage his presidency.
Overall I don’t think much has changed in terms of public medicine. The parameters of the virus were estimated by the Chinese at the start of the year, and really, the numbers have pretty much tracked what they initially reported. Experts in public medicine and epidemiology have pretty much stayed the course with their advice. There are detail changes as time has gone on, but little of importance has changed. Public expectations seem to have shifted. And that makes a difference.
This is a real problem. And indeed, this is where a nation’s leaders are supposed to be doing their jobs. Despite being elected as politicians, they are supposed to be able to manage the pointy end of running a nation. It is down to them to muster the advice, cope with conflicting pressures, and finally make the call of how things will be. This is the buck stopping. Looking around the world you see dramatic differences in how politicians have risen to the challenge.
Here in Oz, we went into lockdown something like four months ago. Right now, despite major success in handling the pandemic, one of our states has had a serious resurgence. Very likely due to only a minor lapse, but with vicious result. Yet, if we hark back to the advice we received from our Prime Minister going into lockdown, what we are seeing was exactly what was expected. Flare-ups, localised lockdowns, deployment of the defence forces to help manage the lockdowns. Where things have changed, is a public expectation that maybe we should have gone for total elimination from the start. Harder lockdown months ago, and longer time to open up. The state where I live, and some other states, have eliminated the virus. Our borders are closed, and we watch in trepidation as our neighbours try to put the genie back in the bottle. The point being that little has changed since the start of the year in terms of public policy or management of the epidemic. Some things go right, some things not so good. But the plan and the understanding was always reasonably good.
Here in Oz we have a similar federated system of government to the US. Not as many states, but otherwise a similar division of responsibility. Similar tensions between federal and state governments. But the epidemic has never become partisan here. Indeed there is unprecedented cooperation between the states and the federal government. Political colour hardly ever comes into the question. Indeed I don’t even know the political colour of the other state governments. Nor do I care.
I think it would be interesting to imagine how the previous US presidents might have acted had they been in power now. Curiously, I suspect that Regan might have been the most effective. He had a well honed sense of political reality and also a very clear sense of how to play the public mood. Also, as I have observed earlier, in general conservative politicians have a slightly easier ride, as they are able to introduce more socialistic policies easier. Liberal presidents will face the wrath of the conservatives; whilst a conservative president pushing exactly the same agenda will not face the same level of opposition. So when large scale social action is what is needed, counter-intuitively - you want a conservative.
No doubt US politics has become much more riven and divisive in the decades since Regan. But he was hardly an uncontroversial figure. Bush Snr would probably have made a workmanlike effort. Obama could probably have done well, but may have been hamstrung by the level of growing partisanship. You need a communicator and someone with true political sensibilities for the mood of the country. Someone who is statesman enough to work to unite people and defeat the crisis. But you also need a country willing to listen. That does seem to be lacking.
Obama actually had a global pandemic on his watch, the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. He by all accounts did well. Of course this is to H1N1 as a squadron of B52 is to pistol.
I don’t think he would have had any measurable improvement over Trump. The structural problems that existed in 2020 would have existed then too and not just in political partisanship. The health and government systems have lost most of their slack and surge capacity due to policies demanding “efficiency. Plus most of the plans that did exist were paper ones with limited implementation done. Fact of the matter is that most of the people who drew up the plans never expected to have to implement them and really the expectations was to face localised outbreaks not global ones (as weird as that sounds after Swine Flu).
This would affect Bush jr and Clinton. Bush Sr and Reagan would have been more effective since the policies which gutted government and healthcare expertise and capacity only were implemented after they left office (yes I know they can rightLy be blamed for the ideology behind it).
This is nuts. We have a large number of people and state governments actively spreading disease because they believe it’s all a Democrat hoax. Trump has fostered this notion the entire time.
Well, there was the Ebola outbreak as well. That didn’t come to much, but that’s the point - we were very proactive about it. And the questions at doctors’ offices about travel to West Africa continued years after it became a non-issue in the US.
Maybe it wouldn’t have come out to much in any event even if we didn’t, but that’s the mark of success with disease outbreaks - the correct response appears as “overreaction”. Either it wouldn’t have been bad in any case or we were so successful that we have no way of telling how successful we actually were.
Lots of good responses here. The aspect I want to emphasize is, wouldn’t it have been nice if our President thought he/she had ANY obligation to comfort/unite/reassure… the nation as a whole? No past president or major party candidate would have done as bad of a job as Trump.
I often think how nice it would be - as President - to be able to call on pretty much any top experts you wished, and then pick and choose from their advice. Damn - that would be sweet. Then announce your decision, explain how it is based on the best knowledge at the time, and admit it will be continuously reviewed and modified as the information changes.
The economic shit - I’ve got no idea.
Oh yeah - and I would NEVER use the bullshit term “essential.”
Trump, as always, is interested mainly in polishing his own supposed reputation and blowing smoke and sunshine up our collective asses. He’s not even a politician in this regard, more like the reality game show host he seems most suited for. Yes, it WOULD be nice if he even acted like a standard politician…hell, even Bush II was a better one…but it’s not what the man is. I often think that his followers want him to be like that, and it’s a feed back loop that only reinforces itself. The more he doesn’t act like a politician the more they like it, and the more he picks up on that and goes out of his way to do it more. I think this Covid pandemic hit us, collectively, at the worst possible time with the worst possible leadership. Literally ANYONE could have and would have done a better job at this than our fearless orange haired leader. 
Maybe as an Ohioan I am biased, but I do feel that DeWine did a pretty good job here. I think he also set an example that other more responsible republican governors followed.
With competent leadership from the federal government, democratic or republican, most states would have worked together. There’d be a few outliers, maybe Alabama or something who refused to play along, but they wouldn’t be large contributors to the problem.
As is, with the federal government providing no leadership, and to a large extent undermining the leadership of the states, there is much less of a good example to follow.
Weeks late, and while saying asinine things about how the pandemic was going to do in the USA.
“Listen to experts”? Which ones. People have expertise in narrow areas, there is no such thing as an all encompassing “expert”.
You do realize that Trump stopped listening to Dr Fauci and the CDC for almost a month? Trump just recently began to talk to him under pressure from aids that realized how dumb Trump’s pettiness continues to be a detrimental to deal with the issue.
I think it’s obvious that no one on the Dope, trolls included, is going to run things quite as badly as Donald Trump, and that the larger questions of where things sit when the pandemic appears becomes hopelessly intertwined in the question.
So we’re not going to have Donald Trump’s specific problems heading into the pandemic. Fine points might be unanswerable given this reality, because answers like ‘Congress decides to work together’, ‘my experts and cabinet create sophisticated plans upon heavy consultation with experts’, when your experts are paid shills, Fox News Anchors and Vladimir Putin.
No one is going to have that specific baggage.
But none of this fun. So let’s create a somewhat realistic timeline:
Jan 2017: President Max is informed by an outgoing Obama of the importance of emergency planning. A non-Azar Secretary of Health and Human Services reads the abstract and casework, and decides to invest in having an up to date version. Fortunately, the Obama Administration is interested in supporting the transition team, and early expertise is kept.
Through 2020: President Max decides to make ‘cosmetic fixes’ to the Affordable Care Act. Expanding Medicare Access and exchanges, in exchange for some of the small tax hikes used to make it revenue neutral. This continues to expand access to health care; preventive care is generally always covered.
Counterfactual #1: When does the US learn about Covid-19? Trump didn’t take it seriously until March 2020, and it seems plausible that December 2019 would be fair as something bad was clearly happening in Wuhan by this point, but the US would have observers throughout China and it is also possible that China might decide to make a backchannel request for help. A date in November would require real luck.
I’ll answer this with December 2019.
Counterfactual #2: When and how likely is Congress going to approve massive financing to fight the Pandemic? A congress united by one party or somehow in militant partisanship isn’t going to spend to fight the problem.
I’ll use the answer of: Congress will accept modest items at a time of concern, and unlimited funding to avert mass casualties; this is probably OTL, although it could vary either way.
So, there is a playbook, and there is a series of conversations inside the administration by January 1st about trying to address a Covid 19 outbreak in the US. Early precautions, like asking all states to create a plan, quietly invoking the Defense Production Act to begin a buildup of PPE Masks, Tests, Ventilators and Hospital Beds goes forward.
I do not see how any of this saves NYC from becoming ground zero. Governor Cuomo has done a great job trying to educate and save lives, and throwing the federal stockpile of ventilators doesn’t, on its own, stop many thousands of people from getting sick.
Lead by example. I’m a history fan, so my take would be to have a series of fireside chat style TV broadcasts seeking to educate the nation, how to protect yourself from the disease, the symptoms, when to seek emergency assistance, and take the lead in wearing masks.
NYC getting clobbered means rolling out the big guns. Executive order: National Mobilization of Armed Forces to tender aid to the sick, order things like MASH units to New York. The nation gets locked down, although I would simply order an expansion of Social Security and Medicare to all Americans, and emergency tax hikes to cover the bill, on grounds that in a time of crisis we have no choice.
[Fun fact: In WW2, FDR raised the top marginal tax rate to 95%. There is precedent to do this, and it’s time].
I would then institute a national standard of lockdowns. The Department of Labor is empowered to begin a massive investigation into workplace safety standards, and non-essential businesses are shut down. However, the focus is not to keep everything locked down, but how to create a hard guarantee that workplaces do not spread Covid. There will be absolute liability for a worker contracting Covid in the workplace as part of the agreement for a business to reopen, and the plan must be reviewed and approved.
This could lead to some businesses reopening earlier, and some businesses never reopening. But job loss at least has some social safety behind it. This might lead to lead Covid receding by the current day, but it would probably still be around.
The de-escalation steps would probably focus on trying to ensure safety without high cost. That said, I suspect that expanding social security and medicare to everyone isn’t going away. 
Starting as soon as I’ve had some sleep after the victory party in November of the election year, and continuing after inauguration:
List all the major potential disasters the USA might possibly have to deal with. Floods, fires, droughts, financial collapses of various types, epidemics, terrorists attacks, disruption of trading routes due to war or to any of the above, massive volcano eruptions, meteorite strikes. Get advisers to check for what I’ve left out.
For each of those, find out whether and to what extent we know what to do about it. I expect that for any of those we’ll have some idea what to do about some aspects but no good idea what to do about others.
For the things about which we think we know what to do: are we prepared to do that? If not, get to work on getting prepared. (At this point, for instance, somebody goes and physically checks the stocks of masks and ventilators, finds out that they’re old, poorly maintained, and often unusable, and we order production of replacements. By the time we start hearing about covid-19, therefore, those stocks are full to their designed levels, and we know who we ordered them from and which of the people we ordered from came through with quality goods, so we’re all set up to order a batch more in a hurry.)
For the ones we don’t know what to do about: get people working on trying to figure it out. (In the case of impending meteorite strikes, say, this is going to be a long-term endeavor. Assume that it will be, and try to plan to keep it funded.)
For all of them, to the extent possible at the time: have a coherent plan, both for what the Federal government can do and for what it can reasonably ask of governors, mayors, and the general public.
For all of them: do our best to identify genuine experts, so that we know who to call, making sure that we include people capable of changing their minds given further evidence; and fund enough of them to keep watching out for danger signs, so that we’ll know when to call. And make sure that they’ll have access, and be taken seriously.
(I am in no way qualified to actually be POTUS. Among other problems, if I’m woken up out of deep sleep it can take me a couple of hours to be able to think straight.)
Most of that should be done during the transition, long before you are actually sworn in.
Assuming of course, that there is a good faith hand off from one administration to the next.
I do believe we’re in agreement on that.
Yup, that would be the way a normal handoff should work.
Frankly, I think I would have become so incandescent with rage at anti-maskers, it’s-a-conspiracy-or-hoax deniers that I would transform into a tyrant and start imposing martial law or something, throwing many of these deniers into big detention camps. Probably best, then, that I not be POTUS…
I remember the Surgeon-General’s report on AIDS that was mailed to all residents of the US. It was really too little, too late, but it was steamrolled by the Surgeon-General who was thinking more as a physician than as a political puppet.
The Reagan administration failed abominably when it came to the AIDS epidemic, and the millions of dead rest squarely upon his shoulders.
The final number of dead from COVID will be Trump’s millstone.
The three main efforts to controlling an epidemic are testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. If the testing and contact tracing have been performed properly, a quarantine needs to be put in place. Commandeering college dorms, military barracks, even cruise ships would make beds available, and every effort should be made to keep families together. You cannot expect people to self-quarantine. Too many folks think, “Oh, they really don’t mean ME…” as they sneak around and do whatever they please.
Draconian? You bet! And there would be an avalanche or two of lawsuits, depriving people of their civil rights. I don’t know what legalities have been used in the past to uphold quarantine, but the needs of public health should outweigh the needs of the few. These measures would contain the virus and drastically reduce its spread, until it dies out for lack of a host, or a vaccine is found. And then all life can return to normal, and the economy can resume full force, instead of this strangled animal we have now.
I’d probably be the very first president lynched.
~VOW
At this point, even someone without any experience in leadership could have done a lot better. It would be a simple matter of saying “let’s pick random world leader X, and assuming they aren’t a Trump style leader, let’s do the exact same thing as that world leader.” Take a pick, as I mentioned in the thread I started earlier. Just copy what the leader of New Zealand, South Korea, Iceland, Germany, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, or any other number of countries did. Boom, Covid-19 would be a much smaller problem than it actually is.
Do you think any country’s solution could be directly implemented in America (if so, which), or are you saying to use the efforts of successful countries to inspire more specifically American ideas?
It’s very tempting to blame everything on the stupidest person with the most power. Certainly Trump did his part in screwing this up, but he couldn’t have done it without the militant idiocy of the MAGAts. They were here before Trump, they put him where he is, and we’ll be dealing with these shock troops of stupidity probably forever.
I can tell you what I would NOT do in the middle of a pandemic;
Fire the chief of staff and the deputy chief of staff of the Center for Disease Control, people hired by MY OWN ADMINISTRATION, fired for not being LOYAL ENOUGH to repeat my bullshit lies.
I mean, Jesus Christ tapdancing on a cracker! “The Best People” indeed. Just keep firing and hiring and firing and hiring and screwing up every single part of government that is responsible for keeping people disease free.