The truth is it is fairly difficult to directly blame either Trump or Biden for these deaths. That likely is a whole debate in and of itself, but some degree (and in my opinion) most of the covid mortality we had was essentially baked in the moment the pandemic hit. Primarily because of the nature of our country being divided into 50 States, with emergency health powers for public health crises largely being wielded by State level officials, with a huge population unwilling to take any disease seriously, with a big reservoir of vaccine hesitant people etc etc. Trump did not create any of those things, even if he did cheer some of it on.
The rhetoric Biden used in the campaign wasn’t really dishonest though, at least in my mind–and I’m grading him on the “politician’s curve”, so there is some level of disingenuousness innate to that, right. Biden’s rhetoric was largely about sending the message that Trump was never taking the pandemic seriously enough, tried to downplay it, and was consistently putting other concerns higher in precedence than trying to contain the disease. Biden was promising he would make covid his main concern. This was fairly basic political calculus and actually smart–poll after poll in 2020 actually showed a good chunk of the electorate took the pandemic as the #1 issue for them, even higher than the economy (which is usually the #1 issue.) Biden was positioning himself as the “take covid seriously” candidate. Trump had largely already locked in for himself the position of “I value the economy more.” It ends up in the suburbs that Trump message didn’t win. It likely did win in lower income Hispanic communities in some parts of Texas and Florida, though. This didn’t surprise me–those are workers most directly affected by shutdowns, who don’t have jobs where they can sit at home and make good money, if their stores close they lose their income.
We’d be in agreement that Biden mismanages the political optics of a number of things, but this triggered my “nonsense detector.” His withdrawal from Afghanistan was clearly done under the assumption the Afghan National government would not immediately collapse, so it was not done under any presumption that the Taliban would “respect women’s rights”, he clearly expected the Taliban would not be in charge–and on that he was wrong (as was a chunk of U.S. intelligence.)
He also has refused to return billions of dollars in state assets to the Taliban in part specifically because of their treatment of women, so I don’t see much evidence that he’s given the Taliban a lot of benefit of the doubt there.
Biden likely knew it was possible the Taliban would take over, but he essentially gambled it would take a few years and he wouldn’t take the heat for it. He lost that wager. FWIW I was a reluctant Biden voter (I’ve never been a big fan, was a Republican until 2014 or so, I would vote for virtually any Democrat over Trump though), and I consider him getting us out of Afghanistan one of his few undeniable wins, along with the infrastructure bill. The problem is those two wins give him basically no political currency at all. Afghanistan is seen as a loss. The infrastructure bill was sorely needed but won’t make any meaningful impact for 4-5+ years as projects get bid out and started, and people just aren’t voting based on that stuff, but I had been hammering infrastructure as a need for about 15 years–and if Trump had managed to get it together and pass his long promised infrastructure bill, I’d have called that one of the few wins of his Presidency, too.
