Also, don’t forget:
I don’t ever recall George W. Bush commenting on how sexy Jenna and Barbara were, or that he’d date them if “if I weren’t happily married, and you know, her father…”
“I have never been so grateful for a ellipsis in my life.”
Stranger
Let’s stick to politics, specifically what they did as POTUS, and leave personal life out of it.
Many people are inclined to say that we should distinguish between the private and professional life when judging a President or other powerful figure (an argument that has often been made to preserve the legacies of presidents like John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, and in the rehabilitation of Nixon’s image) but as Heraclitus is credited with saying, “Character is destiny.” The President isn’t just an executive decision maker; he is a leader and the public face of the nation both domestically and to the world at large, so he personal conduct is at issue as well as his politics and executive actions. In the case of Trump, there is plenty of sheer awful to go around but it isn’t’ the as if his private conduct doesn’t influence his behavior as President, and indeed is key to understanding why he feels completely justified in violating democratic norms; it is because he feels justified in violating basic societal norms.
Stranger
WRT Bush, I always thought it was slightly harsh to lay all the deaths on him. I mean, I don’t see an alternate universe where the US doesn’t lash out against someone following 9/11, there’s no way the public wouldn’t have accepted that, and indeed the invasion of Afghanistan had high approval IIRC.
That doesn’t make it OK of course, but if we’re saying that not all Covid deaths should be attributed to Trump because no American leader would have been able to implement the kind of Draconian measures that contained the virus in much of East Asia and Oceania, well, we can say a similar thing for American leaders’ response to 9/11.
So those things largely cancel out in my view.
And we’re left comparing a bad politician with someone who wanted to destroy politics completely.
Someone who has admitted to having regrets about Iraq, with someone who is incapable of caring one iota about anyone that isn’t him. There’s no contest.
I think we should have attacked Afghanistan – which we did. But attacking Iraq for 9/11 is like attacking Mexico for Pearl Harbor.
I thought Bush 43 was an idiot, and I couldn’t imagine anyone worse. At least Bush didn’t give secrets to our enemies, nor attempt to destroy the United States.
Well I agree WRT Iraq.
WRT Afghanistan, from a purely sober, patient point of view, then a few targeted special forces missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan may have been sufficient to get OBL and gut Al Qaeda. But I don’t think such a response was realistically on the table.
America felt vulnerable, and they needed to show the world they were not to be messed with.
Agreed. He totally sold out the US for his own personal gain.
Bush blabbed about how we were tracking bin Laden through his mobile phone, among other things. I probably posted 20 years ago that the government should have kept quiet and disseminated information on a strict Need To Know basis.
But America felt vulnerable and Americans think they have a right to know everything.
Well if there’s one thing we can be sure of, Trump wouldn’t have blabbed. He’s a shrewd player that one; something something 4D chess.
You wouldn’t get him blabbing important security information to the Russian ambassador.
And think how hard it must be to keep all the details of his “so good” healthcare plan secret all this time.
Um…
Which has no bearing on the point I made. Bush acceded to the lawful end of his term in office. Trump on the other hand is claiming he should still be in office, and it’s pretty doubtful at this point that he’d even allow himself to be termed out, if that were the situation.
So, advantage Bush on that score.
See above; I said what I said. Pretty much anybody beats Trump on the meeting the low bar of not attempting an autogolpe.
Still not really not comparable IMO.
At the end of the day trump didn’t cause the pandemic, true he f-cked almost every last thing it was possible to f-ck up about responding to it, but that’s not the same as unilaterally invading a country and killing 100,000s of it’s people.
Killing foreigners is a proud American tradition. Causing nearly 700,000 (and counting) Americans to die is a Charlie-Foxtrot of Brobdingnagian proportions.
The problem with this line is the leaders who care deeply about their own character wind up like Jimmy Carter, unsuccessful leaders. We need to make peace with the fact that the people who seek out these positions are ambitious men, not Mister Rogers. Yet my impression from many on the left is that the personal conduct outweighs anything else.
I don’t know why you made it a left and right thing.
Eg There were plenty of attacks on Obama’s personal character, despite him being more Mr Rogers than Mr Rogers. They actually had to resort at one point to saying that because his father had been adulterous that Obama himself didn’t have the “dignity of office” or whatever. (yes this is hilarious now)
On the overall point, I agree and disagree. There are a lot of things about a politician’s past and current lifestyle that don’t matter but a large proportion of the electorate care about: their sexuality, their sexual activity, religion, etc.
Personally I don’t care about those things, and I’m even prepared to forgive old views where they have long ago renounced those views.
But someone who repeatedly defrauds the state, screws over employees / contractors and spreads (dangerous) misinformation…yeah those things are relevant, to me, to the suitability for someone for the role of president.
You’re only considering the direct impact he had on US deaths. But by the nature of his role as the President of the United States, he has a significant degree of influence on what happens elsewhere, too. Here in Canada, the vast majority of our Covidiots are directly quoting the same stupid things Trump was saying in the US, and so at least some of our body count can be laid at his feet as well. The situation is even worse in some other countries.
And it gets even worse if you look at the time line of when Trump knew that COVID would be a problem. He admited on tape that he knew how bad it was in January of 2020, but he kept quiet about it until March, at least, and even then downplayed it.
The US has world-wide intelligence sources that most other countries in the world simply cannot match, Canada included. If he’d told us all how bad it was in January, we all would have been better off. We wouldn’t have avoided all the infections and deaths, but giving a disease another month and a half to two months of unconstrained exponential growth was unconscionable, and without a doubt hugely inflated the body count in those first months.
FWIW as much as I detest Trump I actually think it’s hard to ascribe any real number of coronavirus deaths to him, there’s strong evidence a huge portion of Americans are simply fucking imbeciles about disease and basic public health precautions–note that this sort of stupidity has flared up several previous times in our history when we were faced with major disease outbreaks. Trump had dumb rhetoric on covid19 that I think didn’t help, but I’m not really sure he could have done much to make the stupid wing of the country behave on this matter–in fact one of the few times he’s ever gotten booed at one of his own rallies is when he was advocating for people getting the vaccines.
Trump’s main reason for being worse than W Bush is simply because Trump directly attempted to bring about an end to our democracy. A bad decision to go to war in Iraq carries with it a lot of moral, economic and etc weight and is a major fuck up for a President, but it is within the bounds of our system of government and our laws–it was approved by huge majorities in both houses of Congress for example.
We have him on tape in January 2020 confirming he knew how bad the virus was, and it took him months before he admitted there was a problem – which he then minimised. ‘It will be over when it gets warmer!’ ‘It will go away after the elections!’ ‘It will disappear like magic!’ His intentional denial of something he knew to be true, his trivialisation of the disease for two or three months, and his bloviating to his followers leading them to believe Covid was not serious cost tens of thousands of lives – which I think is a ‘real number’. His mishandling of the pandemic, and the multiple lies he told his cult, is a large reason why the Delta variant is running rampant in this country now.
I agree that this is the main reason.
I mean no one knew how bad it was in January of 2020. And I am not clear on what Trump could have done in January, February or March, that he did not do. What did Trump not do during that span that other world leaders did? I can’t actually see how our initial pandemic response was materially different from the OECD norm.
My understanding is the Pence staffer who dropped this bomb said this:
Society in general, particularly in the West, would not have accepted mass lock downs, mask mandates, social distancing requirements etc based on that level of knowledge. Is it shitty Trump downplayed the virus in February and March and said it was going to just “go away”, sure, it’s shitty when the President looks stupid.
What I’m objecting to is claiming that it likely cost thousands of lives. To demonstrate that would be incredibly difficult, and would also require demonstrating that somehow the U.S. has done much worse in terms of deaths than other Western nations. As best I can tell we haven’t done out of band worse. We’ve done about the same as the UK did, and neither the Conservative or Labor party in that country have been against covid lockdowns and etc as a political rule. The British lock downs were more significant than Americas, for example–and note I’m not saying the Tories have handled covid perfectly, but I’m also not sure any Western country really has.
Also mind the President is at the top of the Federal government in a Federal system, many covid issues actually have to be done by State governors, some of whom were opposed to any serious lockdowns at all–for example Brian Kemp (GA) basically resisted the initial Federal lockdown that Trump pushed for and there was little Trump could do about it.
Just for reference the U.S. is at about 2,066 deaths per million. Some comparison points of countries with similar or higher rates in the OECD:
Belgium (2196)
Chile (1948)
Colombia (2460)
Czechia (2839)
France (1734)
Hungary (3129)
Italy (2165)
Lithuania (1826)
Mexico (2114)
Poland (1999)
Portugal (1765)
Slovakia (2306)
Slovenia (2182)
Spain (1844)
United Kingdom (2001)
EU - 1718
The U.S. numbers…are not great, but we share a same “quartile” of death rate with a lot of countries that seem to have done all the “right things”, that don’t have a two-party system in which one party refused social distancing, masking, vaccines etc. Frankly I suspect because to some degree, government response to the pandemic has much less impact on the outcome vs societal response. Government does not perfectly control society. Some countries are just much more likely to take disease seriously and social distance, mask up, and vaccinate early and often. I do not think there is a magic wand that these governments possess that can change their national character and behavior.
What is so different from Germany with 1100 deaths per million and Belgium and Czechia? Neighboring countries with much higher death rates? I suspect it is much more cultural/societal and not any magic wand Angela Merkel was waving around.
Mind you I’m not absolving Trump whatsoever; I’m just saying I think the powers and scope of Presidential ability to effect change tends to be exaggerated in this context. Trump’s pandemic response was disjointed, stupid, and bad. Not many other ways to say it. I’m just not convinced it led to a significant increase in deaths in the United States versus what would have occurred if say, Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio had been President.
That’s the point though - Trump, with access to more and better information than anyone else in the world, did know how bad it was going to be. He’s admitted that!
And the biggest thing he could have done earlier was to let everyone else know how bad it was, so that we could have placed better limits on travel earlier in the year. With a two week incubation time, we couldn’t have stopped all the cases, but everyone who traveled internationally in February was a potential vector for spread. Limit it to essential travel, and have proper screening and quarantining for those who had to travel, and you cut the spread enormously. Remember all those people dying in Italy in March and April? They got infected long, long after January. Had we known to take precautions in January, a lot of those people would have avoided infection.
Also, we wouldn’t have needed the more extreme lockdowns. Masks and social distancing would likely have been enough to limit the spread, and had Trump not decided to politicize the issue, the opposition to masks would have been much reduced. Even the half-assed approach we ended up with was demonstratively better than doing nothing, so an approach not hampered by the president himself would have been even more effective.
Generally, the earlier you respond to any such infectious outbreak, the better the results will be, and Trump deliberately delayed any such response. We’ll never be able to quantify exactly how many deaths are on his head, but you can be sure it’s a lot.