He didn’t admit he knew how bad it would be, a Pence staffer says he said something like “It’s going to be big” and it was a WHO briefing, so it wasn’t data unique to Trump.
Also covid had already begun community spread in the United States by January, the genie was out of the bottle.
Trump received two briefings in January.
[Emphasis mine]
The president has defended his handling of the crisis — pointing to steps like his decision at the end of January to restrict travel into the U.S. from China. But for much of the following month, the president and some of his top surrogates downplayed the threat of the virus.
“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” the president said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News early in February. By the end of the month, with the virus reported in several dozen countries at that point, he continued to tell reporters that the risk “remains very low.”
Trump knew about coronavirus’ severity in January.
Trump not only knew about the virus, but also admitted that he kept the knowledge… hidden from the public.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down….
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: It’s hard to even count all the times President Trump has told the public not to worry about the corona virus, like this from March 10.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: And we’re prepared. We’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. If you stay calm, it will go away.
“Deadly stuff” versus “It’s going to disappear”
In February, Trump told Woodward that the virus was “deadly stuff,” more dangerous than the flu and potentially transmitting through the air. (CNN has audio recordings of Trump’s comments.)
February 7, to Woodward : “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one, that’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than your — you know, your, even your strenuous flus. … This is more deadly. This is five per — you know, this is five percent versus one percent and less than one percent. You know? So this is deadly stuff.”
It’s on tape, for Christ’s sake.
Right, I’m saying you guys are acting like Trump had this golden box full of guaranteed, known facts, that said “covid19 is bad and will kill 600,000+ Americans.” That isn’t what he had. He had some best guess assessments of worst-case scenarios. I do not believe any American President would have taken serious / draconian lock-down measures in response to such warnings, particular since at that time we had just gotten our first confirmed case (later research shows community spread had actually already started by this time, but that wasn’t known then.)
The WHO was saying not to implement travel bans. Other western countries who were working with almost guaranteed similar assessments, were not shutting down travel.
No one is saying it was good for Trump to be told covid could be very serious, and to then choose to downplay it in the press. What I’m saying is none of that is evidence Trump could have done anything about it.
And that’s a bullshit excuse to let him off the hook. We’ll never know what would have happened, because the one guy with the power and responsibility to actually take action decided to fuck the dog instead.
I’m sorry what do you think is being demonstrated with that tape?
That A) Trump knew it could spread through air–I think basically anyone with a brain understood a respiratory virus would spread that way and B) that it was “deadlier than the flu”, again, even in February everyone realized that.
I’m saying, what about this knowledge do you believe Trump feasibly could have converted into action that would have materially altered the American death rate. Further why do you think other countries without Trump as President, for example Mexico, United Kingdom, Italy, Czechia, Belgium–why have those countries had a similar death rate? Did their leaders all do bad things like Trump? Or is it likely that there wasn’t any meaningful efforts that Western political leaders, significantly hampered by running free societies with limited governments and populated by people who generally do not just do whatever government says, had serious limitations in how it could respond to a pandemic?
I’ve explained that all already above. It’s on you to actually read it.
I’m not letting him off the hook, I’m calling him out for his bad behavior. I just fundamentally disagree about the impact of that bad behavior. I think it’s a very comforting fiction to believe if we just had a good President, bad things wouldn’t happen. The virus would’ve not spread at all, we’d have had no shutdown, no one would’ve died, and all these great things. I simply do not believe that is true. I think it’s entirely possible for there to be situations where a President does a very bad job, and the net result is not that different from a President “doing everything right.”
It’s no different from the fact that some people can eat a bacon wrapped porterhouse washed down with a liter of beer for dinner every day for 75 years and die in their sleep at age 100 peacefully, and a fitness freak with 2% body fat who is a professional athlete caliber conditioning and health can drop dead of a heart attack at age 38. There are many events in the world to which the human inputs have only very minimal impact on the outputs.
Edit: I’ll note Biden has been doing many of the things people say Trump should’ve been doing, and we still had the delta surge under his watch.
I did read it as evidenced by my analysis. We can both read the same thing and disagree on its meaning, as is quite obvious.
Okay, where fuck did I say anything like “nothing” would happen? Can that smarmy BS right now.
If that’s the level of discourse you’re interested in, we have little else to say on the matter.
never mind
We’ve reached the ‘Red Covid’ phase of the pandemic - CNNPolitics
[Bolding mine.]
Dubbing it “Red Covid,” The New York Times’ David Leonhardt writes:
"The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state. … Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America.
…
How did we get here? There’s no single person to blame, but in my mind it’s quite clear that former President Donald Trump and Fox News bear the lion’s share of the responsibility.
Trump spent the first 16 months of the pandemic doing everything he could to downplay it. He insisted that the virus was “going to disappear.” He was openly dismissive of mask-wearing; on the day he announced CDC guidance that people should wear masks indoors, Trump said that he had no plans to do so…
Trump also worked to make the debate about masking – and steps to mitigate Covid-19 more generally – about attempts by Democratic leaders to limit your freedoms. Lockdown orders were an abrogation of your rights – as opposed to short-term attempts to slow community spread of the virus. Masks were nanny government trying to tell you what to do. Respected experts… were shills for the Democratic Party. Everything, in short, that people other than Donald Trump was telling you about the virus was bunk.
As seen in previous posts, Trump knew the virus was extremely dangerous. And yet he blew sunshine up his minions’ arses and turned an medical emergency into a political issue. Unfortunately hundreds of thousands of lives were lost because of Trump’s lies. Fortunately most of the lives being lost now are Trump supporters rather than patriotic Americans.
Yes, but to some extent Trump weaponized ignorance, which has made Biden’s job much, much harder. A lot of this particular slew of anti-vaxxer attitude we’re dealing with today (not all of it, but a pretty large chunk) seems to me to be ideological. And I lay that ideological cohort squarely at Trump’s feet. If he had pushed proper masking/distancing/lockdown protocols and pushed vaccines for all he was worth instead of alternately taking credit for them then equivocating over the necessity of them, we would have a different reality today. A.) he would have probably have been re-elected (God help us all) and B.) we would have fewer fatalities today and less anti-vaxx bullshit.
Fewer fatalities, not none. A lot fewer? I think so. I can’t quantify it, I can’t prove it. But I do believe it.
Correction, a half-way sensible person in Trump’s position, given the information and advice that Trump was given, ought to have known this.
Trump, however, is far too lazy to even look at advice. He didn’t know anything.
In terms of comparing the US covid rates to other countries, I would say:
The true impact of weaponizing ignorance is still to be seen. The US has had the benefit of being one of the first to be able to mass vaccinate. However it’s falling down the vaccination tables now as other countries now have supply and not the political problems that are plaguing the US.
Europe is a largely borderless continent of small countries. Why are we comparing to Europe and not Australia, China, Japan etc? Normally fiscal conservatives are the first to say that Europe is a bad comparison to the US.
Of course, if the case rate looks increasingly bad under biden then many will lay the blame on him, even if the cases are in red states. This is one reason why I think trying to come up with body counts is a misleading way of evaluating presidents. It’s better to evaluate their actions and consequences in a qualitative sense.
Right but how logical is that belief? Like much as everyone hates Trump, I don’t see that he’s ever been openly anti-vaxx in terms of covid. He repeated some vague anti-vaxx nonsense about autism back in 2016; but he was a chest-beating advocating for Operation Warp speed and rushing the vaccine through FDA Emergency Use authorization specifically so he could take credit for it. He also got vaccinated early on. Now once he saw that a decent chunk of the GOP base was leery or outright opposed to the vaccine, he quit talking about it nearly as much…but he would still mention the need to vaccinate at least “sometimes.” Even in his post-Presidency he’s advocated vaccination a couple of times.
I think there’s just a genuine reservoir of hesitancy and anti-vax mentality among the right, in a disproportionate way (I point that out because there are contingents of anti-vax lefties, just less proportionally than on the right.)
Trump’s administration also was involved in all the initial shutdowns, did advocate for social distancing, he was soft on masks, but he was not normally out there saying “don’t wear a mask.” Masking is probably the area you can hit him the hardest on because he was never big on advocating mask use, and while he wore one himself a few times, he also still ridiculed Biden for wearing a mask etc.
His promotion of hydroxychloroquine, the infamous injecting bleach and sunlight press conference etc were low points, not just in Trump’s history, but in my life and probably the history of the American Presidency. But I’m not sure what “real” effect those shenanigans had. The reality is a lot of people are just very terrible at-risk assessment, and when those people are also prone to dislike “being told what to do”, I think it manifests roughly as we’ve seen it. I think some of the same reasons that someone votes for a Donald Trump are also reasons they were less likely to embrace a vaccine and less likely to want to follow government mandates. I don’t know that Trump could meaningfully change that, and if Trump had cleaned up his rhetoric on say masking–to match his rhetoric on vaccination (which he had advocated more consistently), I’m skeptical it would significantly drive behavior. Trump’s support for vaccines didn’t seem to resonate with a lot of his supporters.
Trump encouraged his followers to attempt to violently overturn an election, including the potential lynching of members of Congress and his own VP. This has never been done by any president or presidential candidate in our entire history. Even James Buchanan and Richard Nixon left quietly. That is a HUGE deal, and nothing Bush Jr. did compares. Comparing the two is like comparing Ted Bundy to some guy who accidentally ran someone over while they were driving drunk. Yes, the latter did something bad and would never come up in a discussion about the best of the best, but it doesn’t compare to the former.