My sense, from watching Trump as president and from reading about his business history through his and his family’s testimony in court cases, is that he’s learned over the course of his career that things work better when he’s less involved in the daily business and, instead, largely delegates it to smarter people. He loses money slower. He generally views his job as being to create buzz around the name “Trump” and to retain the semblance (but not the reality) of being “the boss”. As such, he largely just let’s people do what they want, but will easily let someone convince him into doing something else so that he has an excuse to dramatically change things up.
The social understanding of Trump and the reality of Trump are two wildly different things. Kellyanne Conway was feeding information to CNN on a daily basis, of which most of it was misleading or puffery. The reality is that at the same time Mnuchin was questioning the Pandemic, Fauci was a member of Trump’s Administration and working for Trump. Operation Warp Speed was set up and undertaken by the Trump Administration and headed by Trump’s personal appointee - a guy who had sexually assaulted some ladies.
He mismanaged the pandemic because he’s not particularly competent and because he just let people do what they want. Some went one way, others went the other way.
He’s hailed as an enemy of the pandemic because that’s the image being sold to the Republicans - to maintain support - and to Democrats - to maintain rage, to help maintain Republican support. But that’s largely a fantasy. The reality is that Dr. Fauci was Trump Administration. If you think he was doing a good job then, to some extent, the Trump Administration was doing a good job. Project Warp Speed didn’t achieve a vaccine any faster than anyone ever could have believed - its release date matched the prediction given by that one doctor who appeared on Joe Rogan in the early part of 2020 - but it wasn’t a long, drawn out mess either. It was on schedule.
I’d vote that the whole thing was a muddled mess of good and bad, without any particular leadership pro or con of anything. Trump didn’t know what to do. Didn’t have a plan. And mostly just tried to find ways to promote his name off the thing.
I’m forced to give the little putz some level of sympathy (though not much), as I would to anyone who got in over his head. Is he an egomaniac? Of course, but why would anyone want to become President of the United States unless they were suffering from an overabundance of ego?
David Graeber, often amplified by his fan Adam Curtis, made much of the fact that modern politicians have devolved into mere middle-managers of the status quo. They became that because that’s what we want, once we became consumers instead of citizens.
But we won’t admit it, and instead elect anyone who promises “leadership for a new era” (while defying leadership and having to be dragged kicking and screaming into any new era). Bush Sr. admitted his weakness in “the vision thing,” and it limited him to a single term.
Politicians are infamous for answering the questions they want to be asked instead of the questions they actually are asked, and likewise they pursue issues their “visions” compel them to pursue while botching the actual problems that inevitably arise. Lincoln luckily had one vision and a matching problem. FDR luckily had a vision (fixing the Great Depression) that was solved by a different problem (WWII, which reenergized the economy). LBJ said this: “That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved, the Great Society.”
Trump’s “make America great again” wasn’t necessarily the “again” of Beaver Cleaver and Emmet Till. Its “again” was the pre-9/11, 1990’s era of everyone enjoying cheap shit from China, de-regulated businesses from Reagan, etc. An empty sales pitch reliant on such unrealistic nostalgia was already doomed, but it also didn’t allow for the possibility of some godamn thing coming up out of nowhere. For a mountebank like Trump, blaming and denial were his only recourse.
Good answers, folks. As a small addendum, I think his pat answer of “I didn’t want to cause a panic” is slightly truth-ish – he didn’t want to provoke a financial panic.
It’s this, plain and simple. Trump always denies what he doesn’t want to be reality. Let’s also not forget Sharpie-Gate, where he simply Sharpied a hurricane’s path into something other than what experts said – accurately, of course – it would be.
Trump has said many times that if you say something often enough, it will become reality to many people. Sadly, this is true, and in the instance of COVID, it cost some people their lives or the lives of their loved ones.
Yup, and it was for him to save face (and because he can never admit that he was wrong), as he had previously listed Alabama as a state which would be affected by the hurricane, and then continued to insist that he was correct.
One factor is that he needs his base to mistrust, fear, and hate intellectuals. The pointy-headed geeks say that you have to give up your gas guzzler to fight climate change? No, it’s all a hoax! The elites say that we need to shut down businesses to fight a pandemic? Fuck them! It’s all a conspiracy! Make the people hate science and you can go ahead and make money like you’ve been used to, consequences be damned. If the science tells you something you don’t like, attack science.
I don’t have any sympathy for someone who gets in over their head and then can’t admit it. Ego is one thing, but letting the ship go down because you can’t admit you hit an iceberg and won’t listen to your fellow officers. No sympathy there.
And that’s on him, no argument. But some blame has to go onto a society whose middle class and social safety nets and hand-ups were replaced by a binary of winners and losers; suckers and cons, “saved” and damned.
You can’t make mistakes, admit to them and then learn from them anymore, like Ike did when he lead the army into North Africa, or JFK did after the Bay of Pigs. You can only always win now, which is why the majority of Americans polled see their society as having become a rigged deck, and so cheating and lying are therefore necessary. And boy, isn’t Donald Trump an example of that? Maybe he was elected because he’s the most visible example.
I agree with the previous points too, but also I wonder: How stupid is tanTrump really? He wanted (and wants) to be a dictator. And a pandemic is the ideal vehicle for that. Imagine he had managed the pandemic correctly, imposing restrictions on the citizens of the US because of the emergency the pandemic clearly is. Without overstepping his powers at first, just managing the situation sternly. That was his magic bullet right in front of him. Many have stated, and I agree, that this would probably have won him the election 2020. Then he could have played the dictator’s handbook at leisure, tightened the state of emergency and with little opposition been declared ruler for life. It was the ideal opportunity!
And not only he did not recognize it, much less seize it at the time. He still does not know.
But he feels it, I think. One of the reasons he is so angry and unhappy with himself. He could have done so much better! For himself, of course.
ETA: Come to think of it, you dodged a bullet there!
If you mean the overseas pandemic response team: IIRC, not quite closed but cut their budget so much that they might well have been. Partly because Obama had something to do with them existing in the first place.
Right. Trump is not only stupid and lazy, but notoriously cheap. He thought the government was basically paying a pandemic response team to do nothing but sit around on their thumbs, because there wasn’t actually a pandemic going on at the time. He thought he could just reassemble the team once it was needed. By the time the pandemic was a reality, it was too late.
One thing that affected Trump indirectly was that the pandemic inadvertently was handled in a way that fed into his base’s anger and fear. For instance, the much-repeated claim that “Churches are being closed, yet abortion clinics are being kept open.” Or how the same health experts who said that it was wrong for people to amass together in protest against Gretchen Whitmer outdoors (because it would spread Covid) were okay with the anti-racism protests after the George Floyd’s death. This sort of thing no doubt prompted Trump to handle Covid even more frivolously and politically.
This is plausible, but remember he and his cult want to be the dictators over the “others”, so if he were to impose responsible restrictions like many governors did, it would inconvenience cult members, and make them mad at him. If he were smart enough to figure out how to bother only those outside the cult, then yeah, he woulda been all over that. Should be be elected again, this time he has a whole team of helpful people who have already worked-out the playbook on how to hurt people not in the cult, but he did not have that at the start of the pandemic, thankfully.
Pandemics have historically been terrible vehicles for dictators to show their stuff.
Dictators want a reputation for effective, decisive leadership that leads to ideal outcomes. Diseases, by their very nature, don’t work that way.
COVID demonstrated that pretty well - Putin, who has a reputation as an ‘effective’ dictator even in the US, screwed up the Russian response. Trump cleared screwed up the US response. The Chinese response was mismanaged. Bolsonaro down in Brazil was no better. The list goes on.
One of the problems is you can’t “other” a disease and expect that to work. Nor can you dictate to a virus.
Yes, you can blame the disease on some minority or external group (guess what Trump did and what the Republicans are STILL doing?), but at the end of the day, that doesn’t make the disease go away or bring back the dead. You’re just sitting there hoping the disease burns itself out before too long.
Note - Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in his White House appointed working group did this, thinking COVID would burn itself out in the big cities in blue states and would be a great election day issue (hint: it wasn’t).
The countries that seemed to handle it the best? Generally the western style liberal democracies that largely went with the suggestions of the actual experts. Go figure
In theory, a dictator or regime could handle a pandemic BETTER than a democracy. But it all depends on whether the regime is 1) willing to tackle it well, and 2) has the tech to do it.
AIUI, the Chinese response, although iron-fisted and botched at the beginning, did pretty marvelously until about a year after the pandemic’s start, when the Omicron super-contagious variant simply overwhelmed anything and everything.
Had China managed to get a good vaccine going by year’s end in 2020, beating even Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, they could have gotten most or all of the population vaccinated. But they didn’t. Their vaccines were lousy.
A regime, with the right tech, science, and resources, can most absolutely outperform a democracy. They can impose social distancing, quarantine, in ways no democracy could.
Counterfactuals and hypotheticals that never happen might be fun for navel gazing but the likelihood of their importance is rather important for real world application.
And in this case, over the history of the world, there are vanishingly few cases where the response of a dictator to some type of major medical emergency was effective at all.
“Until”
That’s an important word. A response that worked “marvelously” UNTIL it failed is a response that still failed. Saying an airplane functioned marvelously UNTIL it crashed into a mountainside is giving a lot of credit where it isn’t due.
A dictatorial state where they actually seemed to have done pretty well? Singapore. But that’s a case where the state actually does seem to care about the well being of its citizenry rather than solely about maintaining power.
I agree. If Trump had a modicum of political sense, he would have realized the covid crisis was a godsend for him. People rally to their leaders, even bad ones, in the midst of a crisis.
If Trump had been aware of this, he would have gone in the opposite direction that he did. He would have played up the seriousness of the problem. He wouldn’t have actually had to do much; a medical crisis like this would have been handled by health care workers and scientists. All Trump would have had to do was make dramatic speeches and claim the credit for other people’s work. And coast into a second term.
Why didn’t Trump do this? Like I said, he’s stupid and he’s lazy. Admittedly, he’s also greedy. But as the meme tells us, hard work pays off eventually but laziness pays off today. Trump’s stupidity made him miss the long term benefits of being greedy and only see the short term benefits of being lazy.
I dunno. Like I noted, other authoritarian types also failed at the response in much the same way. It’s not just stupidity and laziness for all those cases.
The playbook is to blame others and be seen as taking active charge of things. And that’s exceedingly hard to do if seen as actually listening to the advice of experts rather than telling the experts what to think and do.