The problem with a dictatorship is that everything comes down to the whims of one individual.
Does the Great Leader think that killing birds helps the crops grow? Then everyone kills sparrows and the crops get devoured by insects. Does the Great Leader decide that Lysenko is a better scientist than Darwin? Then you plant crops in the middle of the winter and watch them die.
Dictatorships may let a country implement an idea faster. But democracy means the country is more likely to implement the right idea.
Saying Fauci is the Trump Administration implies that he was solely in control. This is not the case. He has said himself that he was constantly fighting within it. They literally did opposition research on him!
This decision is apparent to those of us on the outside, which is why we can generally separate what Fauci did and what the (rest of the)Trump administration did. I see no reason to lump them together, given how antagonistic they were.
But the subject here is not the Trump administration. It’s Trump himself. There is a lot of mismanagement that can be assigned to him directly. The most obvious are any of his public statements involving things like masking,
Fauci is clearly is not responsible for Trump joining the anti-mask brigade or spreading misinformation on treatments. That’s all Trump. That alone is enough to call Trump the “enemy of the pandemic.” The antimaskers caused so many preventable deaths.
That at minimum was mismanagement.
Operation Warp Speed allowed for concurrent testing, which allowed for the trials to move much faster. So the same amount of testing would have taken longer. Sure, the vaccine itself may have existed, but it would take longer to get FDA approval.
I would love to see a cite for the estimate you brought up. Maybe it was made with OWS in mind. Maybe it was just the speed of production, rather than the speed of testing. Or maybe things actually did take longer than anticipated, but were sped up.
But I cannot see any way that OWS didn’t help. There’s just no way that letting testing go faster didn’t help get the drugs out sooner.
Because that’s the way of everything in the Trump administration.
Trump hired Chris Wray, raised the budget of the FBI, and approved the continuation of domestic metadata collection and FISA rules while also forcing the terminations of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, calling the FBI investigations of his own friends “politically motivated”, and denounced the US intelligence apparatus while standing with Putin.
It was all just mangled nonsense from start to finish. That’s not unique to this one case.
I think a lot of that comes down to the common conviction among authoritarian leaders that if they are just stubborn, insistent and ruthless enough, the world will work the way they want. Which works until they run into something they can’t coerce, like a virus.
Also, the resurgence of fascism made it worse since fascists are obsessed with “strength” and “looking strong”. And admitting that a disease is dangerous is admitting weakness, as is admitting you were wrong or admitting that experts know more than you. So right wing authoritarians across the world not only refused to implement measures agaisnt the pandemic, they themselves got personally sick because they tried to pretend there was no problem.
For some reason they managed this disease as if everyone was at a equal risk. Early on we knew that the old and sick were much more vulnerable. The resources should have mirrored the risk factors. Even the stats were hard to read increasing the fear in those who were not as vulnerable. Instead of saying a 25 yr old has a 1/100,000 risk of death, they would say something like and 80 yr old is 250 time more likely to die than a 25 yr old.
I think most of the countries that handled it best were Eastern democracies: Japan, South Korea, Vietnam. Compare their excess mortality rates to those of any Western democracy.
Underscoring this is, in addition to his other flaws, that Trump is extremely concerned about being healthy, appearing, healthy, and being surrounded with healthy-looking people. I think this further clouded his judgement about how to deal with the pandemic, even whether to deal with it. Despite Trump telling Woodward he (Trump) knew about the outbreak and how serious it was.
I think this same phobia is why he praised “healthy, beautiful” Presidential Medal of Freedom awardee Miriam Adelson, versus the soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor but were “in very bad shape”.
Back to the topic, this is one more reason why Trump was the worst possible person to be in charge.
Weight was a big factor in mortality. Countries with lower obesity rates generally scored better. Another factor is that some countries don’t milk every last hour out of an elderly sick person. This was a significant factor in our high death rates here also along with obesity.
No, but Japan and South Korea are. And what i think they have in common is not “democracy” or “liberalism”, but a willingness of the government to look at data (it was airborne, who could have guessed?) and a willingness of the population to wear masks to protect other people.
Seems to be more the former - it’s just that governmental systems that are more democratic tend towards the bureaucratic, which tend to include reliance on experts and data and fewer abrupt changes in policy.
The latter factor (masking) is important but as the case of China shows, even if a government is willing to rely more on data and people mask heavily, in a more authoritarian system, if the government just gets tired of dealing with it, it’s possible for the response to collapse very, very quickly when it decides to throw up its hands and give up on short notice.
All of this post was good, but didn’t want to quote a whole wall of text. But it really is that simple.
Trump’s strongest compulsion is to take sole credit for everything that makes him look good, and hide whatever makes him look bad, and blame others if the hiding doesn’t work.
So here’s how that played out:
Initially he downplayed the pandemic simply because it would make him look bad.
When it arrived, he blamed China for letting it out, he blamed immigrants for letting it in, and he blamed public health supporters for inconvenient mitigations that he felt tarnished his presidency.
If he took credit for the vaccine, he would have to share credit with people he had already blamed. So he instead he shits all over one of the most amazing scientific initiatives in history, rather than claiming his rightful share of the hero’s mantle.
This whole sorry episode was a succinct study in all of Trump’s failings as a human being.
This is because those countries have lengthy experience with viruses coming out of China, not due to the degree of democratization. Vietnam obviously isn’t democratic, and though Japan is a democracy on paper, in reality it’s a lot less democratic than many people assume.
Not to put the blame on China’s government or people here. China is just naturally prone to produce pandemics, it’s happened multiple times in the past, and every country in proximity to China is appropriately prepared and paranoid about it.
Trump’s lazy and stupid, but he also has his sense of victimhood. Trump treated the pandemic in large part like it was a public relations disaster for him, personally, and not the public health disaster it was globally.
IIRC, one MAGA conspiracy theory was China created and released it intentionally to make Trump look bad.
Uscinski et al. (Reference Uscinski, Enders, Klofstad, Seelig, Funchion, Everett, Wuchty, Premaratne and Murthi2020) find that 29 per cent of respondents in a recent, nationally representative sample agree that the threat of COVID-19 has been exaggerated to damage President Trump and 31 per cent agree that the virus was purposefully created and spread. A recent YouGov/The Economist poll found that 13 per cent believe it is a hoax. Such beliefs can have negative health effects; for example, Motta et al.'s (Reference Motta, Stecula and Farhart2020) data suggest that individuals who endorse conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are less likely to accept public health experts’ warnings about the severity of the crisis.
[my bold]
Makes one wonder why China would start the pandemic in Wuhan, then, instead of having someone release it in Los Angeles or New York City as the pandemic’s starting point.
Agreed. It was an automatic reelection gift-wrapped. He could have been a wartime president, done none of the work, taken all of the credit, and been on TV the entire time. You don’t have to be Machiavelli to see the opportunity.
Just like with 9/11 the country would have put politics aside and gotten behind him. Bush had just capitalized on it. His good friend Guiliani could have given him the playbook (get on TV, talk tough, look somber).
The fact that he didn’t do this obvious thing is the only interesting facet about Trump. He must be incapable of empathy and thus has a huge blind spot. Maybe all his empathy circuits are hard-wired to his sense of self; that would explain his non-stop grievances.
I’ve noticed that it’s a common feature of conspiracy theories that they often don’t make sense in terms of "Why would the people you are accusing do that thing in the first place?"
I think this is more of the answer, what ever make him look the best to his base while trying to discredit his opposition. So I say it’s not Trump’s stupidity, but Trump prioritizing what is most important to him and his image over absolutely everything else that has ever been is or is to be.