Early in his administration Trump disbanded the US pandemic response team.
Two years ago, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 countries, including China. This happened because the Trump administration refused to allocate money to a program that started during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden warned that move “would significantly increase the chance an epidemic will spread without our knowledge and endanger lives in our country and around the world.” Cite.
The availability and distribution of COVID-19 test kits has been grossly mismanaged, including refusal to use the WHO testing that was available in the early stages of the pandemic.
Trump initially claimed that everything was under control and the disease would be gone in a few days.
Trump falsely claimed that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were miracle cures for COVID-19, and that the FDA had approved them for that purpose (it has not). As a direct result of this bluster, several people, in the US and abroad, have died from chloroquine overdoses.
Every single one of his briefings on the pandemic in the US – every single one – is so filled with lies and deceptions that, last I heard, some networks were considering no longer airing them, on the basis that they were a public disservice. The only thing that makes them useful is that Dr. Fauci is occasionally allowed to speak.
Yet around half of Americans believe he’s doing a terrific job.
I can only conclude that (a) far too many people get their news only from Fox News and/or Facebook, and (b) many people are stupid.
I’ve actually seen comments online whenever a poll shows Drumpf behind that say that you really need to add 10 points for Drumpf and subtract 10 points from {whatever, whomever} for an accurate poll reading. This is the kind of thing that non-MAGAists are up against.
From Nate Silver, in response to polling results showing Biden still far ahead of Trump nationally, at the same time Trump’s approval rating has gone up:
What fascinates me the most (as a fivethirtyeight junkie) is that the Rasmussen, which has been an outlier favoring Trump, has actually dropped significantly since the beginning of March and stayed down so far (from around 50% down to 46%). Not to poll-pick too much, but given its prominent pro-Trump bias it’s quite interesting.
First, an analogy I got from a psychologist - you’re cooking dinner and its a disaster, but the potatoes are quite nice despite everything else. Some people will deal with the problem by falsely inflating the positive of the potatoes to equal a barely edible roast, burnt vegetables and horrific dessert. Eventually it will be remembered in your personal history as ‘The night I cooked perfect spuds’. Its a common way of dealing with bad news, and stops you going completely headfirst down the slippery dip of despair.
Trump does enough talking and even though its reactive and seldom clear and coherent or relevant, his tasty little potatoes are sufficient for many people to feel comfort that he is on top of things and is in control. Criticism of Trump’s responses is more easily dismissed because the same critics have always complained about everything, and Trump supporters have already tuned their voices out long ago.
There’s also an element of hopefulness that Trump will prove his critics wrong. That’s helped by the way he frames his opponents and critics as having an agenda that may have fooled others but he’s wise to their tricks. So add, ‘told ya so’ as being something that might still be possible if you stick with your man.
Its an approval rating buoyed by wanting to believe that he has the answers, and grasping at everything that suggests he’s making decisions that will eventually pay off. Studies of cognitive dissonance [the classic is when the day the world ends passes] also show that people will frame disappointment by making a long series of excuses before they eventually MAY admit they were being completely fooled.
Don’t expect his approval ratings to change a lot just because reality shows him to have failed.
The first time I looked at this sentence, I parsed “reality shows” wrong, and so expected you to be saying something like:
Don’t expect his approval ratings to change a lot just because reality shows are most popular precisely when the people on them are dysfunctional and self-aggrandizing.
There is a German variant of the Bobblehead (German: Wackeldackel) that became very popular here after it featured in a car ad on TV: the Wackel-Elvis!
If some of tanTrump’s fiercest supporters think that they can make fun of environmentalist when they claim that their favourite animal is the nodding donkey, we can claim that the Wackeldackel is better and then call them Wackel-Elvis.
Without looking at polls, does anyone know a soul that voted for Hillary in 2016 that would flip to Donald in 2020? I personally don’t, but I wager that the number of Donald-Biden voters is larger than the number of Hillary-Donald voters.
I know quite a few seniors that voted for Trump out of major distrust/dislike of Hillary that plan to vote against Trump this time. Hell some of them said they would vote for Sanders over Trump this time, Biden made it easy for them. It is part of what gives me hopes that the Dems can flip Florida back. Florida & Michigan would be enough to beat Trump in the Electoral College.
I do not know anyone that voted for Hillary that is now planning to vote for Trump, but do know 1 person that voted for Hillary that will not vote for Sanders. He’ll vote for Biden though.
Fresh batch of polls today:
4 polls for Trump’s approval show from 0 to 7% disapproval. The only poll to show a tie for Trump’s approval, shows Biden ahead of him by 4%.
There are several types of people who like Trump. Independents have been disillusioned, but he is a genius at simply pivoting away from previous embarrassments and playing to his bubble.
And in some rural areas, a lot of people simply didn’t feel the initial need for social isolation. It felt like a big city problem, because initially it was. Even as time has marched on, Trump has been blaming others and changing the goalposts. It works as long as people prefer him to the alternative. Certainly his direct style is different and involving. One would be foolish to count him out early regardless of his proclivities.
One thing that I’ll note is that the media is very poor at creating a summary of information that is:
Even minimally historical.
Objective and intelligent.
Provides cites.
Of a length that a reasonable human would actually read.
If you want to find a news article that even goes so far as to point out Trump’s tweet on March 9th, which implies a fatality rate of 1.5m deaths, that the President’s force for providing aid to the nation in a pandemic (the CDC) seems to have given up trying to make any real effort at testing on March 13th and seems to take a few days just to find out what its own group’s numbers are, that there’s no indication that the President made any effort to start production of more respirators, temporary hospitals, etc. until late March despite having been warned of the matter since at least mid-January, still refuses to organize a national stay-at-home policy, no policy to limit gasoline at pumps to enforce such an order, no policy to pro-actively identify at risk locations (counties, elder homes, etc.) and start getting them materials and aid in advance, nor otherwise to organize much of anything at the national level. We’ll bypass discussions on the timeline of Trump shutting down air travel, and his relatively arbitrary choices of locations, since I don’t feel like Googling it all up.
And let’s take, for example, the President’s own desire to keep the country running during the epidemic, let’s envision an approach to that, based on reality:
Travel from Eastern Asia should be stopped early, to try and stop transmission of the disease to the US starting at least by early February. Particular attention should be paid attention to locations where lots of Chinese would have been traveling (Seattle, San Francisco, New York), possibly with restrictions on travel out of those places. Eastern Asia should include Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, etc.
As soon as community spread was discovered and Europe started to explode, it would have been clear that further travel restrictions were pointless. At this point, your focus is on protecting at-risk groups, the elderly, overweight, people with chronic illnesses, smokers, and vapers.
Having done this, you start implementing policies to allow elderly homes to receive rations and supplies through a decontaminated process, and ensure that the people who work there are provided with resources to allow them to live in a semi-quarantine and take care of their families. Obviously, this will be expensive to organize but, still, far better than having to bail out the entire economy, if you can allow businesses to continue to run.
For other at-risk groups, homeless would probably be a large subset. Special programs should be set up to encourage them to shelter at temporary facilities, in the major cities.
And for the remaining at-risk people, with day jobs, special incentives should be provided to allow them to work from home or take an extended absence for the next few months.
Given that it’s only a very small percentage of the population who are significantly at-risk and who also work for a living and can’t telecommute, you can effectively allow the disease to spread through the country without significant impact to the economy, without significant loss of life. There is a benefit to getting people immune to it as fast as possible to provide herd immunity to the at-risk groups.
In essence, Trump screwed himself by not pivoting to “circle the wagons” early and allowing shelter-at-home to spread across the nation, without central leadership of the effort. As a result, while we have slowed the spread of the disease, protection of the at-risk groups and not-so-at-risk groups is not differentiated, so everyone is still getting hit - just at a slower pace - and we’ve had to shut off large segments of the economy.
To be sure, the “circle the wagons” strategy might not have worked, just as we can say that step 1 above would have failed anyways, and there are probably other strategies as well that might have been reasonable. But these are all strategies and plans. There are bad strategies, to be sure, and it’s a bit subjective which are in the good bucket and which are in the bad. Having no strategy at all is always a bad strategy. It would be impossible to make the argument that Trump ever has had any strategy beyond being occasionally dragged into doing things at the begging of his advisers.
the real test will be when coronavirus moves out of major “blue” cities like New York, Chicago, LA, and Detroit, and into mid-size and smaller cities in places like Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia, and Ohio. Even in New Orleans, which itself is mostly run by a decades-old Democratic machine, COVID is now rapidly spreading in very Republican Jefferson and St. Tammany Parishes. Trump will only get so much mileage blaming Democrats. His antics will be funny right up until the time they see bodies being stuffed into refrigerated trucks.