Yeah, this sounds right to me. I'd go so far as to say āRacist policies not related to immigrationā is a bit of an āeargreyishā-style convenient-coinage.
I'd agree with this if my impression of the discourse at the time was that people anticipated that Trump would be unable to enact racist policies unrelated to immigration. If the people around you spoke and thought as though we could count on the Constitution to restrain Trump from doing anything else bad-and-race-related, that's plausibly a crux- an aspect of your experience which, if I shared it, would cause me to agree with you.
However, it's a very poor description of *my* experience. I saw quite a lot of people expressing really a lot of race-related anxiety about Trump, quite apart from immigration concerns. That means I can't really believe Scott created the category he was responding to, and it's hard for me to believe he exaggerated its prominence in the discourse.
Yeah, to be honest, from what I remembered, all the talk I heard of the possibility of Trump-sanctioned racist policies would have been immigration-based (albeit potentially so wide-ranging as to affect people who by any sane metric haven't counted as "immigrants" in two generations).
There was worry that garden-variety, non-lawful racist abuse would skyrocket as a result of Trump-supporting police *turning a blind eye* to it, and things like that, but I don't think that should be expressed as "non-immigration based Trump policies".
The context though is that immigration in the West is so far to the left compared to the rest of the world. One insightful comment a few years ago was that when people were freaking out about Le Pen, the actual most restrictive leader immigration-wise was elected in South Korea's Moon. In Asia, Japan and South Korea are extremely restrictive immigration wise and Singapore very explicitly has ethnic quotas in order to keep demographic balance. In the West, we've decided as a culture, that even if the population is to electorally choose to restrict immigration, every facet of society should fight tooth and nail to preven that from happening.
That is because the major part of progressive discourse is that only whites can be racist, so bringing up Korea or Japan is counterproductive. They don't even call Chinese racists, despite believing that they perpetrate a literal genocide.
China has refined racism to the point where they practice racism against other people whom the rest of the world calls "Chinese." That they discriminate mostly based on language, though naturally skin color plays into it as well. Did you know all white men are billionaires, want Chinese mistresses, and are enormously well-hung? My coworkers in Shanghai thought nothing of telling me these things "everyone knows" about white people. Never mind what they said about Africans.
Yeah - if they'd gone from 61% to 30% under Obama, then it would have been literally impossible to do worse by this metric, which seems pretty questionable. "Factor of change in the favorable/unfavorable ratio" seems like a natural choice; by that metric, 2008/2017/2020 ratios are 1.56 / 0.85 / 0.56, for which Obama shrinks by a factor of 1.83 and Trump by a factor of 1.51. (So the conclusion is the same in the end.)
One thing Iāve gotta mention on institutions: you gave yourself a D for guessing Trumpās impact on them, but from what people like Michael Lewis have written, Trump totally ignored/purposely tore down a lot of governmental institutions, and our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So Iād give yourself a higher grade there.
The thing about this line of argumentation is that the US Covid performance, in terms of things like deaths per capita, seems to be somewhere towards the middle of the pack among Western countries, including ones that didn't have a Trump-like "institution-wrecking" figure.
Maybe the US could have been a top-tier country on Covid without Trump, maybe not, but to me, "institution-wrecking" sounds like, I don't know, canceling the CDC. There wouldn't have been a Fauci if the alarmist vision of Trump came true.
While Trump certainly didn't help matters, my sense is that a lot of the complaints about Trump on Covid are failing to account for the degree to which the President's power is limited and America's failures are mostly civilizational.
Autocrats don't announce their intentions. Instead, the hollow out institutions from within. It's not like Hitler called a press conference to announce the Final Solution, or that Putin announced plans to run phony elections.
And BTW those western countries also rely on the CDC's early warning system in China, just like they did with Ebola and Zika. That's part of the reason the CDC was the most respected in the world.
Hitler didn't call a press conference to announce the Final Solution, but the Nazi party official platform in 1920 included the sentence: "No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation," and the Nuremburg laws of 1935 criminialized sex or marriage with Jews and stripped them of their citizenship (after a series of run-ups to this level of prohibition from 1932-35). Not in any kind of veiled or coded way: "Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden," is the (translated) text of the law.
One particularly terrible part of liberals being desperate to equate Trump with Nazis over the last 5 or so years has been, amazingly, them downplaying all the horrible shit that the Nazis did.
America had a number of advantages over European countriesāwe got cases and community spread later and weāre richerāso applying a high standard is appropriate.
America is also much more obese than most of those countries, which carries high susceptibility to COVID
This also mostly ignores the development of and purchasing decisions related to the vaccine, which the US and UK have embarrassed the rest of the West regarding, and requires updating some priors on Brexit.
You really really can't compare the US with most of those nations who don't have the ability to create good statistics at all. Russia for example has far greater excess mortality than their listed Covid deaths would indicate.
I don't know, Canada had (until recently) about 3x fewer Covid deaths and 3.75x fewer cases than the U.S., even though the virus survives better in cold weather / indoors / less sunlight. And the U.S. had an anomalous period from July to September 2020 when it was affected much worse than other developed countries:
It has been argued that European countries have higher risk because their cities are packed more tightly with people, which also helps explain the severity of Covid in NYC. If this is true then Canada seems like a good point of comparison due to having similar city designs with similar suburban sprawl.
This is such a jaw-dropping question (I know you had a busy 2020, but still) that I imagine it must be setting up a very boutique interpretation of "institutional screw-ups." Like if one makes the obvious point about the disbanding of the dedicated NSC pandemic team in 2018, would it fall asunder because Trump probably would've just ignored them like he did the various fragmented agencies the authority fell to?
My main criticisms for Trump's pandemic response had been his terrible optics (ie tweeting that he didn't think masks mattered), his failure to close borders early, his failure to release stockpiles of things that states needed, and his failure to pressure the FDA to approve tests faster. Honorable mention for terrible patchwork shelter-in-place policies although I don't know if that's something he could have fixed or if states rights let them ignore the president on these kinds of things anyway. None of these seemed like the result of destroyed institutions. DJ's answers and your answer are helpful, though I'm surprised you're surprised I needed reminding about this - I don't think Michael Caputo is a household name or Trump's disbanding of the NSC pandemic team was especially covered (although in retrospect I think I had heard about it earlier).
In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
Multiple quotes from experts and Congress concerned that the CDC made the most sense and that the new administrative structure would politicize it, a consequence that Jared Kushner did his damnedest to explicitly realize when he claimed in a cringey press conference that it wasn't meant for the states and then had website's description altered to conform with his assessment.
I'm definitely not trying to shame you, but I gotta say I'm surprised you spoke so confidently about institutions and now plead ignorance. Michael Caputo is one of dozens of Trump operatives who sabotaged institutions throughout the government.
Some other examples:
* Trump firing FIVE inspectors general after the impeachment (the previous record for a president is one, by Obama, and the guy he fired was very old and acting bizarrely, as if he had dementia). The IG regime was created specifically in response to Nixon's abuses of power.
* EPA director Scott Pruitt being under 15(!) investigations before he finally resigned
* By the end of his term, something like five of of Trump's senior defense & intelligence appointees were "acting," meaning they were not confirmed by the Senate. One of them appears to have been involved in delaying the National Guard on January 6. Another was fired after he told the truth that the elections were not stolen. William Barr resigned for a similar reason.
* After the first impeachment, every senior official who did their Constitutional duty and testified before Congress was fired or, in the case of Vindman, denied military promotion.
* Relatedly, before the first impeachment Trump refused to allow *anyone* in his administration to submit to Congressional oversight, something no president has ever done.
* He was only the second president ever to fire an FBI director. The first was Bill Clinton firing William Sessions, and that only came after clear and convincing evidence that Sessions was using government aircraft for personal errands.
I could name at least a dozen more, but just remember: the first rule of institutional sabotage is you don't talk about institutional sabotage.
It seems to me that any good-faith attempt to fix the US's institutions (which I hope we can all agree need some serious work) would look like an attempt to "sabotage" them to anyone who doesn't want that to happen.
Not at all. In the seventies after Nixon there were massive overhauls to the FBI, the CIA, the IRS etc. The Church Committee in particular. Among other things the Congressional intelligence oversight committees were created. Before that Congress had almost zero visibility. Inspectors General were created during that period and expanded multiple times over the next 25 years.
Trump closed borders much earlier than Canada. At the time, Canadians were dumbstruck that could even be in consideration. Now in hindsight, closing them earlier was obviously the correct move, and I wish my country had not been so quick to judge it as xenophobic.
Trump didn't close borders with all countries until months in. Travel with Europe was open long after it spread there. US citizens returning were not quarantined on arrival.
I don't recall US boarders ever being closed in any meaningful sense. There were additional restrictions in place for travel from various places at various times, but "closed"? Never.
His optics were terrible, and his bully-pulpit leadership disastrous, but I think the other things he either did OK on, no worse or better than anyone else, or did OK. Borders were closed in the US pretty promptly, about the same time as they were in Italy (which had more warning), and much earlier than most other European countries -- indeed, Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China.
There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses, as federalism gives the Feds very little control in this area (which always surprises everyone every time FEMA proves *not* to be The Avengers on steroids when natural disaster strikes). Disaster response is a state and local thing, and they hold onto that right and power quite jealously. There's *no* governor, red or blue, who would've stood for Trump, or the CDC, or any gol-darned Washington chair-polisher telling them what to do. He certainly could have organized and cheerled from DC better, and his treatment of the Federal publich health team was a disgrace, a four-alarm clusterfuck. But there's nothing at all he could have done to make Kristi Noem or Ron DeSantis lock their states down, or change Gavin Newsom's plans.
Quite honestly, I think it would have taken an *extraordinary* leader of men to get the American response much better than it was. You have only to look at all the other Western nations -- pretty much none of them did noticeably better, except those few in very unusual circumstances (e.g. Australia and New Zealand), to which contributed unique geographic situations *and* a cultural and political homogeneity that was far out of reach for any American politician. I cannot see Hillary Clinton doing any better job at the nuts and bolts, although she would certainly have presided over less of a clown-car circus at the Federal level.
Why is it *very* different? It's certainly no different than what every other country did. And would you seriously propose simply marooning every overseas American, with no warning, no recourse, for the following year? This would have been completely untenable politically. No politician at all could propose that and get the enabling legislation. For that matter, enforcement would be profoundly difficult anyway -- you have perhaps heard of our difficulties sealing the US-Mexico border, despite several hundred miles of tall fence, spotlights, barbed wire, trained guards...?
I'm pretty sure if Trump tried to close borders to citizens, we'd have another impeachment on the record. He was called racist for preventing those that have zero right to come in from coming in. I can't imagine what he'd be called if he had tried to block those that have the full legal right.
"Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China."
Cite?
"There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses"
Well, if you define "state-level responses" as "responses that the federal government can't influence", that's true by definition. But there's absolutely more he could have done.
Seriously? While all the press has been calling him racist for having covid-based travel restrictions, and all the leftist politicians called for going to celebrate to Chinatown and hugging everybody around to show we're not like the racist Trump - it's Trump's fault alone for not doing enough to close the borders?
I think his greatest failure by far was his failure to provide leadership to the states. States cannot close their borders. Accordingly, having piecemeal shutdowns on a per-state basis is akin to having families quarantine alphabetically and in sequence for 5 weeks each.
States could at least do basic things like stop putting sick people into nursing homes and develop robust medical protocols to guard the most vulnerable instead. Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership". And yet, it's somehow Trump's fault of leadership. There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what. He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier, but he couldn't force the state govs to do anything, and if he tried, they'd probably do the opposite just to spite him.
"Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership"."
Cite?
"There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what."
That's a bunch of paranoid victim complex bullshit. Dems didn't oppose Trump for the sake of opposing Trump, they opposed him because he had bad idea after bad idea, and pretending otherwise is bad faith propaganda used to excuse Trump's incompetence.
"He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier"
Actually, I would guess they probably can. There's not a lot a state can't do on an emergency basis, when it's plausibly justified by public health concerns. Few state constitutions contain anything equivalent to the Tenth Amendment, so in principle their police power is unlimited.
I doubt the assorted supreme courts would put up with it indefinitely of course -- but then, quite a lot of the pandemic measures fall into this category. Having the governor close businesses by fiat or order people not to venture from home without a shred of enabling legislation is no less an infringement on state and Federal civil liberties than preventing Arizonans from freely crossing into California.
But I agree hardly any state *would* without the encouragement and assistance of the Federal government. If nothing else, it's impractical, they don't have border guards. But the Feds *could* have, for example, shut down nonessential passenger and airline and rail travel, and deployed Federal resources to help control highways.
Whether that would have had an impact is a very interesting question. The Chinese experience strongly suggests it might have been the single most effective thing to do, but that's a big extrapolation from murky data, so who knows?
I think calling whatever comes out of CCP "data" is giving it way too much credit. Statistics has always been a form of non-scientific fiction in communist dictatorships, and I don't see why CCP would make an exception in this particular case.
This was my major frustration throughout last spring and summer. (By Fall, I was resigned.) The plan for basically everything was, "leave it to the states", but states can't effectively squash an outbreak because they can't regulate interstate commerce! They're not good at coordinating on things like this. (This is why we have a Federal government...)
So from everything to data collection and reporting standards to testing protocols to "opening" and "closing" plans, you had a confusing mishmash of regulations and information. Coordination and leadership were utterly lacking.
I'd suggest the NSC reorganization was linked to the bad response:
>In 2018, Trump fired Tom Bossert, whose job as homeland security adviser on the NSC included coordinating the response to global pandemics. Bossert was not replaced. Last year, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, the NSC's senior director for global health security and biodefense, left the council and was not replaced. Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC's director for medical and biodefense preparedness, left in May 2018 and was also not replaced.
Oh come on. What exactly would an intact NSC have done to make a damn bit of difference? We're a a full 14 months into the pandemic *now*, with enormously greater information about it, a raft of powerful vaccines, better treatment ideas, much better scientific info about how it spreads -- and what is the NSC doing that is any bit of good? Cases have been soaring in Michigan -- what has been done about that by the NSC? If they would've been effective 14 months ago, why, they should be twice as effective now, with what we've learned. I'm not seeing it.
So far as I can tell, the *only* clearly and seriously effective response to COVID was developing a vaccine extremely rapidly. (Maybe some of the public health hokey pokey -- lockdowns, mask mandates, et cetera -- was useful, and maybe it was marginal, and it will take years of research to know which it is.) That was largely a private effort, except insofar as (1) we should give credit to the NIH and friends for funding the basic research 25 years ago that made the technology available when it was needed, and (2) it probably helped that the Federal Government was willing to guarantee a huge pot of revenue to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J et cetera if they invested in the vaccine. One can give the Trump Administration some credit for that, but on the other hand it was kind of a no-brainer and enjoyed bipartisan support I imagine.
The Forbes article summarizes some WaPo reporting. The gist is: the USPS had a plan in April to mail every American household multiple reusable masks. The White House spiked it, supposedly to prevent panic. (In April!) This was back when the Surgeon General was demonstrating how to make masks out of t-shirts.
How big a difference would this have made to pandemic trajectories? I have no idea. But I think there was a lot of stuff like this.
Is this in reference to getting rid of the "pandemic prevention team" of the CDC? That's the main thing I remember people talking about along these lines.
Robert Redfield was an incompetent political sycophant? Everything I've read suggests that he was a talented and generally respected scientist and administrator, highly regarded for his previous work on HIV/AIDS. And the failings of the CDC under his tenure look like the typical failings of otherwise-competent bureaucrats subject to the Iron Law, not incompetent political sycophancy.
The pre-COVID CDC was too low profile and too far from Trump's core interests to attract Trump's attention, or to be a valuable prize for his sycophants. It looks like he may have appointed one "sycophant" when filling out the offices in 2017, Brenda Fitzgerald, but then mostly lost interest when Fitzgerald went down in a scandal a few months later.
Politico: "But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether."
If Trump was appointing competent technocrats to actually *lead* the CDC, etc, and Trumpist sycophants to brag about it, then that's much less damning than the original claim that Trump was appointing the sycophants to the leadership positions.
And in any event, the media seems to have had no trouble routing around the Trumpists and going to e.g. Anthony Fauci for their messaging. Fauci having served in the same position under every president from Ronald Reagan on down, I think it's unlikely that he's anybody's sycophant (except maybe his own).
I'm no fan of Trump but Scott and others specifically pan his pandemic response. It's not clear to me what the counterfactual would be? What would a Clinton administration have done differently that would have made a material difference in the course of the pandemic? It's hard to believe that the FDA under Clinton would have been less risk-averse allowing a vaccine to be administered earlier, and it seems Macron can be seen as an ideological stand-in for Clinton, but France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US. Not to say that Trump made good decisions here, but just that it's not clear that Clinton would have made better ones.
The winning move was to close borders earlier and lock down for the six weeks or whatever that was necessary, at the start of the pandemic, to eliminate the virus. Clinton wouldn't have closed the borders earlier, so what was needed was a Super Trump of some kind.
She would've closed them sooner because she would've had better information. She would've had better information because she wouldn't have cut two thirds of the CDC observation staff in China, something Biden criticized all the way back in 2019.
The only reason the travel bans happened at all is because Trump's assistant national security advisor had backchannel contacts in China from his days as a reporter covering SARS.
I think the border thing is super hard to say. I could argue either she would have delayed even longer closing the border, since a bit part of the 2016 election was about how border control is racist. Or could have been a Nixon to China moment and the national press would have been more accepting of the "good guys" doing something like that.
A hard border-closing response would've led to a different pandemic in the US, but I'm not real convinced that it would've led to a substantially better one by the numbers. We aren't New Zealand. We weren't going to keep Coronavirus out of here forever. Canada and Mexico were both hit hard, and even if they hadn't been, you can't actually shut down the borders all that hard for all that long -- you're inevitably going to have a lot of exceptions to the rule for a variety of reasons (like citizens coming home), and something is going to break through.
Where the peaks in the graphs were would've looked different, but does pushing the first peak back a couple of months actually lead to a different result? The vulnerable people would've still been there to get infected and die.
That would do precisely nothing. US borders - especially the southern border - is hugely porous, and hoping it can be airtight closed for six weeks (why six? who knows) is pure magic fairy tale. Probably not even for six minutes. Moreover, by the time US politicians realized what is happening, enough people carrying the virus were in to make "eliminating the virus" absolutely impossible.
Similar weirdness is going on Africa: the entire *continent* is reporting a mere 4.4 million cases and 120,000 deaths (and if we leave out South Africa it's 2.9 million cases and 65,000 deaths). Nigeria (population 200 million) is reporting a mere 2,000 deaths to date, which is approximately what the US has reported for the state of Idaho (population 1.7 million).
Of course, it could be utterly hopeless reporting, or...something else. This disease has a lot of seriously weird results.
Africa heavily skews young and older people die more of COVID. Also, it's poor enough that people with preexisting conditions are probably dead of something else.
That was not the winning move and lockdowns have had no effect. The data on this is quite clear.
I have to admit I'm disappointed that a long post all about rationality and data based decision making has a comments section filled with people who believe lockdowns and masks work when you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary.
Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good and I have often found myself wishing we had a Trump-like politician where me and my family live in Europe. He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity, not that voters rewarded him for it. He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out. He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs. His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be. Most of the world hasn't got anywhere close to that point yet!
"you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary."
CIte?
"Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good"
Refusing to let a ship dock because you don't want to "increase the numbers" is pretty good? Holding superspreader event after superspreader event is pretty good? Claiming that 85% of people who wear masks get COVID is pretty good?
"He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it"
How so?
"and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity"
Who?
"He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out."
He was correct in claiming that it was no worse than the flu? Just how dangerous was it being made out and by whom?
"He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs."
Everyone realized that.
"His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be."
Re: Trump. By āpretty goodā I should probably have written better. I mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries. This does not mean good in an absolute sense. His response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leaders who by and large failed to get to grips with the very poor quality of expert advice they were being given. In my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success, one big enough to offset many other mistakes. Blaming politicians for listening to bad advice is fine, but itās not fair to criticise them for that right at the start. No leader can be expected to understand which obscure advisors are reliable at the start of a crisis. Not understanding it after a year though, is much harder to forgive. Trump is one of very few world leaders who successfully saw through their state epidemiologist and he does deserve credit for that. Perhaps you arenāt aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the public (for the greater good as he sees it) TWICE now - this is a pattern for him. I think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition āfull of itā. And thatās just the ones he admitted. Look at his response to Texas not diverging from lockdown states - he has started to claim that in the states still in lockdown everyone is ignoring the law. Thatās delusional.
WRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about āsuperspreaderā events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect. Most obviously the US election. That wasnāt a huge surprise because as already mentioned, in fact the data doesnāt seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have. Thereās just no correlation. Itās as if what we do has no impact at all (except maybe vaccines).
Re: flu. There are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal flu, and of course for the under 70s itās far below, itās not even comparable. Flu kills children and young people at rates that are statistically meaningful, COVID basically doesnāt.
Re: lockdown costs. Itās not obvious everyone does realize that. Go read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists. When I did this exercise I couldnāt find any. Even a paper that claimed to be a cost/benefit analysis declined, in the end, to actually do such a thing because the value of a life would have been controversial.
The first result I got when I google ālockdown effect on covidā was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293850/ āThe lockdown, one of the social isolation restrictions, has been observed to prevent the COVID-19 pandemicā. So reading the studies on lockdowns does not, in fact, lead to the clear conclusion that they were ineffective. And you didn't give any support for your claim that simply looking at case curves proves your position.
āI mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries.ā
If you just mean that you can cherry-pick some bad policies of other countries, that's not saying much.
āHis response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leadersā
But the US is one of the worst countries in the world, so no, Trump's response does not look good compared to other countries.
āIn my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success,ā
How so? The death rate at the end of Atlas' tenure was more than twice what it was at the beginning. He advocated ārising upā against the government in response to COVID restrictions and claimed that masks don't work.
āPerhaps you arenāt aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the publicā
Cite? Also, Trump admitted to deliberately misrepresenting COVID to āstop panicā.
āI think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition āfull of itā.ā
Twice isn't āroutinelyā, as opposed to Trump, who DOES routinely lie.
āWRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about āsuperspreaderā events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect.ā
Trump causing a few hundred people to get COVID isn't going to be a large effect on the overall numbers, but it's still a horrible example to set.
āin fact the data doesnāt seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have.ā
That's just false.
āThere are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal fluā
Yet another claim that needs a cite. Unless you're including the 1918 pandemic in the category of āstrong seasonal fluā, in which case this is wildly misleading. Also, COVID is more infectious than the flu. COVID has killed around half a million Americans in a year. That quite simply is not ābasically the fluā. Period. There is no justification for claiming otherwise.
āGo read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists.ā
Cost versus benefits of lockdowns is more of an economic issue than an epidemiological one. I was able to very easily find cost-benefit articles, for instance http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf . A cost/benefit analysis is indeed difficult to do. That just supports the idea that quantitative cost/benefit analyses not being more common is not indicative of lack of concern.
I think partly this is optics (Trump conspicuously serving as an anti-role model by denying the importance of the pandemic and of shelter-in-place measures), part of this is various little things like refusing to release federal stockpiles that should have been released, and part of this is things that yes, a Clinton administration would have gotten wrong too, but which I'm still angry about.
By the end of it, European rates will climb up higher. Barring a huge, huge disaster, not enough to get Germany to U.S. levels, but still will be closer.
I think that culture and state choices accounts for most of the differences. Your comment has zero actual policy proposals for what Trump could have copied from other nations with better results, which would have made a major impact.
That's a state-level responsibility and having a plan without the vaccines is useless, while it is fairly trivial to 'plan' if you have plenty of vaccines.
As a EU resident, I'd gladly offer a trade where we get your huge supply of vaccines and you get our 'wonderful' plans.
I didn't say anything about Europe having a better plan. But, like, Biden announced yesterday that everyone 16 and up is vaccine-eligible now. How could he have done that if it's a state level responsibility?
Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?
Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government. The US is similar to the EU, in that states decide on lock down measures and such. I also think that culture and luck has a huge impact.
But ultimately, without large-scale vaccinations, the vaccine will just stay around for a very long time, regardless of the lock down measures. Vaccinations are the only way out.
The federal US and EU government have both taken control of vaccine procurement (including funding production facilities, signing contracts and choosing to allow/ban exports). The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things. The incompetent EU decided to sign huge contracts with the very inexperienced Astra-Zeneca, who offered extremely cheap vaccines, but who happen to not be very good at scaling up. And they exported a lot of their production out of the EU, despite the EU funding these facilities. In the entire US, 16+ are now eligible. In The Netherlands, we are still vaccinating only the elderly and at-risk groups.
"Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?"
That rather looks like a straw man.
"Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government."
That's a non sequitur, both in that it doesn't address what I said, and that the second part of the sentence doesn't follow from the first..
"The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things."
If Biden isn't responsible, it's an odd coincidence that the turn around happened right around when he took office. And Trump didn't have any hesitation about taking credit for the low unemployment that happened to occur during his presidency. He can't have it both ways.
There's the institutional issues baked into the US that predate Trump, but downplaying the threat of covid (at the time when his leadership was the most necessary--early February-March) was something that Clinton very significantly wouldn't have done.
Why do you think that ? Emmanuel Macron is probably the closest thing to the Democrats Europe has to offer, and he was downplaying the threat as late as March 7. (Sadly I can't find a link in English, but he went to see a play on March 7. with the explicit intention of "Encouraging people to go out despite the crisis".
None of the things you said are true. Trump was an excellent role model. You claim he resisted social distancing and shelter-in-place measures, but here is a quote from March 11th:
"In particular, we are strongly advising that nursing homes for the elderly suspend all medically unnecessary visits. In general, older Americans should also avoid nonessential travel in crowded areas. My administration is coordinating directly with communities with the largest outbreaks, and we have issued guidance on school closures, social distancing and reducing large gatherings. Smart action today will prevent the spread of the virus tomorrow."
And you claim he denied its importance, but if that's true, why would he declare a state of emergency on March 13th:
"To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, Iām officially declaring a national emergency. The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion of, very importantly ā very important and a large amount of money for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease. And in furtherance of the order, Iām urging every state to set up emergency operation centers effectively immediately. Youāre going to be hearing from some of the largest companies and greatest retailers and medical companies in the world. Iām also asking every hospital in this country to activate its emergency preparedness plan so that they can meet the needs of Americans everywhere."
He was also pro-mask. Here is two direct quotes from July 21st:
"And weāre asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask. Get a mask. Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. Theyāll have an effect and we need everything we can get."
"I carry the mask. I went into Walter Reed Hospital the other day. I have the mask right here and I carry it, and I will use it gladly, no problem with it. And Iāve said that. And I say, if you can use the mask, when you can, use the mask, if youāre close to each other, if youāre in a group. I would put it on when Iām in a group. If Iām in an elevator and there were other people with me, including like security people, itās not their fault. They have to be in the elevator. I want to protect them also. I put on a mask. I have no problem with the masks. I view it this way. Anything that potentially can help and that certainly can potentially help is a good thing. I have no problem. I carry it. I wear it. You saw me wearing it a number of times and Iāll continue."
...
I don't believe any of this, of course. I pieced it together with Google to be a contrarian smart-ass. Any reasonable person who followed Trump can see past the self-contradiction and occasional willingness to read Presidential-sounding scripts (usually while sniffling a lot and pivoting between a left and right teleprompter) and accurately assess what he really believes and demonstrated to his followers in his off-the-cuff remarks at rallies (their new hoax!) and tweets (LIBERATE MICHIGAN). You don't have to be a super-allist to suss the difference between Rally Trump and Podium Trump; it's usually pretty clear to both his followers and his detractors. And like you said, the optics do matter.
The relevance of this example to your racial apologia is left as an exercise for the reader.
I agree, I felt Scott relied too heavily on official quotes and not enough on subtext for some of these conclusions. An example is the capitol riot. Yes, Trump did eventually tweet for his supporters to stand down. However, that was several hours after they first breached the capitol.
Trump's silence during that time is significant; his supporters had illegally broken into a government building with the 'goal' (although that word implies too much forethought) of contesting the results of an election that he lost, and he was willing to wait several hours before saying anything to stop it. This is the behavior of someone who, if not actively hoping for an insurrection, is at least open to the idea of it. I understand that Scott is looking for objectivity, but only looking at official statements misses a big part of the picture.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, it just seems odd to give himself a B on his coup prediction. A legitimate coup attempt would require Trump to fully commit to it and open himself up to immediate legal punishment if it failed.
Also I think the race section should have mentioned the George Floyd protests and subsequent police responses. Don't know how Scott would grade Trump's response, but at the very least it seems like one of the most important race-related events to occur during Trump's presidency.
"Any person with sufficiently biased priors can see past the obvious evidence negating them to continue believing in their priors, it's obvious, read the -- subtext". This is ridiculous, frankly you remind me of string theorists constantly trying to defend their untenable positions.
shambibble clearly said " Any reasonable person who followed Trump". That is clearly a reference to EVIDENCE, not priors, and you are being dishonest in pretending otherwise. And if Trump made pro-mask statements sometime and anti-mask statements other times, it is legitimate to characterize him as standing in the way of masks. If someone is accused of being racist, compiling a list of times where they were not actively engaged in racist activity doesn't counter the charge.
āMy priors are trump is racist so anytime he makes a statement that can vaguely be interpreted as racist, it is obviously his racism and anytime he makes a statement EXPLICITLY CONDEMNING RACISM, his reasonable supporters will discard it as false propaganda, so I shall too.ā Can you see the ridiculousness of your logic? If you want examples of Trump explicitly condemning racism, Scott has linked to many examples and yet examples of Trump being racist is what? ā Fine people on both sidesā - He condemned white supremacy just a sentence before, so he genuinely believed that there were people who were simply protesting taking down of statues. āthey are rapists, thieves and some I assume are good peopleā - He genuinely believes immigrants cause crime. āShithole countriesā āHe believes those countries are actually bad, nothing to do with race. Can you see why your priors are so clearly binding you? Iām not going to continue this conversation if youāre just gonna argue that Iām wrong without considering any charitable explanations of Trump.
I think it's plausible that Clinton would have generally driven a more coordinated federal response. Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections.
Likewise, Trump actively advocated for doing less testing, because he thought that the case numbers were only going up because we were doing more testing. It seems very likely that Clinton would have pushed federal funding for more tests, and more testing would have potentially allowed us to respond quicker to the successive waves of infection.
Many other countries that locked down hard also gave generous economic stimulus; for example paying partial salaries for furloughed workers. It seems at least directionally likely that the US would have experienced less lockdown fatigue (and therefore potentially had a lower R) if at the margin fewer people were forced to work in unsafe jobs.
The US has managed to politicize mask-wearing in a way that is quite exceptional for developed countries. Unclear to what extent this would have happened without Trump, but at least directionally, he was pushing the public away from evidence-based medicine in a way that was harmful.
As you say I think it's likely that "Project Warp Speed" would have gone down differently. I can see a world where the Very Serious People oppose handing a huge check to pharma companies, and so we got fewer doses by this time -- as happened in the EU. However there is a huge difference between the Democratic establishment (i.e. Clinton's wing of the Democratic party, not AOC's) and the European left in terms of the degree of basic faith in capitalism; it doesn't seem implausible that the Democrats would be OK with a "vaccine new deal" to hire furloughed employees as contact tracers and set up a speculative fund for vaccine development. I could easily imagine the Democrats spending more on their version of "Warp Speed".
> Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections
The Australian experience was that contact tracing plus limited lockdowns can work if there's low (single digit) cases per day, and that contact tracing can scale to dozens of cases a day in conjunction with serious lockdown.
It's not that great beyond that point though. Contact tracing teams take time to build and scale out, and they only catch some fraction of potential infectees.
As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference.
"As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference."
Denmark, Norway, Finland, and South Korea suggest otherwise.
By almost every metric, the U.S. delivered more aid and stimulus to its citizens than did any other country. The "European countries gave out much more money" meme is a progressive lie (surprise!)
2. Of course it's impossible to know if a Clinton White House would have implemented any positive actions that would have improved things, and I think it's fair to argue that perhaps it wouldn't have. But it seems clear that a Clinton White House would have resulted in far fewer negative actions that exacerbated the pandemic in the US (nearly all of which come down to Tweeting, honestly).
Clinton's pandemic response would have been to send the VP to the Wuhan wet market to eat bat soup as a show of anti-racism and solidarity with the AAPI community.
Not necessarily. The current condition of the woke media landscape is in part a reaction to Trumpism, which indeed is one of the reasons Trumpism is bad, and the early dismissals of COVID by liberal media outlets were partly a reaction to Trump's anti-China rhetoric/policies. If Clinton had been elected in 2016, Vox in early 2020 would have looked somewhat different - exactly how different, it's hard to say.
"our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So Iād give yourself a higher grade there."
I'm having a hard time reconciling "When the Capitol riots happened, with basically no links to white supremacy" with the number of subsequent arrests of people in explicitly white supremacist organisations, wearing "six million was not enough" shirts, etc.
If ten percent of a room is wearing explicitly Nazi ideology on their shirts, I am not mollified by the other 90%. Ten percent nazis is a lot.
I think 20 Nazis ā and Nazis today ā are shit, not a "shit fuck ton".
(Modern) Nazis, and similar extremists of all persuasions and linear directionalities, are almost entirely edgy LARP-ing; not significant threats to basically anyone.
Yeah, this sounds right to me. I'd go so far as to say āRacist policies not related to immigrationā is a bit of an āeargreyishā-style convenient-coinage.
I'd agree with this if my impression of the discourse at the time was that people anticipated that Trump would be unable to enact racist policies unrelated to immigration. If the people around you spoke and thought as though we could count on the Constitution to restrain Trump from doing anything else bad-and-race-related, that's plausibly a crux- an aspect of your experience which, if I shared it, would cause me to agree with you.
However, it's a very poor description of *my* experience. I saw quite a lot of people expressing really a lot of race-related anxiety about Trump, quite apart from immigration concerns. That means I can't really believe Scott created the category he was responding to, and it's hard for me to believe he exaggerated its prominence in the discourse.
Yeah, to be honest, from what I remembered, all the talk I heard of the possibility of Trump-sanctioned racist policies would have been immigration-based (albeit potentially so wide-ranging as to affect people who by any sane metric haven't counted as "immigrants" in two generations).
There was worry that garden-variety, non-lawful racist abuse would skyrocket as a result of Trump-supporting police *turning a blind eye* to it, and things like that, but I don't think that should be expressed as "non-immigration based Trump policies".
The context though is that immigration in the West is so far to the left compared to the rest of the world. One insightful comment a few years ago was that when people were freaking out about Le Pen, the actual most restrictive leader immigration-wise was elected in South Korea's Moon. In Asia, Japan and South Korea are extremely restrictive immigration wise and Singapore very explicitly has ethnic quotas in order to keep demographic balance. In the West, we've decided as a culture, that even if the population is to electorally choose to restrict immigration, every facet of society should fight tooth and nail to preven that from happening.
That is because the major part of progressive discourse is that only whites can be racist, so bringing up Korea or Japan is counterproductive. They don't even call Chinese racists, despite believing that they perpetrate a literal genocide.
China has refined racism to the point where they practice racism against other people whom the rest of the world calls "Chinese." That they discriminate mostly based on language, though naturally skin color plays into it as well. Did you know all white men are billionaires, want Chinese mistresses, and are enormously well-hung? My coworkers in Shanghai thought nothing of telling me these things "everyone knows" about white people. Never mind what they said about Africans.
Yeah - if they'd gone from 61% to 30% under Obama, then it would have been literally impossible to do worse by this metric, which seems pretty questionable. "Factor of change in the favorable/unfavorable ratio" seems like a natural choice; by that metric, 2008/2017/2020 ratios are 1.56 / 0.85 / 0.56, for which Obama shrinks by a factor of 1.83 and Trump by a factor of 1.51. (So the conclusion is the same in the end.)
One thing Iāve gotta mention on institutions: you gave yourself a D for guessing Trumpās impact on them, but from what people like Michael Lewis have written, Trump totally ignored/purposely tore down a lot of governmental institutions, and our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So Iād give yourself a higher grade there.
Can you link me to more information on how institutional screwups by Trump were related to the bad coronavirus response?
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/16/how-michael-caputo-shook-up-hhs-416632
Also, pulling CDC people out of China, something Biden criticized all the way back in October 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv-idUSKBN21C3N5
The thing about this line of argumentation is that the US Covid performance, in terms of things like deaths per capita, seems to be somewhere towards the middle of the pack among Western countries, including ones that didn't have a Trump-like "institution-wrecking" figure.
Maybe the US could have been a top-tier country on Covid without Trump, maybe not, but to me, "institution-wrecking" sounds like, I don't know, canceling the CDC. There wouldn't have been a Fauci if the alarmist vision of Trump came true.
While Trump certainly didn't help matters, my sense is that a lot of the complaints about Trump on Covid are failing to account for the degree to which the President's power is limited and America's failures are mostly civilizational.
Autocrats don't announce their intentions. Instead, the hollow out institutions from within. It's not like Hitler called a press conference to announce the Final Solution, or that Putin announced plans to run phony elections.
And BTW those western countries also rely on the CDC's early warning system in China, just like they did with Ebola and Zika. That's part of the reason the CDC was the most respected in the world.
Hitler didn't call a press conference to announce the Final Solution, but the Nazi party official platform in 1920 included the sentence: "No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation," and the Nuremburg laws of 1935 criminialized sex or marriage with Jews and stripped them of their citizenship (after a series of run-ups to this level of prohibition from 1932-35). Not in any kind of veiled or coded way: "Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden," is the (translated) text of the law.
One particularly terrible part of liberals being desperate to equate Trump with Nazis over the last 5 or so years has been, amazingly, them downplaying all the horrible shit that the Nazis did.
America had a number of advantages over European countriesāwe got cases and community spread later and weāre richerāso applying a high standard is appropriate.
America is also much more obese than most of those countries, which carries high susceptibility to COVID
This also mostly ignores the development of and purchasing decisions related to the vaccine, which the US and UK have embarrassed the rest of the West regarding, and requires updating some priors on Brexit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ lists the USA as 14th out of 153 nations in terms of covid deaths per capita, which is a long way from the middle of the pack.
You really really can't compare the US with most of those nations who don't have the ability to create good statistics at all. Russia for example has far greater excess mortality than their listed Covid deaths would indicate.
I don't know, Canada had (until recently) about 3x fewer Covid deaths and 3.75x fewer cases than the U.S., even though the virus survives better in cold weather / indoors / less sunlight. And the U.S. had an anomalous period from July to September 2020 when it was affected much worse than other developed countries:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~FRA~SWE~NOR~NLD~CHE~ESP
It has been argued that European countries have higher risk because their cities are packed more tightly with people, which also helps explain the severity of Covid in NYC. If this is true then Canada seems like a good point of comparison due to having similar city designs with similar suburban sprawl.
This is such a jaw-dropping question (I know you had a busy 2020, but still) that I imagine it must be setting up a very boutique interpretation of "institutional screw-ups." Like if one makes the obvious point about the disbanding of the dedicated NSC pandemic team in 2018, would it fall asunder because Trump probably would've just ignored them like he did the various fragmented agencies the authority fell to?
My main criticisms for Trump's pandemic response had been his terrible optics (ie tweeting that he didn't think masks mattered), his failure to close borders early, his failure to release stockpiles of things that states needed, and his failure to pressure the FDA to approve tests faster. Honorable mention for terrible patchwork shelter-in-place policies although I don't know if that's something he could have fixed or if states rights let them ignore the president on these kinds of things anyway. None of these seemed like the result of destroyed institutions. DJ's answers and your answer are helpful, though I'm surprised you're surprised I needed reminding about this - I don't think Michael Caputo is a household name or Trump's disbanding of the NSC pandemic team was especially covered (although in retrospect I think I had heard about it earlier).
In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
The stockpiles were certainly an institutional failure. Here's a Washington Post article from 2018 about Trump's decision to move it out from under CDC authority: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/24/inside-the-secret-u-s-stockpile-meant-to-save-us-all-in-a-bioterror-attack/
Multiple quotes from experts and Congress concerned that the CDC made the most sense and that the new administrative structure would politicize it, a consequence that Jared Kushner did his damnedest to explicitly realize when he claimed in a cringey press conference that it wasn't meant for the states and then had website's description altered to conform with his assessment.
I'm definitely not trying to shame you, but I gotta say I'm surprised you spoke so confidently about institutions and now plead ignorance. Michael Caputo is one of dozens of Trump operatives who sabotaged institutions throughout the government.
Some other examples:
* Trump firing FIVE inspectors general after the impeachment (the previous record for a president is one, by Obama, and the guy he fired was very old and acting bizarrely, as if he had dementia). The IG regime was created specifically in response to Nixon's abuses of power.
* EPA director Scott Pruitt being under 15(!) investigations before he finally resigned
* By the end of his term, something like five of of Trump's senior defense & intelligence appointees were "acting," meaning they were not confirmed by the Senate. One of them appears to have been involved in delaying the National Guard on January 6. Another was fired after he told the truth that the elections were not stolen. William Barr resigned for a similar reason.
* After the first impeachment, every senior official who did their Constitutional duty and testified before Congress was fired or, in the case of Vindman, denied military promotion.
* Relatedly, before the first impeachment Trump refused to allow *anyone* in his administration to submit to Congressional oversight, something no president has ever done.
* He was only the second president ever to fire an FBI director. The first was Bill Clinton firing William Sessions, and that only came after clear and convincing evidence that Sessions was using government aircraft for personal errands.
I could name at least a dozen more, but just remember: the first rule of institutional sabotage is you don't talk about institutional sabotage.
It seems to me that any good-faith attempt to fix the US's institutions (which I hope we can all agree need some serious work) would look like an attempt to "sabotage" them to anyone who doesn't want that to happen.
Not at all. In the seventies after Nixon there were massive overhauls to the FBI, the CIA, the IRS etc. The Church Committee in particular. Among other things the Congressional intelligence oversight committees were created. Before that Congress had almost zero visibility. Inspectors General were created during that period and expanded multiple times over the next 25 years.
Any further info on the Inspector General dementia thing? Sounds interesting but can't find anything about it online.
Trump closed borders much earlier than Canada. At the time, Canadians were dumbstruck that could even be in consideration. Now in hindsight, closing them earlier was obviously the correct move, and I wish my country had not been so quick to judge it as xenophobic.
Trump didn't close borders with all countries until months in. Travel with Europe was open long after it spread there. US citizens returning were not quarantined on arrival.
Ultimately the buck stops on the Resolute desk!
I don't recall US boarders ever being closed in any meaningful sense. There were additional restrictions in place for travel from various places at various times, but "closed"? Never.
What is your country? The US certainly did not judge it as xenophobic.
His optics were terrible, and his bully-pulpit leadership disastrous, but I think the other things he either did OK on, no worse or better than anyone else, or did OK. Borders were closed in the US pretty promptly, about the same time as they were in Italy (which had more warning), and much earlier than most other European countries -- indeed, Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China.
There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses, as federalism gives the Feds very little control in this area (which always surprises everyone every time FEMA proves *not* to be The Avengers on steroids when natural disaster strikes). Disaster response is a state and local thing, and they hold onto that right and power quite jealously. There's *no* governor, red or blue, who would've stood for Trump, or the CDC, or any gol-darned Washington chair-polisher telling them what to do. He certainly could have organized and cheerled from DC better, and his treatment of the Federal publich health team was a disgrace, a four-alarm clusterfuck. But there's nothing at all he could have done to make Kristi Noem or Ron DeSantis lock their states down, or change Gavin Newsom's plans.
Quite honestly, I think it would have taken an *extraordinary* leader of men to get the American response much better than it was. You have only to look at all the other Western nations -- pretty much none of them did noticeably better, except those few in very unusual circumstances (e.g. Australia and New Zealand), to which contributed unique geographic situations *and* a cultural and political homogeneity that was far out of reach for any American politician. I cannot see Hillary Clinton doing any better job at the nuts and bolts, although she would certainly have presided over less of a clown-car circus at the Federal level.
The borders weren't closed, they were closed for non-citizens, which is very different.
Why is it *very* different? It's certainly no different than what every other country did. And would you seriously propose simply marooning every overseas American, with no warning, no recourse, for the following year? This would have been completely untenable politically. No politician at all could propose that and get the enabling legislation. For that matter, enforcement would be profoundly difficult anyway -- you have perhaps heard of our difficulties sealing the US-Mexico border, despite several hundred miles of tall fence, spotlights, barbed wire, trained guards...?
I'm pretty sure if Trump tried to close borders to citizens, we'd have another impeachment on the record. He was called racist for preventing those that have zero right to come in from coming in. I can't imagine what he'd be called if he had tried to block those that have the full legal right.
"Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China."
Cite?
"There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses"
Well, if you define "state-level responses" as "responses that the federal government can't influence", that's true by definition. But there's absolutely more he could have done.
> his failure to close borders early
Seriously? While all the press has been calling him racist for having covid-based travel restrictions, and all the leftist politicians called for going to celebrate to Chinatown and hugging everybody around to show we're not like the racist Trump - it's Trump's fault alone for not doing enough to close the borders?
"While all the press has been calling him racist for having covid-based travel restrictions"
Cite?
"and all the leftist politicians called for going to celebrate to Chinatown and hugging everybody around"
All?
Who was making "fun" of you here?
I think his greatest failure by far was his failure to provide leadership to the states. States cannot close their borders. Accordingly, having piecemeal shutdowns on a per-state basis is akin to having families quarantine alphabetically and in sequence for 5 weeks each.
Pointless.
States could at least do basic things like stop putting sick people into nursing homes and develop robust medical protocols to guard the most vulnerable instead. Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership". And yet, it's somehow Trump's fault of leadership. There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what. He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier, but he couldn't force the state govs to do anything, and if he tried, they'd probably do the opposite just to spite him.
"Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership"."
Cite?
"There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what."
That's a bunch of paranoid victim complex bullshit. Dems didn't oppose Trump for the sake of opposing Trump, they opposed him because he had bad idea after bad idea, and pretending otherwise is bad faith propaganda used to excuse Trump's incompetence.
"He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier"
No, he wasn't.
Actually, I would guess they probably can. There's not a lot a state can't do on an emergency basis, when it's plausibly justified by public health concerns. Few state constitutions contain anything equivalent to the Tenth Amendment, so in principle their police power is unlimited.
I doubt the assorted supreme courts would put up with it indefinitely of course -- but then, quite a lot of the pandemic measures fall into this category. Having the governor close businesses by fiat or order people not to venture from home without a shred of enabling legislation is no less an infringement on state and Federal civil liberties than preventing Arizonans from freely crossing into California.
But I agree hardly any state *would* without the encouragement and assistance of the Federal government. If nothing else, it's impractical, they don't have border guards. But the Feds *could* have, for example, shut down nonessential passenger and airline and rail travel, and deployed Federal resources to help control highways.
Whether that would have had an impact is a very interesting question. The Chinese experience strongly suggests it might have been the single most effective thing to do, but that's a big extrapolation from murky data, so who knows?
I think calling whatever comes out of CCP "data" is giving it way too much credit. Statistics has always been a form of non-scientific fiction in communist dictatorships, and I don't see why CCP would make an exception in this particular case.
This was my major frustration throughout last spring and summer. (By Fall, I was resigned.) The plan for basically everything was, "leave it to the states", but states can't effectively squash an outbreak because they can't regulate interstate commerce! They're not good at coordinating on things like this. (This is why we have a Federal government...)
So from everything to data collection and reporting standards to testing protocols to "opening" and "closing" plans, you had a confusing mishmash of regulations and information. Coordination and leadership were utterly lacking.
I'd suggest the NSC reorganization was linked to the bad response:
>In 2018, Trump fired Tom Bossert, whose job as homeland security adviser on the NSC included coordinating the response to global pandemics. Bossert was not replaced. Last year, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, the NSC's senior director for global health security and biodefense, left the council and was not replaced. Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC's director for medical and biodefense preparedness, left in May 2018 and was also not replaced.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-cuts-national-security-staff-may-hurt-coronavirus-response-say-n1143656
Oh come on. What exactly would an intact NSC have done to make a damn bit of difference? We're a a full 14 months into the pandemic *now*, with enormously greater information about it, a raft of powerful vaccines, better treatment ideas, much better scientific info about how it spreads -- and what is the NSC doing that is any bit of good? Cases have been soaring in Michigan -- what has been done about that by the NSC? If they would've been effective 14 months ago, why, they should be twice as effective now, with what we've learned. I'm not seeing it.
So far as I can tell, the *only* clearly and seriously effective response to COVID was developing a vaccine extremely rapidly. (Maybe some of the public health hokey pokey -- lockdowns, mask mandates, et cetera -- was useful, and maybe it was marginal, and it will take years of research to know which it is.) That was largely a private effort, except insofar as (1) we should give credit to the NIH and friends for funding the basic research 25 years ago that made the technology available when it was needed, and (2) it probably helped that the Federal Government was willing to guarantee a huge pot of revenue to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J et cetera if they invested in the vaccine. One can give the Trump Administration some credit for that, but on the other hand it was kind of a no-brainer and enjoyed bipartisan support I imagine.
Can't see any mention of this, so I'll throw in a link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/09/18/usps-covid-19-coronavirus-plan-to-send-every-household-face-masks-how-the-white-house-stopped-it/?sh=7096c1c16b2a
The Forbes article summarizes some WaPo reporting. The gist is: the USPS had a plan in April to mail every American household multiple reusable masks. The White House spiked it, supposedly to prevent panic. (In April!) This was back when the Surgeon General was demonstrating how to make masks out of t-shirts.
How big a difference would this have made to pandemic trajectories? I have no idea. But I think there was a lot of stuff like this.
Is this in reference to getting rid of the "pandemic prevention team" of the CDC? That's the main thing I remember people talking about along these lines.
Also putting incompetent political sycophants into leadership positions there.
Robert Redfield was an incompetent political sycophant? Everything I've read suggests that he was a talented and generally respected scientist and administrator, highly regarded for his previous work on HIV/AIDS. And the failings of the CDC under his tenure look like the typical failings of otherwise-competent bureaucrats subject to the Iron Law, not incompetent political sycophancy.
The pre-COVID CDC was too low profile and too far from Trump's core interests to attract Trump's attention, or to be a valuable prize for his sycophants. It looks like he may have appointed one "sycophant" when filling out the offices in 2017, Brenda Fitzgerald, but then mostly lost interest when Fitzgerald went down in a scandal a few months later.
Michael Caputo is the obvious name here.
Politico: "But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether."
If Trump was appointing competent technocrats to actually *lead* the CDC, etc, and Trumpist sycophants to brag about it, then that's much less damning than the original claim that Trump was appointing the sycophants to the leadership positions.
And in any event, the media seems to have had no trouble routing around the Trumpists and going to e.g. Anthony Fauci for their messaging. Fauci having served in the same position under every president from Ronald Reagan on down, I think it's unlikely that he's anybody's sycophant (except maybe his own).
Possibly, but it's not about bragging - it's about deliberately sabotaging the CDC:s work in the interest of better PR for the president.
I think that's pretty damning?
In that case, not CDC exactly, but definitely using sycophants to water down the truth to support the president.
I'm no fan of Trump but Scott and others specifically pan his pandemic response. It's not clear to me what the counterfactual would be? What would a Clinton administration have done differently that would have made a material difference in the course of the pandemic? It's hard to believe that the FDA under Clinton would have been less risk-averse allowing a vaccine to be administered earlier, and it seems Macron can be seen as an ideological stand-in for Clinton, but France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US. Not to say that Trump made good decisions here, but just that it's not clear that Clinton would have made better ones.
She wouldn't have tweeted things like LIBERATE MICHIGAN!
The winning move was to close borders earlier and lock down for the six weeks or whatever that was necessary, at the start of the pandemic, to eliminate the virus. Clinton wouldn't have closed the borders earlier, so what was needed was a Super Trump of some kind.
She would've closed them sooner because she would've had better information. She would've had better information because she wouldn't have cut two thirds of the CDC observation staff in China, something Biden criticized all the way back in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv-idUSKBN21C3N5
The only reason the travel bans happened at all is because Trump's assistant national security advisor had backchannel contacts in China from his days as a reporter covering SARS.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-matt-pottinger-on-face-the-nation-february-21-2021/
She might have wanted to close the borders, but the howls of outrage from the right would have overwhelmed any such attempt.
I think the border thing is super hard to say. I could argue either she would have delayed even longer closing the border, since a bit part of the 2016 election was about how border control is racist. Or could have been a Nixon to China moment and the national press would have been more accepting of the "good guys" doing something like that.
A hard border-closing response would've led to a different pandemic in the US, but I'm not real convinced that it would've led to a substantially better one by the numbers. We aren't New Zealand. We weren't going to keep Coronavirus out of here forever. Canada and Mexico were both hit hard, and even if they hadn't been, you can't actually shut down the borders all that hard for all that long -- you're inevitably going to have a lot of exceptions to the rule for a variety of reasons (like citizens coming home), and something is going to break through.
Where the peaks in the graphs were would've looked different, but does pushing the first peak back a couple of months actually lead to a different result? The vulnerable people would've still been there to get infected and die.
That would do precisely nothing. US borders - especially the southern border - is hugely porous, and hoping it can be airtight closed for six weeks (why six? who knows) is pure magic fairy tale. Probably not even for six minutes. Moreover, by the time US politicians realized what is happening, enough people carrying the virus were in to make "eliminating the virus" absolutely impossible.
Thailand had less than 100 deaths, despite the porous border with Burma. China had less than 10K, despite the porous border with Russia and Burma.
China stats are so thoroughly fake that discussing any numbers from there as actual numerical data makes no sense.
There is something strange and as yet inexplicable going on with COVID in East Asia. There are even papers being written about it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7403102/
Similar weirdness is going on Africa: the entire *continent* is reporting a mere 4.4 million cases and 120,000 deaths (and if we leave out South Africa it's 2.9 million cases and 65,000 deaths). Nigeria (population 200 million) is reporting a mere 2,000 deaths to date, which is approximately what the US has reported for the state of Idaho (population 1.7 million).
Of course, it could be utterly hopeless reporting, or...something else. This disease has a lot of seriously weird results.
With COVID, especially in poorer countries, if something seems weird the first place to look is testing/data collection and reporting.
Africa heavily skews young and older people die more of COVID. Also, it's poor enough that people with preexisting conditions are probably dead of something else.
That was not the winning move and lockdowns have had no effect. The data on this is quite clear.
I have to admit I'm disappointed that a long post all about rationality and data based decision making has a comments section filled with people who believe lockdowns and masks work when you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary.
Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good and I have often found myself wishing we had a Trump-like politician where me and my family live in Europe. He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity, not that voters rewarded him for it. He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out. He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs. His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be. Most of the world hasn't got anywhere close to that point yet!
"you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary."
CIte?
"Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good"
Refusing to let a ship dock because you don't want to "increase the numbers" is pretty good? Holding superspreader event after superspreader event is pretty good? Claiming that 85% of people who wear masks get COVID is pretty good?
"He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it"
How so?
"and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity"
Who?
"He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out."
He was correct in claiming that it was no worse than the flu? Just how dangerous was it being made out and by whom?
"He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs."
Everyone realized that.
"His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be."
Can you be more explicit?
For example https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464 and obviously āthe case curvesā cite themselves.
Re: Trump. By āpretty goodā I should probably have written better. I mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries. This does not mean good in an absolute sense. His response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leaders who by and large failed to get to grips with the very poor quality of expert advice they were being given. In my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success, one big enough to offset many other mistakes. Blaming politicians for listening to bad advice is fine, but itās not fair to criticise them for that right at the start. No leader can be expected to understand which obscure advisors are reliable at the start of a crisis. Not understanding it after a year though, is much harder to forgive. Trump is one of very few world leaders who successfully saw through their state epidemiologist and he does deserve credit for that. Perhaps you arenāt aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the public (for the greater good as he sees it) TWICE now - this is a pattern for him. I think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition āfull of itā. And thatās just the ones he admitted. Look at his response to Texas not diverging from lockdown states - he has started to claim that in the states still in lockdown everyone is ignoring the law. Thatās delusional.
WRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about āsuperspreaderā events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect. Most obviously the US election. That wasnāt a huge surprise because as already mentioned, in fact the data doesnāt seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have. Thereās just no correlation. Itās as if what we do has no impact at all (except maybe vaccines).
Re: flu. There are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal flu, and of course for the under 70s itās far below, itās not even comparable. Flu kills children and young people at rates that are statistically meaningful, COVID basically doesnāt.
Re: lockdown costs. Itās not obvious everyone does realize that. Go read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists. When I did this exercise I couldnāt find any. Even a paper that claimed to be a cost/benefit analysis declined, in the end, to actually do such a thing because the value of a life would have been controversial.
"For exampleĀ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464Ā and obviously āthe case curvesā cite themselves."
The first result I got when I google ālockdown effect on covidā was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293850/ āThe lockdown, one of the social isolation restrictions, has been observed to prevent the COVID-19 pandemicā. So reading the studies on lockdowns does not, in fact, lead to the clear conclusion that they were ineffective. And you didn't give any support for your claim that simply looking at case curves proves your position.
āI mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries.ā
If you just mean that you can cherry-pick some bad policies of other countries, that's not saying much.
āHis response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leadersā
But the US is one of the worst countries in the world, so no, Trump's response does not look good compared to other countries.
āIn my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success,ā
How so? The death rate at the end of Atlas' tenure was more than twice what it was at the beginning. He advocated ārising upā against the government in response to COVID restrictions and claimed that masks don't work.
āPerhaps you arenāt aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the publicā
Cite? Also, Trump admitted to deliberately misrepresenting COVID to āstop panicā.
āI think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition āfull of itā.ā
Twice isn't āroutinelyā, as opposed to Trump, who DOES routinely lie.
āWRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about āsuperspreaderā events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect.ā
Trump causing a few hundred people to get COVID isn't going to be a large effect on the overall numbers, but it's still a horrible example to set.
āin fact the data doesnāt seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have.ā
That's just false.
āThere are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal fluā
Yet another claim that needs a cite. Unless you're including the 1918 pandemic in the category of āstrong seasonal fluā, in which case this is wildly misleading. Also, COVID is more infectious than the flu. COVID has killed around half a million Americans in a year. That quite simply is not ābasically the fluā. Period. There is no justification for claiming otherwise.
āGo read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists.ā
Cost versus benefits of lockdowns is more of an economic issue than an epidemiological one. I was able to very easily find cost-benefit articles, for instance http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf . A cost/benefit analysis is indeed difficult to do. That just supports the idea that quantitative cost/benefit analyses not being more common is not indicative of lack of concern.
I think partly this is optics (Trump conspicuously serving as an anti-role model by denying the importance of the pandemic and of shelter-in-place measures), part of this is various little things like refusing to release federal stockpiles that should have been released, and part of this is things that yes, a Clinton administration would have gotten wrong too, but which I'm still angry about.
Trump did the one thing right that really matters, get plenty of vaccines to jab in people's arms.
The best counterfactual is probably to look at the EU, which has Clintonesque leaders, who messed up big time.
US deaths per million is about 1750. Good enough for 15th globally and that's if you count some silly micronations like Montenegro and Gibraltar.
It's a similar to Spain and Portugal but just shy of double Germany (962).
If the US had it's shit together enough to result in a similar response to the EU average there would have been 150-250k fewer deaths. Crazy!
By the end of it, European rates will climb up higher. Barring a huge, huge disaster, not enough to get Germany to U.S. levels, but still will be closer.
I think that culture and state choices accounts for most of the differences. Your comment has zero actual policy proposals for what Trump could have copied from other nations with better results, which would have made a major impact.
Though he doesnāt seem to have developed a plan for doing the jabbing.
That's a state-level responsibility and having a plan without the vaccines is useless, while it is fairly trivial to 'plan' if you have plenty of vaccines.
As a EU resident, I'd gladly offer a trade where we get your huge supply of vaccines and you get our 'wonderful' plans.
I didn't say anything about Europe having a better plan. But, like, Biden announced yesterday that everyone 16 and up is vaccine-eligible now. How could he have done that if it's a state level responsibility?
Trump didn't get vaccines, scientists did. And the EU has lower deaths than the US, so how did they "mess up big time"?
Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?
Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government. The US is similar to the EU, in that states decide on lock down measures and such. I also think that culture and luck has a huge impact.
But ultimately, without large-scale vaccinations, the vaccine will just stay around for a very long time, regardless of the lock down measures. Vaccinations are the only way out.
The federal US and EU government have both taken control of vaccine procurement (including funding production facilities, signing contracts and choosing to allow/ban exports). The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things. The incompetent EU decided to sign huge contracts with the very inexperienced Astra-Zeneca, who offered extremely cheap vaccines, but who happen to not be very good at scaling up. And they exported a lot of their production out of the EU, despite the EU funding these facilities. In the entire US, 16+ are now eligible. In The Netherlands, we are still vaccinating only the elderly and at-risk groups.
"Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?"
That rather looks like a straw man.
"Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government."
That's a non sequitur, both in that it doesn't address what I said, and that the second part of the sentence doesn't follow from the first..
"The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things."
If Biden isn't responsible, it's an odd coincidence that the turn around happened right around when he took office. And Trump didn't have any hesitation about taking credit for the low unemployment that happened to occur during his presidency. He can't have it both ways.
There's the institutional issues baked into the US that predate Trump, but downplaying the threat of covid (at the time when his leadership was the most necessary--early February-March) was something that Clinton very significantly wouldn't have done.
Why do you think that ? Emmanuel Macron is probably the closest thing to the Democrats Europe has to offer, and he was downplaying the threat as late as March 7. (Sadly I can't find a link in English, but he went to see a play on March 7. with the explicit intention of "Encouraging people to go out despite the crisis".
"early February-March) was something that Clinton very significantly wouldn't have done."
Of course she would have done it (though maybe not as insistently as Trump).
https://www.today.com/video/dr-fauci-on-coronavirus-fears-no-need-to-change-lifestyle-yet-79684677616
None of the things you said are true. Trump was an excellent role model. You claim he resisted social distancing and shelter-in-place measures, but here is a quote from March 11th:
"In particular, we are strongly advising that nursing homes for the elderly suspend all medically unnecessary visits. In general, older Americans should also avoid nonessential travel in crowded areas. My administration is coordinating directly with communities with the largest outbreaks, and we have issued guidance on school closures, social distancing and reducing large gatherings. Smart action today will prevent the spread of the virus tomorrow."
And you claim he denied its importance, but if that's true, why would he declare a state of emergency on March 13th:
"To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, Iām officially declaring a national emergency. The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion of, very importantly ā very important and a large amount of money for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease. And in furtherance of the order, Iām urging every state to set up emergency operation centers effectively immediately. Youāre going to be hearing from some of the largest companies and greatest retailers and medical companies in the world. Iām also asking every hospital in this country to activate its emergency preparedness plan so that they can meet the needs of Americans everywhere."
He was also pro-mask. Here is two direct quotes from July 21st:
"And weāre asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask. Get a mask. Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. Theyāll have an effect and we need everything we can get."
"I carry the mask. I went into Walter Reed Hospital the other day. I have the mask right here and I carry it, and I will use it gladly, no problem with it. And Iāve said that. And I say, if you can use the mask, when you can, use the mask, if youāre close to each other, if youāre in a group. I would put it on when Iām in a group. If Iām in an elevator and there were other people with me, including like security people, itās not their fault. They have to be in the elevator. I want to protect them also. I put on a mask. I have no problem with the masks. I view it this way. Anything that potentially can help and that certainly can potentially help is a good thing. I have no problem. I carry it. I wear it. You saw me wearing it a number of times and Iāll continue."
...
I don't believe any of this, of course. I pieced it together with Google to be a contrarian smart-ass. Any reasonable person who followed Trump can see past the self-contradiction and occasional willingness to read Presidential-sounding scripts (usually while sniffling a lot and pivoting between a left and right teleprompter) and accurately assess what he really believes and demonstrated to his followers in his off-the-cuff remarks at rallies (their new hoax!) and tweets (LIBERATE MICHIGAN). You don't have to be a super-allist to suss the difference between Rally Trump and Podium Trump; it's usually pretty clear to both his followers and his detractors. And like you said, the optics do matter.
The relevance of this example to your racial apologia is left as an exercise for the reader.
I agree, I felt Scott relied too heavily on official quotes and not enough on subtext for some of these conclusions. An example is the capitol riot. Yes, Trump did eventually tweet for his supporters to stand down. However, that was several hours after they first breached the capitol.
Trump's silence during that time is significant; his supporters had illegally broken into a government building with the 'goal' (although that word implies too much forethought) of contesting the results of an election that he lost, and he was willing to wait several hours before saying anything to stop it. This is the behavior of someone who, if not actively hoping for an insurrection, is at least open to the idea of it. I understand that Scott is looking for objectivity, but only looking at official statements misses a big part of the picture.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, it just seems odd to give himself a B on his coup prediction. A legitimate coup attempt would require Trump to fully commit to it and open himself up to immediate legal punishment if it failed.
Also I think the race section should have mentioned the George Floyd protests and subsequent police responses. Don't know how Scott would grade Trump's response, but at the very least it seems like one of the most important race-related events to occur during Trump's presidency.
"Any person with sufficiently biased priors can see past the obvious evidence negating them to continue believing in their priors, it's obvious, read the -- subtext". This is ridiculous, frankly you remind me of string theorists constantly trying to defend their untenable positions.
shambibble clearly said " Any reasonable person who followed Trump". That is clearly a reference to EVIDENCE, not priors, and you are being dishonest in pretending otherwise. And if Trump made pro-mask statements sometime and anti-mask statements other times, it is legitimate to characterize him as standing in the way of masks. If someone is accused of being racist, compiling a list of times where they were not actively engaged in racist activity doesn't counter the charge.
āMy priors are trump is racist so anytime he makes a statement that can vaguely be interpreted as racist, it is obviously his racism and anytime he makes a statement EXPLICITLY CONDEMNING RACISM, his reasonable supporters will discard it as false propaganda, so I shall too.ā Can you see the ridiculousness of your logic? If you want examples of Trump explicitly condemning racism, Scott has linked to many examples and yet examples of Trump being racist is what? ā Fine people on both sidesā - He condemned white supremacy just a sentence before, so he genuinely believed that there were people who were simply protesting taking down of statues. āthey are rapists, thieves and some I assume are good peopleā - He genuinely believes immigrants cause crime. āShithole countriesā āHe believes those countries are actually bad, nothing to do with race. Can you see why your priors are so clearly binding you? Iām not going to continue this conversation if youāre just gonna argue that Iām wrong without considering any charitable explanations of Trump.
I think it's plausible that Clinton would have generally driven a more coordinated federal response. Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections.
Likewise, Trump actively advocated for doing less testing, because he thought that the case numbers were only going up because we were doing more testing. It seems very likely that Clinton would have pushed federal funding for more tests, and more testing would have potentially allowed us to respond quicker to the successive waves of infection.
Many other countries that locked down hard also gave generous economic stimulus; for example paying partial salaries for furloughed workers. It seems at least directionally likely that the US would have experienced less lockdown fatigue (and therefore potentially had a lower R) if at the margin fewer people were forced to work in unsafe jobs.
The US has managed to politicize mask-wearing in a way that is quite exceptional for developed countries. Unclear to what extent this would have happened without Trump, but at least directionally, he was pushing the public away from evidence-based medicine in a way that was harmful.
As you say I think it's likely that "Project Warp Speed" would have gone down differently. I can see a world where the Very Serious People oppose handing a huge check to pharma companies, and so we got fewer doses by this time -- as happened in the EU. However there is a huge difference between the Democratic establishment (i.e. Clinton's wing of the Democratic party, not AOC's) and the European left in terms of the degree of basic faith in capitalism; it doesn't seem implausible that the Democrats would be OK with a "vaccine new deal" to hire furloughed employees as contact tracers and set up a speculative fund for vaccine development. I could easily imagine the Democrats spending more on their version of "Warp Speed".
+1
> Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections
The Australian experience was that contact tracing plus limited lockdowns can work if there's low (single digit) cases per day, and that contact tracing can scale to dozens of cases a day in conjunction with serious lockdown.
It's not that great beyond that point though. Contact tracing teams take time to build and scale out, and they only catch some fraction of potential infectees.
As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference.
"As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference."
Denmark, Norway, Finland, and South Korea suggest otherwise.
Worth pointing out that Pfizer was not part of Operation Warp Speed. They were EU funded.
Other vaccines may have been delayed but, regardless of US involvement, the Pfizer timeline would remain unchanged.
You are spreading misinformation. See: https://www.cbs58.com/news/fact-checking-the-battle-for-credit-over-pfizers-vaccine-announcement
By almost every metric, the U.S. delivered more aid and stimulus to its citizens than did any other country. The "European countries gave out much more money" meme is a progressive lie (surprise!)
A couple of things:
1. I'm not sure that "France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US" is supported by data. Here's excess mortality for both countries: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pfwflov8vnjczbi/2021-04%20France-vs-US-excess-mortality.png?dl=0
(from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores)
2. Of course it's impossible to know if a Clinton White House would have implemented any positive actions that would have improved things, and I think it's fair to argue that perhaps it wouldn't have. But it seems clear that a Clinton White House would have resulted in far fewer negative actions that exacerbated the pandemic in the US (nearly all of which come down to Tweeting, honestly).
Clinton's pandemic response would have been to send the VP to the Wuhan wet market to eat bat soup as a show of anti-racism and solidarity with the AAPI community.
Yes. Bingo. Remember this, anyone?
https://khn.org/morning-breakout/white-house-pushes-back-against-states-ebola-quarantine-policies/
Not necessarily. The current condition of the woke media landscape is in part a reaction to Trumpism, which indeed is one of the reasons Trumpism is bad, and the early dismissals of COVID by liberal media outlets were partly a reaction to Trump's anti-China rhetoric/policies. If Clinton had been elected in 2016, Vox in early 2020 would have looked somewhat different - exactly how different, it's hard to say.
Isn't the arrow of causality reversed there, in which Trumpism arose in reaction to a media landscape that was becoming increasingly woke?
One reinforced the other. I would model it as a feedback loop (admittedly one that got started long before Trump), not an arrow.
"and the early dismissals of COVID by liberal media outlets were partly a reaction to Trump's anti-China rhetoric/policies"
No; epidemiologists were just as worthless in 2014.
"France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US"
France has had 1,573 deaths per million. The US has had 1,762. That's 12% higher. 62k extra deaths. Sure seems noticeable to me.
"our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So Iād give yourself a higher grade there."
Did state governments do much better than Trump?
I'm having a hard time reconciling "When the Capitol riots happened, with basically no links to white supremacy" with the number of subsequent arrests of people in explicitly white supremacist organisations, wearing "six million was not enough" shirts, etc.
If ten percent of a room is wearing explicitly Nazi ideology on their shirts, I am not mollified by the other 90%. Ten percent nazis is a lot.
20 Nazis attempting to seize power by overthrowing an election is a shit fuck ton.
Why? Do you think Nazis are superhuman?
I think 20 Nazis ā and Nazis today ā are shit, not a "shit fuck ton".
(Modern) Nazis, and similar extremists of all persuasions and linear directionalities, are almost entirely edgy LARP-ing; not significant threats to basically anyone.
Why do you think nazis are not dangerous?