Some of those reactions were misreadings, so it's worth emphasizing: I think Trump's handling of Covid has been bad. I think it has undoubtedly cost some number of American lives. I think it's possible that it will look worse in hindsight than it does in a snapshot right now.
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On our podcast recently I debated
@herandrews and@ToryAnarchist, who both leaned toward an act-of-God reading of the pandemic in which Trump's actions are essentially marginal to the result. That's not my view.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/opinion/the-argument-trump-coronavirus-election.html …7 replies 5 retweets 50 likesShow this thread -
Indeed, I think that especially given Trump's own professed nationalist/China hawk worldview, and his 2016 sales pitch, his failure to take the virus seriously when it counted is a good reason for a swing voter to swing against him.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html …
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What I'm questioning is whether we have evidence that Trump's response has led to a unique catastrophe as opposed to a more ordinary failure, of the kind unfortunately common in our peer countries.
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I think the unique-catastrophe case has, so far, relied on snapshots in time -- taking European versus American case rates circa July 15 as a final judgment, for instance -- that don't necessarily tell us how things will actually end up.
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Ross Douthat Retweeted Bruno Maçães
On the late spring, as we came out of lockdown, the US was doing better than Western Europe. By mid-summer we were doing worse. But now, well ...https://twitter.com/MacaesBruno/status/1303526121804312576 …
Ross Douthat added,
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Likewise, once you step back from deaths and case rates to other measurements of response capacity, the US looks anywhere from slightly-below to slight-above average, rather than catastrophic, compared to W. Europe and the Americas.
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I mentioned mask usage in the column as one example:https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-global-face-mask-adoption/ …
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Our testing rate is one of the highest in the world:https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/international-comparison …
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Our economic decline was slightly better than middle-of-the-pack:pic.twitter.com/HUczMvRGKr
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What's the metrics on social breakdown and rioting in USA as against peer nations?
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