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The other very important point is that Trump has convinced large numbers of people that he wasn't in power* between March and November 2020, and therefore should not be blamed for America's buttock-clenchingly pisspoor response to COVID-19 (Americans had more restrictions and more deaths than countries with a competent response like Taiwan, or even a barely adequate response like Germany). This matters, because by far the strongest arguments for "1st-term Trump was an unusually bad President" are the botched COVID-19 response and that he tried to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.
A lot of people voted for Biden (or stayed home despite being natural Republicans) on the basis of "COVID sucks, and it probably sucks more than it needs to because the government screwed up, so vote out the incumbent). The vibes have now changed to "2017-19 were pretty good, so Trump must have been an okay President".
* I can't remember which centre-left memelord said "Who was President in summer 2020 is a key election issue." but the point isn't that people have forgotten who was President, it's that Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.
Wasn't it proven that the vaccine was intentionally delayed to come out after the election in order to spike Trump's chances? Like, Zvi mentioned this, and if anything he's got TDS; he's no Trump shill.
'Proven' is hard, but "One doctor’s campaign to stop a covid-19 vaccine being rushed through before Election Day" comes to mind every time people start drawing really complex theories for the surge in vaccine skepticism on the right. The weird last-minute process change to drop the 32-sample threshold is less well-known, but it's... hard to see the daylight for the official justification.
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It astounds me that this and the stolen election narrative have somehow redounded to Trump's benefit among his supporters. To me, they sound like the plight of someone who is grossly incompetent at understanding and exercising the power he holds as President.
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It’s also worth noting that between May and October 2020, the mob (and mob supporters) were in control of large portions of the country, to the point that the government couldn’t mobilize a proper response to them. Hence the claim about “deep state” holding more water, and that people that originally voted for Trump saw him do nothing about that, so they voted for the mob’s candidate instead.
This didn’t happen in other countries more or less at all.
Are you talking about BLM protests?
Because I don’t think that’s a reasonable description of the scenario at all.
Yes, I'm talking about the BLM riots.
The government arms nominally tasked with quelling them refused to do so; by definition, the government lost control of those areas. The faction responsible for the riots then proceeded to win the election in 2020.
Thus I don't believe it unreasonable to assume the continuity of that faction's governance also includes the summer of 2020 (and the actions of the bureaucracy that specifically enabled them by exempting them from public health orders). The same would not have been true had that faction lost. What supporters of a particular faction do matters to the general public's perception of who's in charge.
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The question is what decision could Trump have made that would’ve resulted in a different outcome?
The only ones were sidelining people like Fauci (which was hard to do). It sucks we didn’t happen to have the Swedish public health minister.
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The worst decisions were mostly made at the state level, where Trump indeed was not in power. Trump made some bad decisions, but the ones Biden would have made (and indeed did make when he had the chance) were worse.
The question of "botching the COVID-19 response" assumes there was a useful response that could have stopped COVID-19. Once the European strain was here, there was not (and it probably was never possible to close the US enough to block that). All the botching, then, was in the direction of "too much response". And while Trump wasn't great on that, he's better on it than any Democrat said to be in the running, unless you count RFK Jr. Biden was terrible, Kamala is part of the Biden administration, and Newsom and Whitmer were worse.
And I think it's easier to remember the lockdown enthusiasts as overreaching than it is the relatively laissez-faire Trump/Republican approach, regardless of whichever was nominally better at addressing whether the local Octogenerians were sent to early graves slightly or moderately faster than usual. Biden's tribe backed a lot of disruptions to average living that seem like an utterly insane void in hindsight, whilst regardless of how much emphasis you put onto Omicron and the Vaccines for the nullification of COVID the red tribe's stance that it was largely nothingburger seems to have born out.
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