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This doesn't really seem true. Back in 2016, I wasn't upset about Trump winning the way that other people were, but I did have some pretty significant concerns about what I would have described as a high-variance Presidency. What the hell is this weirdo going to do? I didn't know and thought it was reasonable to be concerned that it would be something actually catastrophic for Americans. And then... pretty much nothing. After a pretty ordinary three years, things were actually looking pretty good heading into 2020 and I figured Trump was probably going to win a fairly easy reelection on the strength of a potent economy and there just generally being not much in the way of actual bad outcomes for Americans or even anything all that radical that anyone could point to.
This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.
I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?
Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.
To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.
Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research. Changes to regulations around wet markets would have done absolutely nothing to stop the pandemic.
That said, the idea that the US could have done anything whatsoever to keep China honest in this regard is a joke - too many people in the US government had their fingers in this particular pie for them to be able to do anything about it.
Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.
I actually don't have a single source that sums everything up - I'll go looking for one that ties everything up, but unfortunately all the good summaries I have so far carry the kind of undeniable political valence that makes them not terribly effective at convincing regular people.
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My impression was that that wasn't the case: I know there was some series of fairly thorough videos recently that I didn't watch where two sides presented their positions, and the judges ultimately came out in favor of the natural origins hypothesis.
Not certain what I think, though my priors definitely would lean toward lab leak, but I haven't looked at any concrete evidence.
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The catastrophes of 2020 were the Covid freakout and the riots. The left got its way on both things. To the extent that Trump fucked up in 2020, it was in failing to reject the advice of "experts" and failing to listen to Tom Cotton on riots.
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The catastrophe was our Covid response. We could have ignored Covid and been fine, or gotten away with a far more measured response and still been fine.
Yes, trump was president when the Covid response was decided on. But the democrats were demanding even more of the catastrophic policies; maybe if Ted Cruz had won the 2016 election we wouldn’t have high inflation right now, but whatever. Saying ‘Trump caused a catastrophe by doing slightly less of the things we told him to do, and those things turned out to be catastrophic’ is giving yourself too much credit.
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