I figure with the election approaching, it’s time for me to post my endorsement, and if you’re a regular reader of my blog, it will not be a surprise: Vote Trump Out.
Yes, I realize that tons of people have already voted, and that I will change no one’s mind. But I’m posting this anyway, just to make sure I say something.
First, though, a quick note about Joe Biden. There’s a reason I headlined this post “Vote Trump Out” and not “Vote Joe Biden In,” and it’s because Joe Biden has a terrible track record on many issues. I’m not asking anyone to vote for Biden. I’m asking you to vote against Trump. Unfortunately, the most effective way to vote against Trump — unless you’re in a state where one candidate is sure to win — is to vote for Joe Biden. But if you can’t vote for Joe Biden, then please consider just staying home and not voting for anyone for President.
In my earlier post on the subject, I argued that nearly all my reasons for opposing Trump in 2016 are still good today. Now I want to talk about some new reasons for opposing Trump.
Number 1 by far is Trump’s handling of the pandemic. As I write this, Worldometers is reporting that 230,749 Americans have died from Covid-19 and it seems obvious that thousands more will die before the pandemic subsides. Surely no President could have prevented all of those deaths, and there’s a lot of blame to go around, including a lot of governors and a lot of big-city mayors. But the Covid-19 waves have been washing over region after region of the country. It’s a nation-wide phenomenon, and that makes much of it Trump’s fault.
No one knows how many people would have died if the U.S. had handled the pandemic differently, but we can make some pretty good rough guesses.
New Zealand, a nation of 5 million people, has had a grand total of 25 people die of Covid throughout this entire pandemic. If the U.S. had the same death rate, scaled up to our population of 328.2 million, only 1641 Americans would be dead. Similar calculations for Taiwan, South Korea, and Australia yield equivalent U.S. death counts of 97, 2955, and 11,736, respectively. This is arguably not a fair comparison, because New Zealand and Taiwan are easily isolated island countries, and South Korea is almost an island, with its only land border being the most well-defended border in the world. I suppose you could argue that Australia is also an island country, but at over 2.9 million square miles, it’s almost the size of the United States.
Nevertheless, if you want an even better comparison, how about Germany? It’s a modern industrial democracy, and it’s right in the middle of Europe. If the United States had as many deaths per million as Germany, we would only have 40,216 dead. Heck, if the U.S. only had the same death rate as the entire world, we’d only have 49,291 dead instead of 230,749. Surely one of the wealthiest countries in the world could do better than average?
Or how about our neighbor to the north? Like the U.S., they’ve had a worse-than-average fight against Covid-19, but if we had Canada’s death rate, we’d still only have 87,288 dead.
Let’s go one step further and use the Covid Tracking Project‘s somewhat lower count of U.S. deaths: 217, 029. That’s still 129,741 more people than would have died if we had Canada’s death rate. I think that’s a safe number for the minimum number of lives that could have been saved if the U.S. had done a better job fighting Covid. It’s the minimum number of American deaths that can be laid at Trump’s feet.
And yes, they should be laid at Trump’s feet. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been studying and fighting epidemics around the world for over 70 years. They wrote the book on the subject, and all of the highly successful countries have been following it.
And no, the key to fighting a pandemic is not a lockdown. It’s testing, tracing, and isolating. You test as many people as you can, you trace the contacts of people who test positive to find more people to test, and you isolate everyone who tests positive. This is what public health experts have been advising from the beginning. Lockdowns are what you have to do when you don’t do testing, tracing, and isolating.
Trump has been terrible at this. I’ll let Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center explain:
Trump was not called to greatness. He wasn’t even called to above-average competence. He was called to implement a game-plan we’d already written with a disease control bureaucracy that was the envy of the world, the administrative infrastructure and personnel of the world’s most dominant and powerful state, and a practically bottomless well of resources. […] If Trump had merely said, “Tell me what to do!,” had done it, and otherwise had stayed out of the way, I believe it’s almost certain that at least 100,000 dead Americans would now be alive.
But Trump didn’t just fail to do what needed to be done. He didn’t just refuse to do what needed to be done. He actively and aggressively undermined both federal and state efforts to contain the virus. For example, he abruptly ended U.S. cooperation with China on disease surveillance. We could have had a much clearer picture of what was coming, which would have allowed us to gear up and contain community spread before it got out of control, but we didn’t. Trump inexplicably hollowed out our global public health presence before the pandemic, and kept doing it throughout. And he contradicted and undermined his own administration’s pandemic control authorities at every turn, wreaking havoc on the federal government’s immense capacity to respond. If he’d done nothing at all, many thousands of Americans would still be alive.
Trump could have activated the Defense Production Act very early on to rapidly increase the supply of tests and testing facilities, but he never used this emergency power to ensure an adequate testing supply. He has been at times overtly hostile to a big push on testing, largely because a big testing push would make the pandemic look like a big problem, and he’d assured everyone that it wasn’t, first because he was worried that it would spook the markets, but then because it actually became a big problem, due to his initial dismissiveness. […] He has questioned the utility of testing on the flabbergasting grounds that you can’t have a high infection rate if you don’t test for infections. He has consistently, actively and purposefully misled the public about the scale and adequacy of American testing in order to pooh-pooh the idea that we need to do more of it.
You may recall that during the worst part of the pandemic, the Trump administration told the states they were basically on their own and would have to fight the pandemic with their own health departments and resources. Among other things, this led to bidding wars between the states for supplies such as PPE.
To ameliorate this problem, states got together to create alliances to coordinate planning and resources:
It’s difficult to overstate the absurdity of this. To put it in stark terms, under the Trump administration, individual states were compelled by circumstances to form cooperating alliances to fight the pandemic and protect the lives of their citizens. They had to do this despite already being part of an extremely well-funded 230-year old alliance called The United States of America, which included the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the CDC, which I will remind you was the most respected pandemic fighting organization in the world. Despite these vast resources under his control, Trump did little to help the states, so they had to join together to help each other.
Short of civil war, it is difficult to imagine a greater failure of leadership by an American President.
I was going to make this post a list of reasons why we need to vote Trump out. But now that I’ve finished the first and most important reason, I think it is sufficient by itself to make the case.
Windypundit wrote, “Vote Trump Out”
This screams of pure partisan anti-Trump’ism aka Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Why not simply ignore who the candidates are and just vote for the candidate who’s political policies are more in line with your views.
I didn’t vote for Trump or Clinton in 2016 because I thought they were both the worst that their party had to offer and a character lose-lose regardless of which person sat in the Oval Office.
What the last four years has shown me is that the personality and character of the person on the oval office is damn near irrelevant to getting things done in the political bubble of Washington DC. Trump is a terrible person in all respects other than actually getting things done for the American people and striving for peace in the world. Regardless of President Trumps personality and character failures, he has accomplished a lot in the USA and around the world. The personality and character of the person in the oval office is almost irrelevant in today’s political extremes.
Vote for policy not against the candidate.
When it comes to voting for the President of the United States, I may never vote for a person’s character over their policy again.
First of all, I really should see if there’s a WordPress plugin that will automatically replace the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” with “I have no coherent thoughts here,” since that’s pretty much what it means.
Second, Windypundit has largely been a policy blog, and I usually vote on policy. Trump is the first President whose character is so atrocious that I feel it is more important than his policies. Part of the reason for that is…
Third, Trump has been pretty squishy about his policies, with the exception of his trade protectionism and restrictive immigration policies, and I disagree strongly with both of those. I will give him credit for not getting us into any new wars, but I worry that drawing back from so many world organizations will actually be destabilizing.
Fourth, you seem to have missed it, but the bulk of this post was about a Trump policy: Specifically, his pandemic response policy choice to abandon thousands of Americans to die. I’m against it.
Fifth, I think the chance we have of changing that policy is to put someone else in charge.
Mark wrote, “you seem to have missed it, but the bulk of this post was about a Trump policy: Specifically, his pandemic response policy choice to abandon thousands of Americans to die. I’m against it.”
Oh I didn’t miss that at all, who could.
By the way, this statement of yours, “his pandemic response policy choice to abandon thousands of Americans to die” is signature significant of those that are so completely blinded by their anti-Trump bias that they refuse to see anything that opposes their bias, this is the mentality of those with TDS, the bias runs so deep that it’s all about getting rid of Trump no matter what. “Abandon” – really Mark – this is TDS delivered straight up without a twist, own it or lie to yourself, it’s your choice.
Personally I don’t give a damn who you vote for, the why is where I choose to interject. Your vote is yours no matter who you choose. What anyone else thinks of your vote should be 100% irrelevant to you. Why you choose to vote the way you do is a reflection on your character and no one else’s.
OK then. Thanks for stopping by…
So not only did you not make one substantial rebuttal to Mark’s long and detailed critique of Trump’s COVID policies, you are now admitting that you knew he made such a critique and chose to pretend that he didn’t in your first comment.
Cool.
What the last four years has shown me is that the personality and character of the person on the oval office is damn near irrelevant to getting things done in the political bubble of Washington DC. Trump is a terrible person in all respects other than actually getting things done for the American people and striving for peace in the world.
For many reasons, including those detailed by Mark in this very blog post, this is an insane conclusion to arrive at.
It is entirely because of Trump’s character that his COVID response has been so terrible and resulted in so much needless death. He could not admit there was a problem because he thought doing so would make him look bad, and his self-image is all he cares about. He didn’t want to wear a mask because he thought it made him look weak. He wouldn’t stop holding superspreader events, even after he was diagnosed with COVID.
As Jack Marshall said in 2016, Trump is fundamentally unable to perceive objective reality if it conflicts with his self-image. As Jack said, Trump literally does not know the difference between a fact and a lie.
It was obvious to anyone who gave this character defect any thought in 2016 that elevating such a man to the highest office in the land posed a massive national security risk, and put American lives in danger. To deny this now, with thousands dead due to Trump’s policies (which are entirely a result of this character flaw), is insane. That’s the real Trump Derangement Syndrome; the desire to protect him from criticism at all costs.
Chris,
It’s my opinion that unethical people have chosen to politicize the pandemic for political reasons; the pandemic is not political, should not be political and if you’re voting based on the single issue of the pandemic then you’re an imbecile. We the People are the ones that are responsible for the spread of COVID-19, making this political and blaming a politician or multiple politicians for the the actions of We the People is utter nonsense and morally bankrupt.
This is why I stated above…
Chris wrote, “For many reasons, including those detailed by Mark in this very blog post, this is an insane conclusion to arrive at.”
You talking about something that differs from your opinion as being insane is SOP for you; bigot.
Bigot: a person who is intolerant toward those holding different opinions.
You should take the test…
Testing for Acute Propaganda-Induced Anti-Trump Hysteria Syndrome
You have still not made a single rebuttal to Mark’s arguments about how Trump’s policies have resulted in higher Covid transmission and a higher death rate. Instead, you are simply denying that public policy could have made any difference at all in the spread of Covid, which is a denial of objective reality.
“You talking about something that differs from your opinion as being insane is SOP for you; bigot.”
Amazing hypocrisy from someone who opened with the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Simply amazing.
Chris wrote, “You have still not made a single rebuttal to Mark’s arguments about how Trump’s policies have resulted in higher Covid transmission and a higher death rate. Instead, you are simply denying that public policy could have made any difference at all in the spread of Covid, which is a denial of objective reality.”
As usual you’re showing your partisan biased ignorance. It’s not up to me to refute what Mark wrote, it’s up to Mark to support his argument with real evidence and real facts not innuendo and propaganda.
You’ve been told this before and now I’ll say it directly to Mark, ignoring this…
Correlation ≠ Causation
…makes you look quite foolish.
“It’s not up to me to refute what Mark wrote”
Like Chris and I both thought: You’ve got nothing. I accept your surrender.
Mark Draughn wrote, “You’ve got nothing.”
You’re failure to comprehend the written word is not my problem, it’s yours.
Like Chris before you, you too should learn from this statement.
“It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt”
Chris removed all doubt long ago, you just removed all doubt too.
Damnit, I forgot to finish my edit…
Your failure to comprehend the written word is not my problem, it’s yours.
Mark presented evidence. Every leading health institution in the world agrees on this. There is no amount of evidence you would accept.
It is self-evident that had Trump set an example by wearing a mask and not holding super-spreader events, his supporters would have followed his example, and there would be fewer deaths today. Denying this is to deny reality. But that’s what Trump and his supporters do.
Here are my thought on voting in the Presidential election…
Why I’m Casting My Presidential Vote Based 100% On Policy and You Should Too!
I think the “s” key on this keyboard is starting to die.