How the Press Recalled Trump's Pandemic Train Wreck

The standard summary of the capsule is: Trump had a strong economy and Biden had a strong economy, but Biden's strong economy created inflation. Heather Long and Aden Barton, compare Trump's economic record compares with Biden's, wrote last June The Washington Post“Pandemic aside, both Biden and Trump experienced outstanding growth.” Coming back? To say that Trump delivered outstanding growth is tantamount to saying, based on Woodrow Wilson's first four years in office, that he kept America out of war. That's only true if you ignore the fact that the United States lost 53,000 soldiers in combat during Wilson's second term.

Or maybe it's ignoring Trump's Covid year asks Mrs. Lincoln whether she liked it, apart from John Wilkes Booth's objection Our American cousin. Yes, the Covid pandemic was going to happen – it was global, after all. But under Trump's watch, the death rate in the United States rose well above that of other comparable nations. In February 2021, Covid deaths in the United States were 40 percent higher than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. accordingly a commission set up by the British medical journal The lancet. Dollars and cents shouldn't be our primary concern, but these excess deaths and the panic they caused had dire consequences for the economy. Like Georgetown economist Harry Holzer observed In 2020, “both employment and health outcomes during the pandemic were worse in the United States than in virtually all other high-income countries in the world.”

Was this Trump's fault? In his Covid book 2021 The premonitionMichael Lewis convincingly argues that much of America's exceptionally high Covid morbidity is due to the ass-covering Centers for Disease Control Fear of swine flu in 1976 that it is not advisable to ever address a pandemic threat until it gets out of control (and by then countless lives will be needlessly lost). So yes, there were institutional forces at work. But the CDC is an agency of the executive branch and therefore the responsibility of the President of the United States. Since the Reagan administration, the president has appointed the director of the CDC. Trump appointed Robert Redfield, who recently made a public display of his sycophancy delegated Trumps Convocation vaccine curator Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will help formulate health policy if he runs for a second term.