Worst ever
One doesn’t want to rush into calling Trump the worst president ever, because time has a way of changing our minds, but Max Boot says it’s safe to call it now.
With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history.
His one major competitor for that dubious distinction remains Buchanan, whose dithering helped lead us into the Civil War — the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Buchanan may still be the biggest loser. But there is good reason to think that the Civil War would have broken out no matter what. By contrast, there is nothing inevitable about the scale of the disaster we now confront.
The situation is so dire, it is hard to wrap your mind around it. The Atlantic notes: “During the Great Recession of 2007–2009, the economy suffered a net loss of approximately 9 million jobs. The pandemic recession has seen nearly 10 million unemployment claims in just two weeks.” The New York Times estimates that the unemployment rate is now about 13 percent, the highest since the Great Depression ended 80 years ago.
And it’s going to keep going up, not down.
Far worse is the human carnage. We already have more confirmed coronavirus cases than any other country. Trump claimed on Feb. 26 that the outbreak would soon be “down to close to zero.” Now he argues that if the death toll is 100,000 to 200,000 — higher than the U.S. fatalities in all of our wars combined since 1945 — it will be proof that he’s done “a very good job.”
If he herded 200,000 of us into concrete bunkers and gassed us to death, would that be proof that he’s done a very good job?
Trump was told, emphatically, what would happen if we didn’t act.
A team of Post reporters wrote on Saturday: “The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus —the first of many—in the President’s Daily Brief.” But Trump wasn’t listening.
He doesn’t read the PDB, and if he did he wouldn’t understand what he was reading, and if he did he wouldn’t remember it, and if he did he wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s not in his wheelhouse. In his wheelhouse is shunting money to his hotels and golf resorts, bragging, extorting flattery, insulting his betters, shouting, and firing people.
Trump was first briefed on the coronavirus by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Jan. 18. But, The Post writes, “Azar told several associates that the president believed he was ‘alarmist’ and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue.” When Trump was first asked publicly about the virus, on Jan. 22, he said, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
In the days and weeks after Azar alerted him about the virus, Trump spoke at eight rallies and golfed six times as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Which he didn’t, because he paid no attention and wouldn’t have cared if he had. He doesn’t have enough brain left to have a care in the world.
South Korea and the United States discovered their first cases on the same day. South Korea now has 183 dead — or 4 deaths per 1 million people. The U.S. death ratio (25 per 1 million) is six times worse — and rising quickly.
I continue to wish someone would drop a piano on him.
I fear mass unemployment is going to be the new normal for years to come. I’d sure be happy to be proven wrong on that prediction though.
All this time we thought mass automation, self-driving cars and AI were gonna kill all the jobs in ten, twenty years, and that we’ve still got a little time to experiment and come up with creative solutions (e.g., universal basic income). Nope — it all came crashing ashore with the novel coronavirus. Here in Toronto, there are estimates that 50 to 75 percent of restaurants and bars will go bankrupt — that alone is a MASSIVE chunk of the economy. (We are a city of foodies; the diversity of international cuisine and entertainment and nightlife is our pride and joy, and it’s basically the only reason to endure the exorbitant rents and tiny square-footages to live in this otherwise aesthetically bland concrete jungle.)
I can’t see how it won’t take years to rev the economy back up to speed after this, and I don’t think it will ever fully recover. Now more than ever we need a strong, bold, intelligent, visionary president to see us through this. After the piano falls on Trump, can we impress Obama back into the Oval Office for another four years?
“South Korea now has 183 dead — or 4 deaths per 1 million people.” And miraculously, North Korea doesn’t have a single case! We have a lot more cases since we have commenced doing a lot more testing, and the numbers at this point are pretty misleading, maybe purposefully so depending on who’s doing the tallying.
Putting NK aside for obvious reasons, this is about the death rate per million of population Twiliter, not the testing numbers. The US can test or not test. People will and are dying at a greater rate that they are in SK (which has had a very effective testing programme).
Sadly, there is nothing in US law to hold the President and his incompetent and in some cases probably corrupt enablers to account for this disaster. Maybe a revolution will come down the track and he’ll get strung up from a lamp post by a mob, have a pitchfork driven through his chest or one of his body guards will get disgusted enough to take action (it’s happened to other dictators).
Recently I heard a rant by Ben Shapiro. I generally avoid Shapiro, because I don’t like disingenuous little shits who think being captain of the debate club equals having an education, but still, I heard it.
Shapiro was going on about how workers who went on strike were just as bad as price gougers right now, and it struck me.
For years the US has had the most expensive medicine in the world. It has gotten so bad that prior to the lockdown, Americans were going to Mexico to buy diabetes medication.
So when it was not a pandemic, and people will die from lack of medication, Shapiro was absolutely fine with corporations doing the same thing he condemns workers for doing now.
And America has always been kind of stupid when it comes to healthcare. It has always treated healthcare as if it is a privilege, not a social necessity.
One of the things I watched as my country went into lockdown was Pandemic on Netflix, and part of what it went into was efforts to vaccinate migrants.
In December the New York Times reported that several doctors had been arrested during a protest – after they had been refused permission to vaccinate migrants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/us/migrants-flu-vaccines-border-patrol.html
In other words, Americans hate the idea of “illegals” benefiting from their tax dollars so much, they’re willing to compromise their own herd immunity over it. Hell, another character highlighted by the documentary was an awful anti-vaxer, who seemed to be a complete narcissistic idiot so focused on her bullshit idea of personal autonomy that she couldn’t fathom the idea of individuals having responsibilities to their communities.
For most of the series, it followed another woman working a 72 hour shift in a rural hospital where she was the only doctor on call. It struck me, they also showed doctors fighting Ebola in the Congo – and there was more than one doctor on duty over there.
American healthcare has been badly neglected for years, so I’m not sure that we can say that an outbreak like Covid-19 wasn’t inevitable. While prior presidents have put together response teams, those rural hospitals kept closing.
Having a response team sounds good and all, but they can’t magic up more hospitals on the spot. The basic infrastructure has been allowed to collapse.
Donald Trump is not only a bad president in and of himself, but an end point to bad decisions going back decades. Decisions driven by the constant need to try and cut taxes, as inflation meant that the stuff government needed to be doing became more expensive.
Everything where the impact wouldn’t be felt immediately, has been neglected and that is something I think somebody is going to have to address. In a lot of ways Donald Trump is everything wrong with American politics on steroids, including the tendency to ignore consequences in favour of short term electoral gains.
Trump is the mudslide at the end of years of erosion, when he leaves office, whether it is after this election or the next one, he is going to be leaving behind a mess. Whether Trump goes down as the worst president in US history is going to depend heavily on whether the next president is willing to go to the expense cleaning that mess up is going to entail.
The longer Trump remains, the worse it is going to be, and the more extreme the action required to fix it is going to be. Can the Democratic Party provide the radical course correction required? And can such a course correction win at the ballot box?
Rob, yes the death rate is higher per capita, if you trust the reported numbers. I tend to think the way this is reported by different countries and regions is in no way standardized, and should be taken with a grain of salt. I did read somewhere that Italy’s numbers were inflated because they were allegedly counting deaths that were not confirmed to be virus related. I’m not sure I believe that either, but it’s hardly an exact count anywhere because of the dynamics of the escalation.
Pitchforks and Pianos. A future blockbuster?
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on Worst […]
Twiliter, do we have any reason to doubt South Korea’s reported deaths? If so, do ‘we’ assess their numbers to be high or low? By how much? What about the US numbers? Are they likely to be a true record or an under/over estimate? By how much?
If we start throwing up our hands and say ‘no way to know or compare’ without pointing at known facts and without making any attempt to quantify such comparisons and concerns we’re buggered. We wouldn’t have any ability to evaluate one countries success or failure at preventing spread or deaths against anothers. We’d be groping at strategies in the dark.
Luckily there are people who are skilled at evaluating such things and we should rely on that expertise, I think.
Even if SK has not counted some Covid19 deaths (and I’ve seen no reporting suggesting they systematically do so), are we confident that the US is capturing all such deaths? How many poor and homeless die every week in the US? I’m betting that given the poor to non-existent medical care available to such people and the compromised health they live with, that Covid19 illness is over-represented and under accounted for in that cohort.
As I understand it with Italy, the specific complaint there was that they counted as a Covid death anyone who died in hospital with the disease. Some are saying “Oh but old people have co-morbidities. That person already had poor lung function, so they might have died because of that rather than Covid.”
I sort of see the point, but then again, the question is really “would the person have died then if not for the Covid 19 infection?” If the answer is no, they died as a result of Covid19 and the underlying co-morbidity just made that death more likely.
Rob, yes those are the questions I have basically. I think the using the numbers a guideline to track the progression of the virus is reasonable, as far as it helps with mitigation and treatment strategies, but coming to conclusions about what country did a better job based on per capita death rates involves too many variables.
I recommend a Bosendorfer Imperial piano for the job. They are a bit expensive, but…
For certain things only the best will do.
twitter #2, #8
It’s anecdotal, but my colleague Nandu (recently returned and in quarantine for two weeks) told me last month that before he could enter the office in Seoul his temperature was taken and if it was greater than 37 C he could not enter the office and would be referred to a physician. Less anecdotally (https://youtu.be/iOcNEfuJBT4 inter alia), the relative success of South Korea in controlling the spread is because this practice was immediate and wide spread.
Since East Asia has come up in John Wasson’s comment, here is a hypothesis about why East Asian countries, including Japan (where I live), which has so far taken nothing like the measures adopted elsewhere, as well as formerly Communist countries appear to be doing rather better than most Western countries. The writer, who is in no way a specialist, is properly tentative about drawing strong conclusions. It was sent to me an Austrian friend who is a scholar of Japanese film.
https://www.jsatonotes.com/2020/03/if-i-were-north-americaneuropeanaustral.html?fbclid=IwAR166BXRT-SQ1CDX3beGQB9NIhP-Ju2BQS3n3dwFZJIpua57ePXV_0xgFUo
If I were North American/West European/Australian, I would take BCG vaccination now against the novel coronavirus pandemic.
A blog of a Japanese businessman living in Australia. Mostly about books. Sometimes about moving from Japan to Australia.
http://www.jsatonotes.com
Tim Harris, that might be worth asking my doctor about. Especially since my asthma and diabetes make me high risk if I get it.
Iknklast, I suspect that your doctor might find it difficult to get that vaccine, but no harm in asking.
Japan has just declared a national emergency, and is closing things down, but because of the demands of big business with which the LDP is in cahoots, the close-down is far from sufficient, I suspect. I wrote ‘appear to be doing rather better’ in my previous post, because I am by no means convinced that Japan, at least, where testing has been virtually non-existent (unlike ROK), is as free from the virus as it has been pretending to be. We have been living in a curious limbo since the end of January, with nobody really knowing what is going on or having any idea of how many cases there are.