Biden’s record on Covid shows how preposterous the over-the-top critiques of Trump were.
Biden’s record on Covid shows how preposterous the over-the-top critiques of Trump were.
T he fullness of time, and now the Omicron wave, have made it obvious how preposterously over-the-top and unfair the chief lines of criticism against Donald Trump were during the pandemic.
It has been said, over and over, that Trump almost single-handedly killed thousands upon thousands of Americans. Chris Hayes a couple of months ago called for a truth-and-reconciliation-commission-type inquiry into how Trump “willfully got hundreds of thousands of people killed.” Willfully! Whoopi Goldberg opined that “this blood is on his hands.”
During one of the presidential debates last year, Biden said of Trump, “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”
Why, then, does Biden get to stay in office? Tragically, about as many people have died of Covid this year as in 2020. This doesn’t make for an apples-to-apples comparison — Biden only took office in late January, and any policy changes would take time to show up in real-world results — but it speaks to how neither a Republican nor Democratic president has been able to stop this plague.
Indeed, if you simply look at the progression of cases and deaths in the U.S. over time, you’d have no idea that a president promising a radically new approach took office in January 2021. The peaks and troughs have proceeded in keeping with the seasons, the emergence of variants, and other underlying conditions.
That line from Biden in the debate, by the way, wasn’t a one-off; it was one of the main themes of his presidential campaign. “If this president is reelected, we know what will happen,” Biden said of Trump in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last year. “Cases and deaths will remain far too high.”
He continued, “Just look around. It’s not this bad in Canada or Europe or Japan, or almost anywhere else in the world.” As I pointed out in a column in Politico last week, though, the U.S. has had more cases on a per-capita basis than Europe, Canada, and Japan in 2021, and more deaths.
Is that Joe Biden’s fault this year, the way it was Donald Trump’s last year?
There are obviously legitimate criticisms of Trump on Covid, from the initial testing snafu, to his extreme, repeated overpromising about when the virus would disappear, to his hostility to masks when they were, whatever their shortfalls, a better option than lockdowns, to his generally wild, poorly informed statements.
But none of these produced mass death, unless you believe we could have tested and traced the virus into oblivion at the outset, which seems unlikely given the scale of the outbreaks here.
And, on the other side of the ledger, Trump helped develop the vaccines, a world-historical event.
A Democratic defense of Biden is that his Covid response has been sabotaged by Republicans’ refusing to get vaccinated. This is, no doubt, part of the story.
It’s made the pandemic worse that 15 percent of adults haven’t gotten even one shot, and 27 percent aren’t fully vaccinated. But when comparing Trump and Biden, it’s important to remember that for almost all of 2020, there were no vaccines at all.
Is it better to be president of the United States at a time a novel virus comes to our shores that we know nothing about, don’t know how best to treat, and have no vaccines for? Or to be president nearly a year later, when vaccines have come online and we know much more?
The answer, clearly, is the latter. Under Biden, 243 million people have received one dose of a vaccine. Up until the very end of the year, zero people had in 2020.
As for the uptake of the vaccines, if Trump had won a second term, surely there would be more Democratic suspicion about the vaccines than there is now — and that presumably would have been blamed on him. But we are a big, varied, continental country with a low level of trust in our institutions and authorities. We weren’t, say, high-trust Denmark when Trump was president, and we aren’t Denmark now.
In that convention speech, by the way, Biden promised, “We’ll develop and deploy rapid tests with results available immediately.” In his Covid plan, he slammed Trump for testing shortages and pledged to implement “widespread” testing and tracing.
Now that there’s a shortage of rapid tests and enormous lines of people desperately seeking tests, Biden explains that the latest wave moved too fast to get in front of. Whatever you think of this explanation, it’s the kind of thing Trump officials said at the outset of the pandemic. It goes to show that it’s possible to be earnest and well-intentioned — as all of Biden’s allies believe he is — and yet get caught flat-footed by the latest permutation of a once-in-a-century event.
This is the possibility that Biden and his supporters were never willing to admit existed while Trump was in office. The suffering and death were never attributed chiefly to the virus itself; the bureaucratic mistakes never attributed to well-meaning people struggling within outdated systems in trying circumstances; the policy disagreements never attributed to sincere differences about how best to try to get out of the pandemic and where the balance should be struck between restrictions to control the virus and their inevitable downsides.
No, it was just all chalked up, like in the Chris Hayes segment above, to near-criminality.
If this is the standard, Biden, too, has “blood on his hands.” Of course, alleging that would be simplistic and absurd — not that that stopped anyone when Trump was in charge.