No. of Recommendations: 22
But voters (I think) intuit that something like a once-in-a-century pandemic (like Covid) is so obviously not the fault of the President that they don't include it as part of his economic record. Trump obviously didn't cause Covid in a way that's far more obvious than Biden not causing inflation - especially since economists generally believe that economic policies can contribute somewhat to inflationary pressures.
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Which proves most voters are morons. If the average voter can appreciate the economic damage a once in one hundred year pandemic can do to an economy and society...
...but NOT simultaneously comprehend that the same economic stress just acknowledged then ignored with the wave of a hand is capable of producing inflation through the instant "square wave" impact on supply and demand in a world economy dependent on global shipping, then the average voter is in fact a moron.
Also, the presence or absence of ANY individual in the White House during the COVID outbreak was never going to dictate whether the country somehow magically escaped ANY cases or even made the difference between zero and ten thousand deaths or between fifty and one hundred and fifty thousand deaths. However, Trump's personal unwillingness to grasp the exponential spread of the disease led to a completely haphazard national response strategy in the early weeks before more aggressive international travel restrictions were imposed.
Remember the Italian cruise ship that incurred an outbreak in the first few weeks? The cruise that ended with an entire planeload of Americans BOARDING a CHARTERED plane with hints of symptoms in Italy, and LANDING in America with full-blown symptoms? Passengers who were allowed to traverse inbound US Customs like ANY other incoming international passengers, then fly directly to multiple hub airports across the country? That single plane load of roughly 400 Americans who, by landing, were likely 100% infected literally injected the virus into every major metropolitan area within 24 hours, on March 20, 2020, before any lockdowns had begun.
A more coherent national response strategy, directed by a White House focused on public safety rather than Presidential perceptions of political concerns, might have quarantined those passengers prior to Customs and kept literally 30-40 "seeds" from widening the spread throughout the country. How crucial could such a time shift have been to the overall impact in the US? Any DELAY in incurring higher rates of infection would have DELAYED the point at which higher volumes of severe patients overwhelmed hospitals and exhausted supplies required to protect patients and staff. More importantly, delaying the mathematical surge by a month or two would have shifted more of that wave into the period where vaccines were widely available, beginning in February 2021. Remember, America had more people die of COVID after vaccines were available than in the pre-vaccine portion of the cycle.
Is Trump responsible for the COVID virus? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Is Trump uniquely responsible for its impact of death on the United States? ABSOLUTELY.
WTH
