Try paying attention to how a president actually governs and how they've affected material conditions. If you look at it that way, Trump is at worst the level of Obama (who started 5 new wars), and several orders of magnitude less bad than W or Bill Clinton. Remember, Lincoln project wants to invade Iran/Vz/Russia. Fuck those war criminals
Trump himself didn't really bungle the response though. The reason why the United States has such a terrible response to covid-19 - small businesses that don't want to close, a non-existent public health care system and decentralized state are fundamental. Obama or Clinton or bush would not be able to overcome those problems. California's governor ignoring his own previously stated standards for reopening in doing so early is not Trump's fault. Neither is Cuomo's decision to move covid positive patients back into nursing homes.
No, he absolutely bungled the response.
Any president would have fucked it up, but not every president literally refused to do anything during critical junctures because it would make him look bad. Not every president would gut the CDC and pull out of the WHO as a temper tantrum. Not every president would have refused to cooperate with international offers to test because it would make the rates go up, or fucking steal masks like a god damn pirate. Not every president would be fucking around trying not to extend unemployment, or trying to blame it on China.
Every state is fucking this up, but it's crazy to think this wasn't a terrible response at the Federal level even by those standards.
How much worse he made it is hard to quantify. But he definitely has.
Cutting fucking for the CDC and pulling out of the WHO is meaningless though. Turn off Rachel Maddow lol
Gutting the agency in charge of fighting pandemics when it was pulling its hair out to do something in February is meaningless, got it.
It's big brain time.
What would the CDC do with another billion dollars? Seriously.
Test fucking millions of people?! Contact tracing? More effective quarantine?
Fuck, throw a billion dollars into research or a vaccine attempt?
Have you completely lost your fucking brain and gone full right wing to own the libs?
Yes, some of the responses in this thread are really maddening. Apparently it's a "white take" to say how Trump's platforming of a white supremacist lie about South African farm murders have damaged South African politics.
We literally don't have the supply to test millions of people. We don't have the fucking bench scientists to test millions of people. And the "defense production act" can't manufacture lab techs and scientists. Im making a structural critique of the US response instead of just "Trump bad" and that makes me a right-winger? Lol.
How did these libs make it to the Lemmy? I figured most would have sunk with the Titanic of r/chapotraphouse
What, and Vietnam did? They have a tenth of our resources and did 10,000x more with it.
It is literally right wing shit to think that the United States' Federal Government was unable to do anything about this. That it would be unable to do testing and contact tracing in a way that would significantly have changed the infection rates. That it had no access or ability to seize and command the production and resources it needed to take this pandemic seriously.
It was unwilling and uninterested. To a self destructive degree, honestly. That's true of both parties, but not to an equal extent.
Saying Trump did no worse than anyone else would have is fucking insane. It's to say that the US isn't declining, isn't rapidly deteriorating, and that no one could have done things differently, which just obviously isn't fucking true.
Sure, the US government could have done things better in the abstract. But considering real-world conditions, this virus is a perfect storm for all of the faults in American political economy and social life.