I think @DouthatNYT is largely right here. But his main caveat—“Who are you going to believe, my stats or your lying eyes?”—seems a bit understated. Because, unlike the countries Ross uses as a baseline, we never actually developed a coherent plan. 1/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/opinion/sunday/covid-19-trump.html

In March, @AriSchulman wrote: “the problem is...not whether the plan for victory is too costly. It is whether we have a plan at all.” We needed a plan for public health reasons, yes—but we also needed a plan because uncertainty itself is costly. 2/ https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/whats-the-plan

It has economic costs, it has psychological costs, and a fortiori it has social costs. It affects how society experiences the pandemic—not as a painful-yet-predictable disruption, but as uncontrolled chaos. Those social costs don’t show up in the data. But they’re there. 3/

So even if our death totals are merely mediocre; even if our per capita case counts are average; even if Trump’s accelerated vaccine timeline saves lives—the absence of a plan will have caused immense intangible harm: to the country, and also to Trump’s re-election prospects. 4/

And, pace @DouthatNYT, I suspect it’s caused some pretty tangible harms too. Ross notes that our per capita deaths don’t look so bad compared to Spain or Italy. But the median age in Spain and Italy is 45 and 47, respectively; in the US it’s 38, and varies greatly by region. 5/

Indeed, if we’re attempting peer to peer comparisons, most of the examples @DouthatNYT cites won’t tell us very much. Spain has a population of 47 mil, Italy of 60 mil, the UK of 66 mil, and France of 67 mil. The US has population of 330 mil—90 mil more than those 4 combined. 6/

Since population density, median age, healthcare infrastructure, and a host of other factors vary greatly between these countries and the U.S.—and even within the U.S. itself—it's not clear that the British, French, Spanish, or Italian experience is at all germane to ours. 7/

A better though far from perfect point of comparison would be the EU as a whole—large population, lots of internal diversity, and no centralized pandemic response, just like the US under Trump. And guess what? Our per capita death rate is more than EIGHT TIMES the EU's. 8/

Even though, unlike the EU, we have a federal government that could have come up with a plan. Viewed in that way, the US performance has been abysmal by raw metrics, never mind the psychological toll of Trump's frenetic messaging and persistent incompetence. 9/

Then there's the issue of counterfactuals. @DouthatNYT notes that our rates of mask usage fall "right in the middle of the pack for our peer nations," DESPITE Trump's "palpable contempt for masking." But that suggests mask compliance might have been much HIGHER but for Trump. 10/

We can't be sure of that, of course. But the relevant question—the one @DouthatNYT is attempting to answer—is not "how well did we do compared to our peer countries?". It's how well WOULD WE HAVE DONE with a normal president, one who encouraged the public to wear masks. 11/

Maybe mask compliance would have been the same. Or maybe it would have been doubled, and the virus's toll halved. All we know for sure is that Trump actively discouraged the adoption of basic, commonsense health measures that could have accelerated a safe reopening. 12/

A safe reopening for which—and I cannot emphasize this enough—the administration never developed a serious plan. The White House guidelines should have been step 1 of 10. The shutdown should have been used to set up the remaining 9. It was not. 13/

No support for test-and trace (see Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air), no attempt at centralized quarantine, no consortium to prevent a bidding war between states for PPE. 14/

Implementing any of this WELL might have required "presidential greatness." But INITIATING it? That an average president could have managed. Trump couldn't. And lo and behold, the electorate seems to have noticed. 15/

Tldr: the problem isn't that Trump mishandled COVID. It's that he didn't even try. The resulting rudderlessness is making the country go insane, independent of its probable-but-ultimately-unknowable effects on public health. For that, Trump deserves nothing but scorn. 16/fin