A lot of things have happened that have surprised me on one level or another but the big one is that a year ago I’d have said a Trump-led United States was at risk of a panicky overreaction to something like this not a response that just amounts to the power of positive thinking. https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1302957692907028480

Like okay Trump “didn’t listen to the experts” and lies constantly and other Trumpy things.

But in the early days he also didn’t actually ban travel from China. He did nothing when Northern Italy was clearly full of virus. No centralized quarantine. Just let everyone leave NYC.

He embraced anti-maskism rather than dunking on the experts for getting this wrong and becoming the most zealously pro-mask person in the world. He let revenue-hungry universities he hates reopen. He didn’t try to use the pandemic as a pretext to ban protests.

I don’t know if on balance Donald Trump Public Health Autocrat would be better than Donald Trump Let ‘Er Rip Libertarian, but my ex ante guess was that we’d get number one and I was obviously mistaken.