So, I agree that this is a valid concern, re: presidential crisis management, but in a strange way, Covid has reassured me about Trump. (Uh-oh.) https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1313105800412442625

Not that I don't think there's plenty of things Trump did wrong. But relative to what? It's obviously easy in hindsight to imagine what a good coronavirus response would have looked like. Trump said lots of ridiculous things, but instead of looking at what Trump said, I ...

... look at actual policy, and I compare it to the response of the anti-Trump, the Jupiter of technocratic governance, Emmanuel Macron. Macron downplayed the severity of the virus. His extremely-well-credentialed health minister said at the time that there was ...

... "very little chance" that the coronavirus would ever get to France, before resigning in the middle of the crisis for a doomed-in-advance run for Mayor of Paris; she has since said on the record that she knew at the time her reassurances were false. Government health ...

... authorities also relayed WHO propaganda and also engaged in the transparent lie that masks are bad for you. The weekend before the lockdowns, the President encouraged people to go vote in person, which led to many infections, as well as cast doubt on the legitimacy of...

... the results. I could go on. So, bad crisis management, yes, but relative to what? As @DouthatNYT put it in that column on Trump's Covid response, it's easy to imagine how a "churchillian" leader would have done better, but that's clearly not an option, in 2020 or 2016.

It's also very easy to imagine how an establishmentarian response could have been *much worse*, if the choice had been made to downplay the virus in order to coddle China or to not seem unwoke, as was the original prescription of Cathedral media.

Trump did ban flights from China fairly early (not early enough), and going against the advice of his technocrats, if memory serves me.

Trump spent a lot of time agitating (at least via tweets; it's unclear what actual policy came out of it) for keeping the economy going instead of going into lockdowns. But putting aside the fact that lockdowns were a state/local matter anyway, Macron has pretty solidly said...

... that while he will try to bend the curve, he won't have lockdowns again no matter what, because the economic impact has been so severe. In fact, we don't like to say it publicly, but we're pretty much all Swedes now. So Trump's "open it up!" phase strikes me as another ...

... instance of Trump getting in trouble, not for saying something that's wrong, but for saying something that's true but impolite to say.

And finally we get to masks. The anti-mask movement on the Right I find baffling, inexcusable, horrifying, and deeply worrying. But my ...

... sense from talking to many normie conservative US friends was that it was very much a bottom-up movement. My sense is that, e.g., Fox News hosts were very much ready to sound the alarm on the China plague until they realized their audiences were instead already convinced ...

... that Covid is a hoax (or whatever). I obviously wish Trump had encouraged people to wear masks from the beginning, but I also don't think it would have made much of a difference. I should also like to point out that it would have been easier to get skeptics to wear masks ...

... if the public health establishment hadn't incinerated its credibility on multiple occasions.

So, again, bad crisis management, relative to what? It seems to me that the West has creaky permanent administrative states that will pretty much always run on auto-pilot, for ...

... better or worse, even if the pilot grabs hold of the joystick and swings it in every direction. And that we live in an era of mass mental derangement whose many causes are unclear and which, in an environment of impotent/distrusted/villainous institutions will just ...

... play themselves out, in their different ways on both left and right.

I also think of another moment when Trump's crisis management came into play: the decision to kill Qasem Suleimani.

This was a decision I don't believe I would have taken, and I was very scared for a while that it would lead to a chain reaction in the region. Instead, not only did it not lead to escalation in Iran, it seems to have indeed deterred them from further attacks on US assets.

Trump acted on instinct and, as has often been the case, his instincts were right when mine were wrong.

In 2016, the prospect of Trump in a crisis was a legitimately scary thing, and I believe a totally legitimate reason to withhold one's vote. Now Trump *has* been through a literally once-in-a-century crisis.

And the actual result, if we're honest? "Meh." Like the plausible result of anyone else sitting in his chair. I'll take it.

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Addendum: so the steel man theory of "Trump really screwed this up" is that Trump's histrionics caused many governors to open up sooner than needed which caused the Summer flare up. In which case Trump does look worse than the average mediocre European leader.

I don't know enough about the details of state-by-state responses to know whether this is true. Thoughts, internet? (Not just on the fact of the timing of the reopenings, but that they were caused by Trump.)

I do have a sense that, with its state/local patchwork, its generally lower state capacity, and its screwed up health care system (not to mention collective derangement), there's no way the US could have done better than Europe under the best (non-churchillian) circumstances.

That may be wrong, but even putting Trump aside, that's just the general perspective that I come from.

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Addendum 2: Since I'm told I'm too online (almost certainly true; we all are), let me point out that this entire line of argument is premised on the fact that we pay way too much attention to Trump tweets vs actual policy, which is very different from Trump tweets, in large..

... part because Trump doesn't control his administration (or even really try).

Addendum 3: of course, one of Trump's special talents is making his would-be defenders look like total morons. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313449844413992961?s=20