There is no question that the government’s response to the coronavirus constituted a top-to-bottom bureaucratic failure spanning across executive offices under President Trump’s purview and down to the disastrous guidances and decisions of local and state governments. But unlike hyperbolic left-wing fears that the “dictator Trump” would pounce on power at the first moment of crisis to live out some latent fascistic fantasy, Trump’s failure largely stemmed from the fact that, like the overwhelming majority of the swamp he was supposed to differ from, he too was a bureaucratic sheep. Trump, like most of the world, at first largely took the lies of the Chinese Communist Party and its liege, the World Health Organization, at face value and let career swamp scientists decide public policy.
And yet, Scientific American has decided to abandon its 175-year tradition of not endorsing presidential candidates to back Joe Biden, specifically citing Trump’s rejection of “the science” with regard to the coronavirus. All of this raises a question that has been worth asking since the coronavirus threat began: If Biden were now president instead of Trump, what would he have done differently?
“[Trump] was warned many times in January and February about the onrushing disease, yet he did not develop a national strategy to provide protective equipment, coronavirus testing or clear health guidelines,” writes the Scientific American editorial board. “It wasn’t just a testing problem: If almost everyone in the U.S. wore masks in public, it could save about 66,000 lives by the beginning of December, according to projections from the University of Washington School of Medicine. Such a strategy would hurt no one. It would close no business. It would cost next to nothing. But Trump and his vice president flouted local mask rules, making it a point not to wear masks themselves in public appearances.”
Scientific American also cites the president’s frequent bouts of verbal diarrhea and their support for aspects of Biden’s agenda, such as “increased salaries for child care workers” and that he’ll pay for his climate plan by slashing Trump’s corporate tax cuts, neither of which seem related to “the science” at all.
Sure, Biden’s Christmas list of coronavirus policy proposals sounds nice, but not only is there no sign that they’re any more workable than Trump’s, but the claims Scientific American makes about Trump’s extant handling of the virus are belied by the facts.
Consider Trump wrongly ate the lies of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization early on, and although he did enact an albeit weak China travel ban at the end of January, the entire month of February was wasted as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monopolized testing development and production. Biden now claims he would have taken the virus seriously as early as January, arguing that shutting down weeks earlier than the initial “15 days to slow the spread” would have saved tens of thousands of lives — but then why did Biden hold rallies on March 2, 3, 7, 9, and 10? Biden can talk the talk, but as far as the early timeline goes, he was exactly on par with Trump.
It’s great that Biden wants more testing, but are we really supposed to believe that a Democrat would have wanted the CDC to have less control over testing development? And then, there’s the crucial matter of mask-wearing guidance, arguably the most preventable disaster of the whole coronavirus disaster.
It beggars belief that Trump, an outsider elected specifically because he ran on flouting the establishment, listened to the “experts” when they lied and said that masks, worn by doctors treating the plague for centuries, would raise the odds of transmitting the coronavirus (an airborne respiratory illness whose severity apparently depends on the amount of exposure) and not decrease the risk. And mind you, this lie came directly from the World Health Organization, which had a vested interest in preserving personal protective equipment for its Chinese overlords.
Unlike testing and a vaccine, both of which require ample time, money, and resources to produce, we had a plethora of scientific studies proving that homemade masks made of tea towels and cotton T-shirts are 72% and 50% effective (respectively) against bacteriophages one-fifth the size of the coronavirus. There was absolutely no reason for Trump not to do his job, read the science, flip off Dr. Anthony Fauci, and tell everyone to make homemade face masks. There is a reason I, not a doctor, wrote an article endorsing this idea after researching it and getting the input of multiple doctors who were all supportive of it a full week before the CDC reversed course on the issue.
So, in short, Trump’s mask failure was precisely because he listened to “the experts.” The Left has lionized Fauci and company as pandemic heroes. Are we really supposed to believe that Biden would have had the courage to reject their lies and endorse mask-wearing back in March, when it could have saved thousands of lives?
Sure, now Trump may personally flout mask-wearing despite publicly endorsing it, but only an idiot would believe that anti-masking morons took their cues from Trump’s personal behavior and not from the complete 180 made by bureaucrats they already loathed. And besides, the damage was already done. Mask-wearing could have prevented the virus’s carriers from unleashing it on the nation. But by the time the experts decided to stop intentionally lying to us plebians, the damage (both in terms of the sheer spread of the virus and in public faith in the experts) was complete.
Trump spews every ridiculous musing that crosses his self-absorbed brain to the public, but as a matter of policy, it’s not clear that a Biden administration would have made a single decision differently regarding the coronavirus than the Trump administration. National mask suggestion? There’s already one in place! Continued bureaucratic overreach over pandemic prevention products? That’s a bipartisan commitment. Incessant tweets of virtue signaling? Trust me — we already have a president who tweets.
We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President! pic.twitter.com/iQOd1whktN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 20, 2020
