Comment by wredcoll
3 days ago
Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.
3 days ago
Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.
The extended lockdowns 100% ended his term. It upset too many people for too long. Regardless of actual responsiblity, big nationwide negative events always get laid at the feet of the current sitting president.
Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.
In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.
In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
> In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.
Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.
Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.
Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"
I agree with everyone else that Covid definitely lost Trump the 2020 election. Saying it would have been a lay-up for someone who isn't Trump is meaningless when we're talking about Trump. When there's a crisis people crave strong leaders who can guide them through it, and Trump completely fucked up his messaging. One day everything will be fine in a few weeks, the next day Covid is extremely serious, then he's trying to get people to use horse medicine from Tractor Supply as a home remedy, etc. Compare that to how people around the nation were paying attention to Andrew Cuomo's daily press conferences. Despite Cuomo making extremely incompetent decisions around Covid (such as using nursing homes as overflow space for Covid patients, causing over 15,000 deaths), he got a huge popularity bump at the time because he appeared strong and competent and Trump didn't.
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> Covid was the definition of an easy layup.
I don't understand this at all.
Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?
wredcoll doesn't mean that COVID-19 was good for the US, any more than they mean that 9/11 was good for the US. They mean (rightly or wrongly) that it should have been easy for the sitting US government to respond to it in a way that made itself look good and helped it get re-elected, just as G W Bush was able to respond to 9/11 in a way that made him look good and helped him get re-elected.
(I'm not convinced that that's right, but it isn't refuted by the fact that COVID-19 was devastating for the world in general and the US in particular.)
> Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11
Anything but. Trump could have won in 2020 if not for Covid. A lot of turnout was anti-Trump protest vote.
he lost because of covid because everyone watched him fucking botch the response.
'it will go away in two weeks, no one will even remember...'
injecting bleach
getting uv light 'inside the body'
the look on all his health advisors faces whenever he showed up at a press conference.