I think there’s a legitimate concern that mask and vaccine mandates might end up costing Democrats the 2022 and 2024 elections. I’m not so pessimistic as to think that the Dems are screwed anyways in those cycles and I would be willing to accept a sub-optimal anti-COVID strategy if it would deny Republicans a victory. So, yes, I emphatically endorse letting people die for electoral gain.
We’ll find out if anti-mask sentiment is enough to overcome California being solidly Democratic in the gubernatorial recall election. If Newsom loses, Dems might run away from strongly enforcing restrictions in a lot of places.
Fighting out in the courts means preventing the government from acting until the case works its way through the process. This is fine if you want to stop government from doing something, but not great if you want government to do something.
I think people wanted Trump to stop downplaying the virus and prioritizing the economy over public health. To let the policy be driven by public health professionals instead of politicians. To encourage people to wear masks and get vaccinated and take all possible steps to mitigate. And to inspire people to work together to defeat a common enemy.
Obviously Biden’s not been completely successful and never could have been, but his approach is light years away from Trump.
Other than what he has said(which yes does matter), how is it really that much different? The vax mandates that affect 2% of the population?
We are back to the hospitals overflowing and will soon be at 1000+ deaths/day. If Trump was President I guarantee we would be asking for more than what has been done.
Letting the policy being driven by public health professionals instead of politicians leads to the formation of policy without consideration for how mass publics will react.
Trump was willing to do almost anything (can’t possibly ask people to wear masks, gotta leave it as a personal decision) and gave zero fucks about precedent or whether or not he actually had the power to do it.
Biden seems to take the office of President incredibly seriously and doesn’t want to do anything he might not be able to. He’s also a big believer in the fantasy that Republicans and Democrats can work together to craft legislation and that the President shouldn’t be working around the Legislative branch.
Basically they’re both infested with brainworms but Trump’s could possibly have been used for good.
I see they still have no interest in actually reading the Constitution or understanding what happens if Biden gets removed.
We’ll never know what the spring and summer would have looked like under a second Trump administration, but I have to think Biden’s seriousness made some difference. What now? I don’t have an answer.
This. The US did the vaccine and the distribution and all of that stuff. Not perfectly, but like Germany didn’t either. People were expecting what was basically impossible.
On the other hand if Trump said: “Look at this beautiful American vaccine made by American ingenuity and capitalism! Some people are saying it’s the best vaccine ever. Never would have happened with Trump.” there would be a lot fewer people not getting it.
He on occasion did try to take credit for the vaccine, but as a master of telling people what they want to hear, he also knew they didn’t want to hear that.
So we are saying Delta would have been worse? sooner? or what if Trump had still been president? Are we really arguing Biden has convinced anyone to get vaccinated? I’m not buying it.
Yeah. He tried to play both sides. He knew people wanted to hear that it was a phony hoax vaccine from the dirty antifa Democrats. Obviously Trump would never have gone hard on pushing the vaccine, but if he had it would have made it so anti-vax was just the regular anti-vax crowd and not an especially huge swath of the Republican Party.
The current situation is still Trump and Rs fault, blue states are handling it okay.
The derpers in red states want to derp and their leaders just keep encouraging the derp, Biden can only affect that on the margins. The main difference is we don’t have Trump holding blue states hostage by threatening to withhold vaccines and shit, and don’t have to suffer him pulling DeSantis type pro-COVID bullying on the whole country.
I don’t like Biden but I don’t see what more he could have done with covid. The vaccine roll out was amazing, but once the delta variant came we were fucked. People aren’t going to listen to mask mandates. People who are masking now is like 99% of who is going to mask.
Trump making covid political fucked us.
A huge part of the reason Trumpers went anti vax is because they bought into the narrative that it’s just the flu. Why get vaccinated for the flu?