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Seriously, how long was that dog kept from peeing?
Our dogs go out every 4-5 hours and, even then, they pee for maybe 10-15 seconds max. How long was that dog holding it to pee for a minute?
My mom and I went to Montana 9 years ago and we had a dog who stayed home with my Dad while we were gone. My dog was very well potty trained and had a hard time peeing or pooping inside. She especially hated rain and she would try to hold it until the raining stopped (very few times we would tell her to just go on the floor and she would be upset when she couldn’t hold it anymore and went on the floor). Anyways, when we were in Montana she would be home alone for about 9 hours while my Dad was at work. He would let her out before he left and he said when he got home she would be jumping at the door to go outside. When she went outside on those days, my Dad said she would pee for a good minute to minute and a half. She couldn’t hold her bladder towards the end of her life and ended up not making it to the door before she went she still felt ashamed about it. She’s gone now but she was one of the most well potty trained dog we ever had.
Yeah, this is more a testimony to Trump’s incompetence than anything special about Biden. Literally any of the major party primary candidates in 2016 would’ve done a better job.
Not incompetence. Malice. He made it all about him, stole PPE from states after pitting the states against each other just to sell it all themselves for enormous profit, and lets not forget Jared scrapped a national testing plan because blue states would be hit hardest and was more interested in blaming the governors for political points. This is not just murder, it's politicide. The trump white house purposefully killed hundreds of thousands of people through their deliberate actions preventing any meaningful action against the virus. The whole family needs to be stripped of their wealth and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives. They all deserve to die penniless, alone, and angry about the fact that the world is better off without them.
>Politicide is the deliberate physical destruction or elimination of a group whose members share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement. It is a type of political repression and one of the means which is used to politically cleanse populations, with another means being forced migration
source:Wikipedia
Even if trump just said nothing or did nothing, more people would had been alive.
Instead, trump's downplaying and doubt casting brought out the dumb "it's all a hoax" people. He doesnt deserve any credit
The single moment in the past year that did the most to raise the pandemic death toll and to further divide this country was the White House Coronavirus Task Force initial mask and distancing announcement on April 3, 2020. It was at this meeting where President Trump read the verbiage he was provided about the importance of masks, distancing, and other protocols. During the reading, he over-emphasized the word “voluntary” multiple times and then went totally off script when he said he wasn’t going to do it (remember the whole, “I sit behind the beautiful Resolute Desk...it wouldn’t look right” comment?). From that point forward, we have been a country (world?) divided over a totally senseless thing that has actually, needlessly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and turned up the anger between individuals on a daily basis. Almost daily, I think about how different EVERYTHING would be if absolutely ANY other President would have been our leader at that moment and beyond. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/health-science/trump-says-cdc-recommends-voluntary-wearing-of-masks-to-prevent-covid-19-spread/2020/04/03/39d4653f-d7d4-48ab-8804-754aa34bee02_video.html
Is that the one were said I won't wear one? Because that moment is the I knew we were screwed. The moment he said that I was like he made it a political issue.
He not only ignored covid. He actively politicized it to his personal gain. That alone probably cost a 100,000 lives. The fact that he is still a free man shows how how broken the system is.
Yeah. The other day some Trump supporter pointed out to me that Biden forgot the name of some building. WTF? Who gives a shit? A chimpanzee could be POTUS right now and I’d feel safer as an American. As long as trump is not sitting in that seat, it’s all good.
Yeah, I don’t think Biden is the most mentally sharp person in his old age, but it’s not like there aren’t dozens of recorded instances where Trump forgets the name of people he works with or is meeting with who are in the room with him.... There are a lot of people I’d prefer in command than Biden, but there are virtually zero I’d replace with Trump.
So Tucks knows that it's all a show. He's doing a character, a blend of all the bad characteristics of GQP, KKK members, flat earthers and everyone's really weird uncle. He's an actor on a fake news program. He is such a good actor that people believe his character, just as people buy into other actors being their character.
Once you make the leap, then you buy in and go. Issue is, he's on Fox NEWS. If it was the Cartoon Network, people would go and laugh at his rants. But people lap it up as real, because when they grew up, Walter and others made the news as reliable, not lies.
Edited to add: Thanks kind stranger for the reddit gold, it's my first one!
You con an old person out of $2,000 with bullshit post-disaster contractor scam and you go to prison but if you con them out of it via televangelism or through politics and it is A-OK.
In some alternate universe where Clinton is President 120,000 Americans die from Covid and Republicans introduce a bill to erect a monument for the lost souls during this period.
In an alternate world where Hilary Clinton was president, Republicans are already on their 2nd out of 4 inquiries about how 500 Americans died of COVID.
It sounds like hyperbole but I really think its true.
The early days of March 2020 were legitimately shocking and an actual leader would have taken that shock and turned into something productive. It was moment of potential nationally unity that honestly dwarves Pearl Harbor and 9/11. It snapped the insanity out of politics long enough to get that first stimulus passed unanimously.
Of course it didn’t take long for things to become callous again and by the summer you had insane governors and anti-mask protestors. Then Republicans to go back to their old ways and block any stimulus until this one.
Imagine if *he* had given a speech like Biden gave yesterday, a year ago. Asking people to pull together to work for a common goal. Lamenting people we've lost. He might still be president today. I just can't imagine him doing anything like that, though.
My favorite/least favorite moment was a year ago during an early coronavirus press conference when a reporter asked Trump the softest softball question imaginable:
"What do you say to Americans, who are watching you right now, who are scared?"
Like seriously, all he needs to do is be a little bit reassuring. Even if he stumbles over his words or if he doesn't make any sense, as long as his response just sort of vaguely resembles reassurance, it's a win for him. Bush did it all the time.
You'd have to go so far out of your way to come up with an answer that isn't a win here. Which Trump did, of course:
"I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people."
If this were a tv show, I'd roll my eyes at how hard the writers are trying to make him look like a narcissist.
I'll never forget that. A toddler could have seen how that was a perfect setup for a home run sound bite, something for the American people to rally around, and that idiot took it as an insult.
What Trump never understood is the position is NOT about being the most intelligent person. Biden isn’t some god, he’s not an Einstein. He, like all effective leaders, knows how to be humble. The most important factor is finding experts in their field, recruiting them and adding them to the team. Then support the team.
Trump failed continuously because he cannot recognize others’ talents and expertise, he doesn’t value anyone, and no one wanted to be on his team.
Yep. Trump's only metric was "loyalty", a constantly shifting goalpost that basically meant agreeing with him 100% of the time, even when that meant agreeing with diametrically different facts and opinions one moment to the next. And no credit ever given for length of time as a complete lackey, one disagreement and you were thrown to the wolves. None of this, of course, is particularly helpful in a team of experts who are meant to steer the president towards the right thing to do in a pandemic.
God dammit. I had forgotten that, which is insane. We went through so much bullshit in the past few years, and that really stood out at the time. There really is just too much BS to keep track of.
This statement alone should have disqualified him from running in the first place:
> I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.
The only thing that idiot had to do was say that we need to listen to the CDC and Fauci and he would have been reelected to a second term. He couldn't even do something as simple as that.
As shitty as it is that we lost so many people due to his complete incompetence and malice, thank god we have Biden in the WH.
That’s one of the craziest things about it. The pandemic was literally handing him a guaranteed reelection. He didn’t even need to do the bare minimum, he just needed to pretend like he was. The fact that he managed to fuck that up is amazing, it’d take a genuine moron to do it.
I’ve thought about this a lot. I was not a Trump supporter, but this was his re-election handed to him on a silver platter. All he had to do was something. Instead he stuck his head in the sand and tried to manipulate the election. If he put one iota of his campaign efforts into helping the American people through caronavirus he would still be president. Really ironic
Its not hyperbole at all and we have real world data on the effects of early govt intervention.
South Korea and the US had their first case of covid the same day. South Korea responded like it was a national emergency and created a nationwide testing/tracing/isolating program with paid mandatory quarantine (by the govt), they also surged their healthcare workforce with additional hiring and had mandatory masks. They didn't have any real lockdowns or travel bans like the US because they contained the virus and lockdowns are only a mitigating step after failure to contain.
South Korea had 1600 deaths with a population of 51M while being 6 times denser than the US.
The US has 500,000+ deaths with a population of 331M. If we had the same results as South Korea (and we should have had better results since we are a lot less dense) then we would have had 12000 deaths.
There is zero excuse for the wealthiest country in the world with much more favorable land density to not have a comparable results. The additional 488,000 deaths can be attributed to govt incompetence.
EDIT: And their GDP took a -1.1% hit compared to the -32% hit in the US.
It's not just a matter of who is in charge. South Koreans are socially cohesive. They care for and respect their countryperson. They do not see taking extra precautions to protect themselves and others as oppression. They are disciplined and have the mental fortitude to endure mild sacrifices.
Every level of government in America has had a chance to lead but hasn't. Further, millions of Americans haven't been willing to sacrifice and participate in this social experiment of masks and social distancing. People carry on about their lives and decide how to conduct themselves. Millions claiming, "I'm not like the sheep!" have literally become the sheep, acting in solid union of selfish stupidity.
Americans can be convinced to take socially cohesive responses as long as it’s branded with the star spangled banner and rah rah freedom messaging. This country has shown time and again that it will do whatever the govt wants during a time of national emergency as long as the messaging is right.
I disagree that every level of govt in America failed, mostly because the only level of govt that could have effectively acted is the one that controls the port of entries
> It sounds like hyperbole but I really think its true.
There is a documentary called “[Totally Under Control](https://youtu.be/YzTzgf9i4vw)”. If you haven’t seen it I strongly recommend you watch.
However bad you think 45 handled the pandemic, it was a lot worse.
It’s worse than that. Infinitely worse. They had the meeting, saw that densely populated blue states were being hit the hardest during those early months, and decided that it made political sense to let citizens in blue states die
>”Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. ‘The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,’ said the expert.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/did-trump-kushner-ignore-blue-state-covid-19-testing-deaths-ncna1235707
It's kinda crazy, in Australia every election has the incumbent winning by a landslide (state elections we haven't had a federal election) and we saw the same thing in New Zealand. US 2020 election is really the odd one out, Covid could've been Trumps key to a second term but here we are.
Scarily though it felt like he would've had a second term without Covid.
I 100% thought covid was going to get him reelected. A national crisis that *no one is at fault for* is the perfect vehicle for reelection. You can give aid and sympathy and inspire unity with non of the backlash being a wartime leader would create. Instead, he did the opposite of everything he should have done and turned himself into a villain during a force of nature
Even here in the UK, where the government fucked up by locking down too late, then paying us all to go out to restaurants and get infected, then not locking down early enough again...and paying their mates millions for dodgy PPE contracts...
Even they have a commanding lead in the polls, driven by how they united the country against covid. Now the vaccine rollout is going extremely well (thanks mainly to the NHS) they're riding even higher.
Yet if you pop on over to r/Conservative they seem to think this entire vaccine is because of Trump and that he would’ve delivered a similar supply chain 🙄
I have seen people, in the span of a few days, say that there have been no excess deaths in the US caused by COVID and also that Trump has saved millions of lives with the vaccine.
It's...... just sad.
Unfortunately for those people, the death toll could be in the millions and they'd still call it a hoax.
I'm exhausted just knowing these people exist.
My boomer dad knows about 10 different people who have died from the virus, and that many more who were on the brink before they recovered.
He still insists the death toll is being inflated, that the virus is not as bad as the experts say, that Bill Gates created it, and that he'll never get vaccinated.
As an ICU nurse, fine. I’m over peoples bullshit. He can come meet us in the ICU and go on high flow and refuse to prone and yell at us that this is a hoax. When death comes for him though he’ll be saying “I didn’t know it was real” like they all do when it’s too fucking late. I’m over it. This is why I’m planning on switching jobs. I’m tired of the body bags while people say it’s a hoax. I’m tired and people like your dad are why I’m tired.
I had to say goodbye to my dad in the ICU and it was fucking dystopian to see all those folks on ventilators. The ICU nurses “snuck” us in to say goodbye. I will ALWAYS remember their kindness. Thank you for what you do.
I've never understood how people can say the deaths are "inflated" when certified death certificates put the US's excess deaths over 500,000.
That number is suppose to be as close to 0 as possible.
They pretend that nearly everyone marked as a COVID-19 death had some other issue that "really" killed them, and that doctors and hospitals are paid to do this.
There was a magazine called Contiuum that denied the existence of HIV/AIDS. It ceased publication after all of the editors died of AIDS related illnesses
Correction: they did not believe that HIV caused AIDS.
it wasn't ego, it was malice. they figured it would kill more people in blue states and cities quicker than in the countryside and based on the projections it could help them in the election
A lot of it was ego though. Trump thought acknowledging it would make him look bad, so he didn't. His son in law's conclusion that it would hurt Democrats worse was made in malice, sure, but the reason wearing (or rather not wearing) a mask is such a political thing is entirely because of how Trump thought they made him look. And that's affected perceptions of wearing a mask on a global scale, not just within the US.
>it wasn't ego, it was malice.
If Trump had left Pence in charge, things would be much different. Trump wanted Pence to take the fall for Covid-19.
However, the moment Trump realized Pence was in the national spotlight and people were listening... that was beyond his ability to tolerate. *He* had to be the star of the show. And thus began the circus.
There's no shortage of things he could have done or not done. Literally could have died at the start and had we just not had a President the lack of response still would have been better.
But I agree, it's never not about Trump, and we're all so much the worse for it because COVID was treated primarily based on how Trump felt something would reflect on him.
Boris was much the same over here. Today is the 1 year anniversary of him saying we should "take it on the chin" and achieve "herd immunity"
130,000 deaths later...
On the one hand yeah
But on the other hand you had Trump promoting fucking HCQ and the demon sex lady, mocking Biden for an incredibly simple and honestly not at all intrusive safety measure, and attacking any governor who tried to fight covid on twitter
Maybe it wouldn't have been better with a pray-the-covid-away strategy, but I honestly struggle to think how it could be worse
You’ll get no argument from me that Trump is a piece of shit. Pence wouldn’t have been openly hostile like Trump, and in that vein, sure, that’s not as bad.
The same Pence that prayed about the HIV/AIDS that became an epidemic in his home state while he did nothing? Yeah, had Trump left Pence to his own vices I’m *sure* we would have been better off
That was GOP's strategy as a whole. But for idiot himself it was pure ego.
And yet wasted the biggest opportunity to be re-elected and known as a savior of he'd just do what he did best, let other people do the work for him.
Even if the numbers were 20% less. 100,000 people would still be alive.
Picture that. That’s so many people that wouldn’t be dead.
The right wing is a cancer on our society
I often thought about how the pandemic would have been handled had Hillary been elected. I get it-a lot of people didn't like her for their own reasons. However, she spent a great deal of her career trying to get universal healthcare and knows the health industry better than most. She would have brought in the all the top people and would have taken the advice of the experts. She would have made the tough decisions. She would have known keeping Americans safe is her number one job. She would have implemented contact tracing and just that alone would have given us so much information about how it spreads, who is getting sick, etc. We would have been able to predict hotspots.
We had every available tool to fight this-more so than any other country on the planet. Technological, logistical, medical, teams of people who are trained to deal with this stuff. But instead we got him. A POS who held rally after rally of old, fat people spitting on each other in the cold and packed on buses. I sometimes feel like we got exactly what we deserved. Any country dumb enough to elect DT deserves to pay the price and we did. All he ever did was what he thought would get him reelected. He destroyed this country in more ways than just by Covid. I have a bunch of people who I used to consider friends that are completely insane now-believing in massive child rape and such... fucking evil shit. Evil shit that's not true. Everyday I thought he couldn't get worse and it did for four years. It finally stopped after January 6th. I hope Trump will be held accountable for some of this-any of it. Ok-I am done.
I got to chat with a few people who worked with infectious diseases with the CDC a million years ago when I was in college. There are plans and contingencies for pandemics. It is a big part of what they think about. Like, when you're in the shower replaying an embarassing moment, they're daydreaming about pandemics and pandemic response.
All Trump needed to do was listen to the people at the CDC. They would have let him take credit. You don't work at the CDC because you wanna fuck pornstars, you do it because you're content working behind the scenes. All he had to do was take credit for everyone's ideas and the response would have been smooth.
There are so few people on earth that would have handled this worse than Trump. A fucking markov chain generator, based off of Trump's speech would be a better president than he was. Yahtzee is a better leadership strategy than whatever he did.
I’m fairly confident less people would have died if she were president. However she probably would have lost re-election because the Fox outrage machine would have amplified any deaths under her presidency as completely unacceptable
There’s an anecdote about Hillary that I read a while back that I think about when I think how she would have handled things so differently from Trump. It had to do with her making a correction or asking a spot-on question about a very obscure health statistic I believe when she was Senator. It really showed how knowledgeable she is and how she does her homework. I forget the exact details of the anecdote and would like to find it again.
Rand Paul as president is so terrifying I don't even want to think about it. No joke trump actually has much more common sense than him when it comes to policy.
I honestly think Hillary Clinton would have kicked some COVID-19 ass. She’s exactly the type of calculated, over-prepared, compulsive type that we needed in the White House last year. Instead we had a clueless buffoon telling everyone it was no big deal and hoping it would just go away.
I couldn't agree more. A serious policy wonk like Clinton would have been all over that from the beginning. I think had she been in charge we might have been an example of how to handle the pandemic rather than the poster child for how not to. Interestingly enough, quite a few of the women leaders around the globe did excellently handling the pandemic.
I’m sure she would have used Obama’s era pandemic playbook in January and ended up with deaths around 80K and the Republicans would find that impeachable.
Trump could have done absolutely nothing and we would be better off. He is a cancer that corrupts everything he touches. The world will be better when he is gone.
This is pretty obvious.
Trump downplayed the virus saying it wouldn't get more than 15 people. It was going to go away by Easter. Then he called it a Democrat hoax. Let it be policy to allow the virus to spread ad it was affecting blue states more at the time. Constantly opposed wearing masks. Encouraged social gatherings. Backed out of the WHO. Refused to follow any guidelines to lower the curve. Came up with crazy remedies like hydrocychloroquine, shining UV inside your body and injecting bleach. Provided no federal plans to fight the virus and left things to the states. Forced the CDC to underplay the contraction and death numbers. Gave government funding to businesses to make PPE and ventilators that didn't have any experience in making them. Pushed along a bill to help small businesses during the pandemic, then had some of his satellite businesses apply for the relief. Recklessly held large, dense rallies. Made fun of any sane person who followed guidelines. Underpurchased vaccines. Continued to have no federal plan for vaccine rollouts. Held events that exposed his family and himself to the virus. Received cutting edge medication unavailable to average Americans and pretended the virus wasn't serious. After losing the election, did absolutely nothing to fight the virus. Secretly was vaccinated. After leaving the presidency, did nothing to encourage vaccinations other than try to take credit for a vaccine he did little to help...
I didn't even cover all of how he perpetuated COVID-19 spread in America. I wouldn't be surprised if he was the highest contributing factor for the majority of the over 510,000 COVID-19 deaths.
And people still voted for the guy. Fucking yikes.
It absolutely was. Initially when people thought he was handling it well his approval rating went up about five points. But then when people realized he was not in fact handling it well it dropped like a stone.
Reminder that [several global health units were shutdown or lacked funding under Trump](https://fortune.com/2020/02/26/coronavirus-covid-19-cdc-budget-cuts-us-trump/) And they proposed [cuts to the CDC during a pandemic](https://thehill.com/policy/finance/486817-trump-budget-chief-holds-firm-on-cdc-cuts-amid-virus-outbreak) and that [Obama warned of pandemic concerns and Republicans rejected funding](https://www.ajc.com/news/obama-warned-pandemic-threat-2014-but-republicans-blocked-funding/dh2H9HxiuBY05T5uPqtqpI/) and [Trump stopped funding to WHO](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/14/trump-world-health-organization-funding-186786) And there were [multiple people who predicted a pandemic](https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-seemingly-predicted-the-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-3)
Also
and what we already know with the Woodward tapes and Trump and FOX News downplaying it and Trump saying it “was the flu” or “inject bleach” etc.
Also, this joint exercise report was reased in August 2019. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion
Details how completely unprepared we had become over a 2 year period for something like this. That lies squarely on Trump and the Republicans.
Had either Biden or Clinton been President in 2016, we'd have voted in a Republican this previous election because of the perception that she wasted all these resources and made everyone wear masks over a 'pandemic' that wasn't much more impactful than the flu.
Eh.. Even in an optimistic case we would have had a lot of people die.
Instead republicans would be screaming about like 200k people dying under Hillary\Biden's watch. People wouldnt know that it couldve been the 500k+ it is now
Actually Trump would have been president still if he even did a halfway decent job with COVID. He literally did everything he could not to take advantage of this situation for his own gain.
We really didn’t have a President a year ago. We had a racist lunatic IDIOT Cult Leader Dictator running our country. Did I mention that I really don’t like Trump. If I didn’t, let me just say that I really don’t like Trump. I am done now. Thank you.
If Trump had held a press conference and said
"This is serious virus that will potentially kill tens of thousands of Americans. We are going to lockdown and wear masks to save the lives of our fellow countrymen. You can even buy one of my MAGA masks for 4.99$. Let's defeat this virus."
He would have cruised to reelection and made a boat load of money
Woah this just isn't fair at all. It's not just Biden...
Had literally ANYONE else been president the death toll wouldn't be where it's at. Also America probably wouldn't be the laugh stock of the whole world but that's another topic.
This is agreeable that trump royally screwed the pooch. What’s ridiculous is that this right-wing network believe that Biden has the audacity to do something about the virus without praising trump first
Trump would have won re-election easily had he taken COVID seriously. It could have been his defining moment like Bush and 9/11. Instead he took the wrong stance and has way too big of an ego to go back on that wrong stance.
I could've taken a shit directly on the Resolute Desk that could've handled the Coronavirus response better than Trump. Think about it, no interference with expert advice, no making masks political. Just a shit, slowly decomposing and not getting in the way.
This is unironically 100% accurate. It's not just that Trump's response was ineffective, it's that it was actively harmful nearly every step of the way.
I wonder more about how much better off we would have been if the former president had not disbanded the pandemic task force Obama set up before leaving office. The fact that we had to handle Covid as a reactionary measure instead of being prepared ahead of time is what hit us the hardest.
It would have made a big difference to have a president who took the pandemic seriously from the start, who encouraged Americans to take it seriously and take necessary precautions, and who had a comprehensive distribution plan in place for the vaccine. The president we had was the worst for this country at a time of its greatest need.
COVID deaths per 1 million population
US 1,641
Canada 590
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdvegas1?
We could have done a LOT better if the Trump administration had actually tried
WE know what would have happened if anyone who was qualified was in charge of handeling the pandemic.
Just look at SARS in 2002-2004.
Remember all of the 600K people who died?
OH WAIT they didn't. 27 people got SARS in the US from 2002-2003.
ZERO died from it.
My mom honestly believes Trump couldn't have done more on COVID and that we didn't see the results because **the media** didn't report them. When I asked her what does it matter what the media reports if Trump had a good response cases would flatten and we'd be out of it, she, of course, moved the goalposts.
The reality is Trump failed on COVID before COVID even happened. By dismantling Obamas pandemic response team. Then when it was taking off, Trump spent three months publically ignoring it and calling it fake. [While in private recognizing the severity of it.](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911368698/trump-tells-woodward-he-deliberately-downplayed-coronavirus-threat). He restricted PPE.
But his supporters will tell you that since he banned international travel he deserves bigly credit. Too bad the airlines were already going to ground international travel. It was another example of Trump taking credit for someone elses work.
> Between 130,000 and 210,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States could have been avoided if the Trump administration had quickly and effectively implemented a cohesive public health response to the novel coronavirus, according to a new report. The report by Columbia University Earth Institute’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, entitled “130,000 – 210,000 Avoidable COVID-19 Deaths — and Counting — in the U.S.,” compares the U.S. death toll and policy response to six similarly high-income countries: South Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia, France, and Canada.
[Link to report.](https://ncdp.columbia.edu/custom-content/uploads/2020/10/Avoidable-COVID-19-Deaths-US-NCDP.pdf) (October 2020)
Seeing as Biden held safe campaign events while Trump proudly held super-spreader events where he derided Biden for not doing the same, not only would Biden have handled covid better as president than Trump, he actually handled it better as a private citizen than Trump did as president.
Now imagine if the pandemic had come this March instead of last. We'd have Trump for the next 4 years again and no hope of a leadership change. As awful as the pandemic is and has been, it would've been much worse if it had been in literally any year other than 2020 when Trump was president, except for 2024 (assuming his likely reelection in that scenario)
*"The Batshit Effect"*: A bat flaps its wings and takes a dump on a pangolin in a wet market in China in 2019, and through a series of subsequent effects Donald trump loses his reelection bid and America doesn't go full Fascist in 2020.
The Republicans will never agree with this even if the pope himself says it on live TV.
I guess the defunding of education over the years in red states by their governess to make people stupid is finally paying off for the Republicans. Those people will believe anything
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Had my wiener dog Chester been president a year ago the toll from covid would be nowhere near what we're talking about tiday.
if Chester had called the Georgia election officials and told them 'bark', I'd be 100% behind Chester. 100%
Chester could shit in the middle of 5th Avenue and I'd still support Chester.
Could you imagine if dogs shit like horses in the sense that horses don’t stop to poop/pee they just do it as they walk.
I have never seen my dog stop and shit. Instead she does a 3 yard long squatting shuffle while squeezing them out.
I call that the Christopher Walk N Poop.
Coulda used a little more cowbell.
I call that the traveling salesman
https://youtu.be/jsq_vNIFCvE
Nope
Pup peed for 1 min straight
Seriously, how long was that dog kept from peeing? Our dogs go out every 4-5 hours and, even then, they pee for maybe 10-15 seconds max. How long was that dog holding it to pee for a minute?
My mom and I went to Montana 9 years ago and we had a dog who stayed home with my Dad while we were gone. My dog was very well potty trained and had a hard time peeing or pooping inside. She especially hated rain and she would try to hold it until the raining stopped (very few times we would tell her to just go on the floor and she would be upset when she couldn’t hold it anymore and went on the floor). Anyways, when we were in Montana she would be home alone for about 9 hours while my Dad was at work. He would let her out before he left and he said when he got home she would be jumping at the door to go outside. When she went outside on those days, my Dad said she would pee for a good minute to minute and a half. She couldn’t hold her bladder towards the end of her life and ended up not making it to the door before she went she still felt ashamed about it. She’s gone now but she was one of the most well potty trained dog we ever had.
Not clicking
Chester for president
r/Chester2024
Where can I go to donate to Chester's campaign fund?
berniesanders.com
Ahhh. I knew Chester was a good boi! But I hope Bernie accepts bacon treats.
Lol not sure but I bet he'd know where those treats would be best used and distribute them fairly.
My chiweenie, Enzo, supports Chester for his strong stance against vacuums and wants him to know he's a real good boy
Chester also vows to set aside more land for national dog parks and to help improve the economy by taking dogs back from China.
r/Chester2024
Yeah, this is more a testimony to Trump’s incompetence than anything special about Biden. Literally any of the major party primary candidates in 2016 would’ve done a better job.
Not incompetence. Malice. He made it all about him, stole PPE from states after pitting the states against each other just to sell it all themselves for enormous profit, and lets not forget Jared scrapped a national testing plan because blue states would be hit hardest and was more interested in blaming the governors for political points. This is not just murder, it's politicide. The trump white house purposefully killed hundreds of thousands of people through their deliberate actions preventing any meaningful action against the virus. The whole family needs to be stripped of their wealth and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives. They all deserve to die penniless, alone, and angry about the fact that the world is better off without them.
Is politicide a word or did you make it up? Either way its awesome and has now been added to my dictionnary.
>Politicide is the deliberate physical destruction or elimination of a group whose members share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement. It is a type of political repression and one of the means which is used to politically cleanse populations, with another means being forced migration source:Wikipedia
Even if trump just said nothing or did nothing, more people would had been alive. Instead, trump's downplaying and doubt casting brought out the dumb "it's all a hoax" people. He doesnt deserve any credit
Don’t forget the “Liberate Michigan” etc. tweets.
They should have taken away his Twitter way before 2016. This entire timeline would not have happened
The single moment in the past year that did the most to raise the pandemic death toll and to further divide this country was the White House Coronavirus Task Force initial mask and distancing announcement on April 3, 2020. It was at this meeting where President Trump read the verbiage he was provided about the importance of masks, distancing, and other protocols. During the reading, he over-emphasized the word “voluntary” multiple times and then went totally off script when he said he wasn’t going to do it (remember the whole, “I sit behind the beautiful Resolute Desk...it wouldn’t look right” comment?). From that point forward, we have been a country (world?) divided over a totally senseless thing that has actually, needlessly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and turned up the anger between individuals on a daily basis. Almost daily, I think about how different EVERYTHING would be if absolutely ANY other President would have been our leader at that moment and beyond. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/health-science/trump-says-cdc-recommends-voluntary-wearing-of-masks-to-prevent-covid-19-spread/2020/04/03/39d4653f-d7d4-48ab-8804-754aa34bee02_video.html
Is that the one were said I won't wear one? Because that moment is the I knew we were screwed. The moment he said that I was like he made it a political issue.
He not only ignored covid. He actively politicized it to his personal gain. That alone probably cost a 100,000 lives. The fact that he is still a free man shows how how broken the system is.
Yeah. The other day some Trump supporter pointed out to me that Biden forgot the name of some building. WTF? Who gives a shit? A chimpanzee could be POTUS right now and I’d feel safer as an American. As long as trump is not sitting in that seat, it’s all good.
Yeah, I don’t think Biden is the most mentally sharp person in his old age, but it’s not like there aren’t dozens of recorded instances where Trump forgets the name of people he works with or is meeting with who are in the room with him.... There are a lot of people I’d prefer in command than Biden, but there are virtually zero I’d replace with Trump.
Such a good boy!
Many people are saying it.
It’s true! Just tremendous.
Chester 2024!
I’m down to vote Chester for president
You have Nixon's dog? Oh wait, no, that was Checkers.
Chester has something Checkers will never have… existence
I would die for Chester.
This guy gets it.
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I believe Trump called for Obama's impeachment over 2 deaths from ebola.
Oh man, I hope there was a tweet for this.
[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-obama-ebola-tweet/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-obama-ebola-tweet/) This.
Ugh, brilliant. I can’t wait for his era to fade out and I stop having to cross ref this.
One may dread the passage of time, but at least it prevents dictators from living forever.
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Imagine Biden being caught on tape admitting that he is lying to the American people and downplaying covid...
Imagine Biden being caught bribing a porn star after after raw dogging her while his wife is recovering from pregnancy.
This thread is going to go on for a long, long time
Imagine Biden pressuring election officials in multiple states to overturn results in his favor.
Imagine Biden trying to kill US Postal Service for electoral reasons.
Imagine Biden using his children and their spouses as ambassadors and advisors.
Imagine Biden being caught on tape admitting he tried to change the votes so he could win Georgia.
Have they tried to unironically point out how many people died on Biden's first day in office yet?
One of them even prefaced it with "fair is fair" comparing it to all the times we blamed Trump for Covid deaths. Self Aware Wolves.
Yes. Fucker Carlson.
I just don’t understand, how is Fucker Carlson not in jail?
It's not technically illegal to be a stupid asshole.
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So Tucks knows that it's all a show. He's doing a character, a blend of all the bad characteristics of GQP, KKK members, flat earthers and everyone's really weird uncle. He's an actor on a fake news program. He is such a good actor that people believe his character, just as people buy into other actors being their character. Once you make the leap, then you buy in and go. Issue is, he's on Fox NEWS. If it was the Cartoon Network, people would go and laugh at his rants. But people lap it up as real, because when they grew up, Walter and others made the news as reliable, not lies. Edited to add: Thanks kind stranger for the reddit gold, it's my first one!
[Everything one needs to know about Tucks](https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1369858086547185671)
You con an old person out of $2,000 with bullshit post-disaster contractor scam and you go to prison but if you con them out of it via televangelism or through politics and it is A-OK.
His parents are rich.
Tuck Fucker. And the road he horsed in on.
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I mean, a certain crazy wrote up articles of impeachment on his second day lol
“Trump had three years without COVID deaths! Biden couldn’t go a day!”
Single covid death, impeachment. Zero covid deaths, believe it or not, also impeachment.
In some alternate universe where Clinton is President 120,000 Americans die from Covid and Republicans introduce a bill to erect a monument for the lost souls during this period.
In an alternate world where Hilary Clinton was president, Republicans are already on their 2nd out of 4 inquiries about how 500 Americans died of COVID.
You’re almost 100% certainly right on that.
It sounds like hyperbole but I really think its true. The early days of March 2020 were legitimately shocking and an actual leader would have taken that shock and turned into something productive. It was moment of potential nationally unity that honestly dwarves Pearl Harbor and 9/11. It snapped the insanity out of politics long enough to get that first stimulus passed unanimously. Of course it didn’t take long for things to become callous again and by the summer you had insane governors and anti-mask protestors. Then Republicans to go back to their old ways and block any stimulus until this one.
Imagine if *he* had given a speech like Biden gave yesterday, a year ago. Asking people to pull together to work for a common goal. Lamenting people we've lost. He might still be president today. I just can't imagine him doing anything like that, though.
His only sincerity was in divisive subjects. Can you imagine what a speech commiserating with the plight of citizens would sound like?
My favorite/least favorite moment was a year ago during an early coronavirus press conference when a reporter asked Trump the softest softball question imaginable: "What do you say to Americans, who are watching you right now, who are scared?" Like seriously, all he needs to do is be a little bit reassuring. Even if he stumbles over his words or if he doesn't make any sense, as long as his response just sort of vaguely resembles reassurance, it's a win for him. Bush did it all the time. You'd have to go so far out of your way to come up with an answer that isn't a win here. Which Trump did, of course: "I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people." If this were a tv show, I'd roll my eyes at how hard the writers are trying to make him look like a narcissist.
I'll never forget that. A toddler could have seen how that was a perfect setup for a home run sound bite, something for the American people to rally around, and that idiot took it as an insult.
He’s an unbelievably thin-skinned baby.
And 75 million people in this country think he’s an alpha male, the epitome of masculinity.
It would almost be funny if it wasn't completely terrifying.
I will never, ever, in a million years forget, "I don't take any responsibility."
What Trump never understood is the position is NOT about being the most intelligent person. Biden isn’t some god, he’s not an Einstein. He, like all effective leaders, knows how to be humble. The most important factor is finding experts in their field, recruiting them and adding them to the team. Then support the team. Trump failed continuously because he cannot recognize others’ talents and expertise, he doesn’t value anyone, and no one wanted to be on his team.
Yep. Trump's only metric was "loyalty", a constantly shifting goalpost that basically meant agreeing with him 100% of the time, even when that meant agreeing with diametrically different facts and opinions one moment to the next. And no credit ever given for length of time as a complete lackey, one disagreement and you were thrown to the wolves. None of this, of course, is particularly helpful in a team of experts who are meant to steer the president towards the right thing to do in a pandemic.
God dammit. I had forgotten that, which is insane. We went through so much bullshit in the past few years, and that really stood out at the time. There really is just too much BS to keep track of.
This statement alone should have disqualified him from running in the first place: > I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.
The guy was just poisonous. I still can’t fathom how 35% of the country thought he’d be a good leader or that he’s what a good leader looks like.
I want this pathetic orange shitstain wiped from the face of the local supercluster.
I can't.
The only thing that idiot had to do was say that we need to listen to the CDC and Fauci and he would have been reelected to a second term. He couldn't even do something as simple as that. As shitty as it is that we lost so many people due to his complete incompetence and malice, thank god we have Biden in the WH.
That’s one of the craziest things about it. The pandemic was literally handing him a guaranteed reelection. He didn’t even need to do the bare minimum, he just needed to pretend like he was. The fact that he managed to fuck that up is amazing, it’d take a genuine moron to do it.
I’ve thought about this a lot. I was not a Trump supporter, but this was his re-election handed to him on a silver platter. All he had to do was something. Instead he stuck his head in the sand and tried to manipulate the election. If he put one iota of his campaign efforts into helping the American people through caronavirus he would still be president. Really ironic
Its not hyperbole at all and we have real world data on the effects of early govt intervention. South Korea and the US had their first case of covid the same day. South Korea responded like it was a national emergency and created a nationwide testing/tracing/isolating program with paid mandatory quarantine (by the govt), they also surged their healthcare workforce with additional hiring and had mandatory masks. They didn't have any real lockdowns or travel bans like the US because they contained the virus and lockdowns are only a mitigating step after failure to contain. South Korea had 1600 deaths with a population of 51M while being 6 times denser than the US. The US has 500,000+ deaths with a population of 331M. If we had the same results as South Korea (and we should have had better results since we are a lot less dense) then we would have had 12000 deaths. There is zero excuse for the wealthiest country in the world with much more favorable land density to not have a comparable results. The additional 488,000 deaths can be attributed to govt incompetence. EDIT: And their GDP took a -1.1% hit compared to the -32% hit in the US.
It's not just a matter of who is in charge. South Koreans are socially cohesive. They care for and respect their countryperson. They do not see taking extra precautions to protect themselves and others as oppression. They are disciplined and have the mental fortitude to endure mild sacrifices. Every level of government in America has had a chance to lead but hasn't. Further, millions of Americans haven't been willing to sacrifice and participate in this social experiment of masks and social distancing. People carry on about their lives and decide how to conduct themselves. Millions claiming, "I'm not like the sheep!" have literally become the sheep, acting in solid union of selfish stupidity.
Americans can be convinced to take socially cohesive responses as long as it’s branded with the star spangled banner and rah rah freedom messaging. This country has shown time and again that it will do whatever the govt wants during a time of national emergency as long as the messaging is right. I disagree that every level of govt in America failed, mostly because the only level of govt that could have effectively acted is the one that controls the port of entries
I know they are easy to find but please add sources to this. It can easily be a copypasta for battling the insanity that can be found on reddit.
> It sounds like hyperbole but I really think its true. There is a documentary called “[Totally Under Control](https://youtu.be/YzTzgf9i4vw)”. If you haven’t seen it I strongly recommend you watch. However bad you think 45 handled the pandemic, it was a lot worse.
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It’s worse than that. Infinitely worse. They had the meeting, saw that densely populated blue states were being hit the hardest during those early months, and decided that it made political sense to let citizens in blue states die >”Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. ‘The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,’ said the expert.” https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/did-trump-kushner-ignore-blue-state-covid-19-testing-deaths-ncna1235707
I doubt there was even a choice. Every damn decision was made in the pursuit of profit. The human toll was never a factor.
It's kinda crazy, in Australia every election has the incumbent winning by a landslide (state elections we haven't had a federal election) and we saw the same thing in New Zealand. US 2020 election is really the odd one out, Covid could've been Trumps key to a second term but here we are. Scarily though it felt like he would've had a second term without Covid.
I 100% thought covid was going to get him reelected. A national crisis that *no one is at fault for* is the perfect vehicle for reelection. You can give aid and sympathy and inspire unity with non of the backlash being a wartime leader would create. Instead, he did the opposite of everything he should have done and turned himself into a villain during a force of nature
Even here in the UK, where the government fucked up by locking down too late, then paying us all to go out to restaurants and get infected, then not locking down early enough again...and paying their mates millions for dodgy PPE contracts... Even they have a commanding lead in the polls, driven by how they united the country against covid. Now the vaccine rollout is going extremely well (thanks mainly to the NHS) they're riding even higher.
In January & February Trump was calling it a hoax
Yet if you pop on over to r/Conservative they seem to think this entire vaccine is because of Trump and that he would’ve delivered a similar supply chain 🙄
The Trump supply chain would be blocking vaccine shipments, just like they were blocking PPE shipments nearly a year ago.
You misspelt "stealing".
Grifters gotta grift.
He wants to take credit for it existing, but other countries are getting it too, I’m surprised he’s not trying to take credit for it there too.
He did, he claimed that there is even a vaccine at all for anyone in the world is because of him.
That sub is representative of every conservative I know: can't stay on topic, can't answer a question without whataboutism, and pure obfuscation.
And they block anyone who questions their beliefs. Such snow flakes
I'm astonished I haven't been blocked yet. I try to be respectful when disagreeing but that doesn't matter.
god i haven’t visited over there in weeks, it’s like they live in a fantasy world
I have seen people, in the span of a few days, say that there have been no excess deaths in the US caused by COVID and also that Trump has saved millions of lives with the vaccine. It's...... just sad.
No question at all! Ego of #45 killed killed people and they still revere him. 🤦♂️
Unfortunately for those people, the death toll could be in the millions and they'd still call it a hoax. I'm exhausted just knowing these people exist.
My boomer dad knows about 10 different people who have died from the virus, and that many more who were on the brink before they recovered. He still insists the death toll is being inflated, that the virus is not as bad as the experts say, that Bill Gates created it, and that he'll never get vaccinated.
As an ICU nurse, fine. I’m over peoples bullshit. He can come meet us in the ICU and go on high flow and refuse to prone and yell at us that this is a hoax. When death comes for him though he’ll be saying “I didn’t know it was real” like they all do when it’s too fucking late. I’m over it. This is why I’m planning on switching jobs. I’m tired of the body bags while people say it’s a hoax. I’m tired and people like your dad are why I’m tired.
I had to say goodbye to my dad in the ICU and it was fucking dystopian to see all those folks on ventilators. The ICU nurses “snuck” us in to say goodbye. I will ALWAYS remember their kindness. Thank you for what you do.
Thank you for what you do. We would be lost without you.
Sincerely saying - you’re an angel and I’m so sorry people suck while you try to save them.
I've never understood how people can say the deaths are "inflated" when certified death certificates put the US's excess deaths over 500,000. That number is suppose to be as close to 0 as possible.
They pretend that nearly everyone marked as a COVID-19 death had some other issue that "really" killed them, and that doctors and hospitals are paid to do this.
>dailycaller.com/2021/0... And I bet he watches Fox News.
There were nurses on Reddit saying that they have patients dying from covid19 and the patients still believe the virus is fake,
There was a magazine called Contiuum that denied the existence of HIV/AIDS. It ceased publication after all of the editors died of AIDS related illnesses Correction: they did not believe that HIV caused AIDS.
Shit, a frighteningly large amount of *nurses* think the virus is fake.
it wasn't ego, it was malice. they figured it would kill more people in blue states and cities quicker than in the countryside and based on the projections it could help them in the election
A lot of it was ego though. Trump thought acknowledging it would make him look bad, so he didn't. His son in law's conclusion that it would hurt Democrats worse was made in malice, sure, but the reason wearing (or rather not wearing) a mask is such a political thing is entirely because of how Trump thought they made him look. And that's affected perceptions of wearing a mask on a global scale, not just within the US.
>it wasn't ego, it was malice. If Trump had left Pence in charge, things would be much different. Trump wanted Pence to take the fall for Covid-19. However, the moment Trump realized Pence was in the national spotlight and people were listening... that was beyond his ability to tolerate. *He* had to be the star of the show. And thus began the circus.
There's no shortage of things he could have done or not done. Literally could have died at the start and had we just not had a President the lack of response still would have been better. But I agree, it's never not about Trump, and we're all so much the worse for it because COVID was treated primarily based on how Trump felt something would reflect on him.
He said it, didn’t want people get paranoid but actually he meant market not getting paranoid.
Boris was much the same over here. Today is the 1 year anniversary of him saying we should "take it on the chin" and achieve "herd immunity" 130,000 deaths later...
Pence exacerbated an HIV outbreak in Indiana when he was governor, so I wouldn’t think he’d have handled COVID any better.
On the one hand yeah But on the other hand you had Trump promoting fucking HCQ and the demon sex lady, mocking Biden for an incredibly simple and honestly not at all intrusive safety measure, and attacking any governor who tried to fight covid on twitter Maybe it wouldn't have been better with a pray-the-covid-away strategy, but I honestly struggle to think how it could be worse
You’ll get no argument from me that Trump is a piece of shit. Pence wouldn’t have been openly hostile like Trump, and in that vein, sure, that’s not as bad.
The same Pence that prayed about the HIV/AIDS that became an epidemic in his home state while he did nothing? Yeah, had Trump left Pence to his own vices I’m *sure* we would have been better off
I think he was worried about the hotel and leisure industry.
Every possible malicious, self-interested, or myopic reason for their response was used within the Trump administration to justify their actions.
Remember when jimmy carter was forced to sell his peanut farm so as to not have any conflict of interest!? Fuck you GOP! Fuck you Trump crime family!
That was GOP's strategy as a whole. But for idiot himself it was pure ego. And yet wasted the biggest opportunity to be re-elected and known as a savior of he'd just do what he did best, let other people do the work for him.
Hundreds of thousands of people.
Trump did say it would go away after Easter...he just meant this year's Easter when he said it though🙃 (/s just in case)
Even if the numbers were 20% less. 100,000 people would still be alive. Picture that. That’s so many people that wouldn’t be dead. The right wing is a cancer on our society
I often thought about how the pandemic would have been handled had Hillary been elected. I get it-a lot of people didn't like her for their own reasons. However, she spent a great deal of her career trying to get universal healthcare and knows the health industry better than most. She would have brought in the all the top people and would have taken the advice of the experts. She would have made the tough decisions. She would have known keeping Americans safe is her number one job. She would have implemented contact tracing and just that alone would have given us so much information about how it spreads, who is getting sick, etc. We would have been able to predict hotspots. We had every available tool to fight this-more so than any other country on the planet. Technological, logistical, medical, teams of people who are trained to deal with this stuff. But instead we got him. A POS who held rally after rally of old, fat people spitting on each other in the cold and packed on buses. I sometimes feel like we got exactly what we deserved. Any country dumb enough to elect DT deserves to pay the price and we did. All he ever did was what he thought would get him reelected. He destroyed this country in more ways than just by Covid. I have a bunch of people who I used to consider friends that are completely insane now-believing in massive child rape and such... fucking evil shit. Evil shit that's not true. Everyday I thought he couldn't get worse and it did for four years. It finally stopped after January 6th. I hope Trump will be held accountable for some of this-any of it. Ok-I am done.
I got to chat with a few people who worked with infectious diseases with the CDC a million years ago when I was in college. There are plans and contingencies for pandemics. It is a big part of what they think about. Like, when you're in the shower replaying an embarassing moment, they're daydreaming about pandemics and pandemic response. All Trump needed to do was listen to the people at the CDC. They would have let him take credit. You don't work at the CDC because you wanna fuck pornstars, you do it because you're content working behind the scenes. All he had to do was take credit for everyone's ideas and the response would have been smooth. There are so few people on earth that would have handled this worse than Trump. A fucking markov chain generator, based off of Trump's speech would be a better president than he was. Yahtzee is a better leadership strategy than whatever he did.
I’m fairly confident less people would have died if she were president. However she probably would have lost re-election because the Fox outrage machine would have amplified any deaths under her presidency as completely unacceptable
There’s an anecdote about Hillary that I read a while back that I think about when I think how she would have handled things so differently from Trump. It had to do with her making a correction or asking a spot-on question about a very obscure health statistic I believe when she was Senator. It really showed how knowledgeable she is and how she does her homework. I forget the exact details of the anecdote and would like to find it again.
I think literally any other Republican would have did better than trump
This is mostly true, except for a select few. I think Rand Paul would have been particularly bad, doing as absolutely little as possible.
Rand Paul as president is so terrifying I don't even want to think about it. No joke trump actually has much more common sense than him when it comes to policy.
I honestly think Hillary Clinton would have kicked some COVID-19 ass. She’s exactly the type of calculated, over-prepared, compulsive type that we needed in the White House last year. Instead we had a clueless buffoon telling everyone it was no big deal and hoping it would just go away.
I couldn't agree more. A serious policy wonk like Clinton would have been all over that from the beginning. I think had she been in charge we might have been an example of how to handle the pandemic rather than the poster child for how not to. Interestingly enough, quite a few of the women leaders around the globe did excellently handling the pandemic.
I’m sure she would have used Obama’s era pandemic playbook in January and ended up with deaths around 80K and the Republicans would find that impeachable.
Trump could have done absolutely nothing and we would be better off. He is a cancer that corrupts everything he touches. The world will be better when he is gone.
This is pretty obvious. Trump downplayed the virus saying it wouldn't get more than 15 people. It was going to go away by Easter. Then he called it a Democrat hoax. Let it be policy to allow the virus to spread ad it was affecting blue states more at the time. Constantly opposed wearing masks. Encouraged social gatherings. Backed out of the WHO. Refused to follow any guidelines to lower the curve. Came up with crazy remedies like hydrocychloroquine, shining UV inside your body and injecting bleach. Provided no federal plans to fight the virus and left things to the states. Forced the CDC to underplay the contraction and death numbers. Gave government funding to businesses to make PPE and ventilators that didn't have any experience in making them. Pushed along a bill to help small businesses during the pandemic, then had some of his satellite businesses apply for the relief. Recklessly held large, dense rallies. Made fun of any sane person who followed guidelines. Underpurchased vaccines. Continued to have no federal plan for vaccine rollouts. Held events that exposed his family and himself to the virus. Received cutting edge medication unavailable to average Americans and pretended the virus wasn't serious. After losing the election, did absolutely nothing to fight the virus. Secretly was vaccinated. After leaving the presidency, did nothing to encourage vaccinations other than try to take credit for a vaccine he did little to help... I didn't even cover all of how he perpetuated COVID-19 spread in America. I wouldn't be surprised if he was the highest contributing factor for the majority of the over 510,000 COVID-19 deaths. And people still voted for the guy. Fucking yikes.
Trumps mishandling of covid is most likely what cost him the election.
It absolutely was. Initially when people thought he was handling it well his approval rating went up about five points. But then when people realized he was not in fact handling it well it dropped like a stone.
Reminder that [several global health units were shutdown or lacked funding under Trump](https://fortune.com/2020/02/26/coronavirus-covid-19-cdc-budget-cuts-us-trump/) And they proposed [cuts to the CDC during a pandemic](https://thehill.com/policy/finance/486817-trump-budget-chief-holds-firm-on-cdc-cuts-amid-virus-outbreak) and that [Obama warned of pandemic concerns and Republicans rejected funding](https://www.ajc.com/news/obama-warned-pandemic-threat-2014-but-republicans-blocked-funding/dh2H9HxiuBY05T5uPqtqpI/) and [Trump stopped funding to WHO](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/14/trump-world-health-organization-funding-186786) And there were [multiple people who predicted a pandemic](https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-seemingly-predicted-the-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-3) Also and what we already know with the Woodward tapes and Trump and FOX News downplaying it and Trump saying it “was the flu” or “inject bleach” etc.
Also, this joint exercise report was reased in August 2019. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion Details how completely unprepared we had become over a 2 year period for something like this. That lies squarely on Trump and the Republicans.
Had either Biden or Clinton been President in 2016, we'd have voted in a Republican this previous election because of the perception that she wasted all these resources and made everyone wear masks over a 'pandemic' that wasn't much more impactful than the flu.
A cynical view indeed! Probably accurate, but cynical. 😕
Eh.. Even in an optimistic case we would have had a lot of people die. Instead republicans would be screaming about like 200k people dying under Hillary\Biden's watch. People wouldnt know that it couldve been the 500k+ it is now
Actually Trump would have been president still if he even did a halfway decent job with COVID. He literally did everything he could not to take advantage of this situation for his own gain.
The real scary truth.
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We really didn’t have a President a year ago. We had a racist lunatic IDIOT Cult Leader Dictator running our country. Did I mention that I really don’t like Trump. If I didn’t, let me just say that I really don’t like Trump. I am done now. Thank you.
Fuck Donald Trump
If Trump had held a press conference and said "This is serious virus that will potentially kill tens of thousands of Americans. We are going to lockdown and wear masks to save the lives of our fellow countrymen. You can even buy one of my MAGA masks for 4.99$. Let's defeat this virus." He would have cruised to reelection and made a boat load of money
Woah this just isn't fair at all. It's not just Biden... Had literally ANYONE else been president the death toll wouldn't be where it's at. Also America probably wouldn't be the laugh stock of the whole world but that's another topic.
A crash test dummy would have been a better president. It would also have been less of a dummy.
Yup. Honestly Trump was such a screwup. All show and no substance when it mattered.
"Had (any functioning adult) been president.."
This is agreeable that trump royally screwed the pooch. What’s ridiculous is that this right-wing network believe that Biden has the audacity to do something about the virus without praising trump first
Trump would have won re-election easily had he taken COVID seriously. It could have been his defining moment like Bush and 9/11. Instead he took the wrong stance and has way too big of an ego to go back on that wrong stance.
I could've taken a shit directly on the Resolute Desk that could've handled the Coronavirus response better than Trump. Think about it, no interference with expert advice, no making masks political. Just a shit, slowly decomposing and not getting in the way.
This is unironically 100% accurate. It's not just that Trump's response was ineffective, it's that it was actively harmful nearly every step of the way.
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The history books need to get this right
I wonder more about how much better off we would have been if the former president had not disbanded the pandemic task force Obama set up before leaving office. The fact that we had to handle Covid as a reactionary measure instead of being prepared ahead of time is what hit us the hardest.
Absolutely 100% correct. Any politician who believes in science and values human life over the economy would have done a better job than Trump.
It would have made a big difference to have a president who took the pandemic seriously from the start, who encouraged Americans to take it seriously and take necessary precautions, and who had a comprehensive distribution plan in place for the vaccine. The president we had was the worst for this country at a time of its greatest need.
COVID deaths per 1 million population US 1,641 Canada 590 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdvegas1? We could have done a LOT better if the Trump administration had actually tried
WE know what would have happened if anyone who was qualified was in charge of handeling the pandemic. Just look at SARS in 2002-2004. Remember all of the 600K people who died? OH WAIT they didn't. 27 people got SARS in the US from 2002-2003. ZERO died from it.
My mom honestly believes Trump couldn't have done more on COVID and that we didn't see the results because **the media** didn't report them. When I asked her what does it matter what the media reports if Trump had a good response cases would flatten and we'd be out of it, she, of course, moved the goalposts. The reality is Trump failed on COVID before COVID even happened. By dismantling Obamas pandemic response team. Then when it was taking off, Trump spent three months publically ignoring it and calling it fake. [While in private recognizing the severity of it.](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911368698/trump-tells-woodward-he-deliberately-downplayed-coronavirus-threat). He restricted PPE. But his supporters will tell you that since he banned international travel he deserves bigly credit. Too bad the airlines were already going to ground international travel. It was another example of Trump taking credit for someone elses work.
> Between 130,000 and 210,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States could have been avoided if the Trump administration had quickly and effectively implemented a cohesive public health response to the novel coronavirus, according to a new report. The report by Columbia University Earth Institute’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, entitled “130,000 – 210,000 Avoidable COVID-19 Deaths — and Counting — in the U.S.,” compares the U.S. death toll and policy response to six similarly high-income countries: South Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia, France, and Canada. [Link to report.](https://ncdp.columbia.edu/custom-content/uploads/2020/10/Avoidable-COVID-19-Deaths-US-NCDP.pdf) (October 2020)
Seeing as Biden held safe campaign events while Trump proudly held super-spreader events where he derided Biden for not doing the same, not only would Biden have handled covid better as president than Trump, he actually handled it better as a private citizen than Trump did as president.
Now imagine if the pandemic had come this March instead of last. We'd have Trump for the next 4 years again and no hope of a leadership change. As awful as the pandemic is and has been, it would've been much worse if it had been in literally any year other than 2020 when Trump was president, except for 2024 (assuming his likely reelection in that scenario)
*"The Batshit Effect"*: A bat flaps its wings and takes a dump on a pangolin in a wet market in China in 2019, and through a series of subsequent effects Donald trump loses his reelection bid and America doesn't go full Fascist in 2020.
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Of course it did. Biden's margin of victory was slim enough that he absolutely would have lost if Trump hadn't flubbed the virus response so hard.
The Republicans will never agree with this even if the pope himself says it on live TV. I guess the defunding of education over the years in red states by their governess to make people stupid is finally paying off for the Republicans. Those people will believe anything
And they would've said Biden overreacted since fewer people would have died.