Last weekend, I wrote a column arguing that the blundering of the Trump administration, while real and deadly, may not be responsible for the bulk of America’s coronavirus fatalities. A few days later, courtesy of Bob Woodward’s omniscient tape recorder, we received a reminder of the president’s culpable failures in the pandemic’s early days — which offered ammunition to readers who found my column to be implausible, pro-Trump special pleading or just obtuse. Some who found it obtuse asked a reasonable question: Does it matter if we could somehow rigorously establish that instead of being responsible for 140,000 out of our 190,000-and-counting American dead, Trump’s bungling is “only” responsible for 30,000 of the fallen? That’s still a dreadful figure, and in the midst of an electoral referendum on his leadership, the brute fact of presidential failure is all we need to know. Since I’m a card-carrying member of the latter club, let me suggest a few realities that become visible if you look at America’s pandemic response through a wider lens than just, “Trump lied, people died.”

Source: New York Times September 12, 2020 18:22 UTC