Krugman's Lost It

How was Trump's response to the Wuhan virus? 

I think what Scott Adams thinks: we don't know (yet).

Two important points that I've made in the past, and he also made: 

First: the question isn't: how'd he do given what we know now? It's: how'd he do given what we knew then?

Second, we'll have to control for a whole lot of factors to figure this out.

Trump clearly did some things really right--e.g. throttling down on travel from China, his ventilator plan, sending hospital ships to NYC. He was almost certainly right to want to open back up by Easter. 

His most notable failure, IMO, was characteristic: his erratic verbal actions at the press conferences. It was so bad I had to stop watching. 

   The press conference stuff was so bad that it seemed to me to be further proof that Trump doesn't belong anywhere near the White House. He just can't control his mouth. It's such a weakness that even making up for it with his many strengths...well, it just doesn't seem to work that way. Or so I often think. If one aspect of your Presidenting game is that weak--so weak that it falls below a certain threshold--there's no making up for it.

   But, as usual, the progressive left complicates the situation by being flat-out nuts. Krugman is an idiot...did that guy really win a Nobel in economics??? Seems unpossible. Here he is not only cramming Charlottesville, holy Charlottesville into a story on the batflu, thus allowing him to suggest that Trump is like Nazis, but also claiming that Trump basically killed people on purpose.

   He uses, among other things, the idiotic progressive argument that Trump is somehow responsible for all the batflu deaths. In fact, of course, one implication of my points above is that we don't know what Trump's effect on the death toll was. Cuomo is the only person we know of who, basically, killed a lot of people. We don't know hot Trump did compared to other world leaders, nor compared to, say, Obama or Biden. We just don't know.

   Another thing I agree with Adams on, though I hadn't formulated the thought clearly and he has--many times: leadership probably didn't have a lot to do with it. 

   I'll bet that, if Trump did have much of an effect, it was generally positive. The press probably had a negative effect. It probably took years off my life by feeding us incoherent, hysterical, politically-motivated disinformation. I can't believe that, by that point, I was still listening to the insane people at the NYT and Washington Post... The batflu panic cured me of that--they cannot be trusted.

   Anyway: we don't know how Trump did, and we won't know for quite some time, if ever. But there's almost no reason to think that Biden would have done any better.

Do we still think the quality of leadership is what determines coronavirus outcomes or have we dropped that illusion? https://t.co/Uz2n6SAYvm

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 11, 2020