Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans

He did the one thing that was unambiguously, knowably, certainly incorrect, which was to slow down testing: https://youtu.be/Ti4sSRonNwY?t=27

And he did it because he didn't like "his numbers."

Lots of mistakes were made, some less excusable or more harmful than others, but this wasn't "a mistake." This was inarguably and knowably a selfish decision to put self above millions of Americans.

> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020

Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.

>> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020

> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.

I don't agree with your implication, because I don't interpret the original statement the same way. The attitude was present, Trump turned into a cultural catastrophe. What political capital that remained was spent. We have less agreement now among the population as to what is acceptable and what is useful than before the last pandemic. The trenches have been dug, the no-man's land will be filled with mud and bodies.

In an alternative universe, Trump said something like, "Hey folks, I know wearing masks can be a bit unusual and uncomfortable at times, and we're not totally certain how effective they are, but there's good reason to believe they'll save the lives of some of our fellow Americans... please put them on when you're around other people, we'll re-assess as we get a better understanding of the cost-benefit tradeoff."

In that universe, we're not even toying with the idea that the American public would violently revolt at the idea of some basic mitigations of a respiratory epidemic.

> What political capital that remained was spent.

Arguably the political capital was just incompetently set on fire.

I imagine a Reagan, or a Kennedy, or a Roosevelt in that situation, and for anyone with a good instinct for leadership it just becomes a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel setup for becoming an absolute legend. The populace was dying of thirst for leadership and unity, and they were given huge blocks of salt and turned on each other. The last time a leader was set up for such an easy approval ratings layup it was Bush post 9/11.

It's wild that the 2020 election wasn't a complete 1984-scale rout for the republicans. It should've been if they'd had an ounce of gravitas or the ability to lead.

> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.

This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures. I don't put much stock in this. No matter how much togetherness rhetoric one threw at the problem the mistakes made in handling the pandemic, while understandable, emboldened and enabled forces that would result in an eventual backlash.

Witness Canada, where we had a government that constantly emphasized togetherness against a common threat, and yet we also got the trucker convoy. Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.

> This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures.

No it doesn't it just depends on the "words the most important person in the world says matters in times of crisis" view of history.

> Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.

I don't think "all of it" is the alternative. There has clearly been a groundswell of similar sentiments across the western world, but to suppose that the question of who is the US President is literally immaterial is frankly insane.

I agree. And I think a lot of the most extreme backlash took off towards the end of the pandemic, when vaccine mandates became a thing. This was the moment where many people I know who were otherwise ok going along with many of the other measures started drawing a line and then began working backwards towards doubting everything else they had been told up to that point.

Notably, this was not Trump's fuckup.

And just to be clear about where I stand - I get the COVID booster together with a flu shot every fall now.

It's not immaterial, but the backlash to COVID measures went far beyond Trump's position on the matter. For example in 2022 Trump was still eagerly taking credit for Operation Warp Speed, while many of his most passionate supporters were saying things like "Trump is great, except for his position on the COVID vaccine."[1][2]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-stopped-talking-operat...

[2] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/06/20/trump-i-dont-want...

Russian national strategy for a long time[0] has been to sow domestic strife/fuel sectarianism by an available means, and politicizing vaccine hesitancy has been a wildly successful lever for them. They were definitely doing this even before Covid[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/1952/

Sure, and think about how many more lives he could've saved if he came out more vocally in favor of it, and how many more lives he could've ended if he came out more vocally against it!

He waffled, and his followers waffled too.