Four Years Ago, Donald Trump Knew How Dangerous COVID Was—And Lied About It
He made life immeasurably worse for all Americans, and we can’t forget it.
I like to point out that Donald Trump is a shitty person along multiple axes, and I believe his shittiness, which makes him unlikable, is his biggest political liability.
There are others liberals who believe complaining about corruption and poor character falls flat if it seems disconnected from regular workaday concerns. Donald Trump accepted millions of dollars in payments from China while he was president? Well what do I care, so long as he doesn’t make things worse for me, personally?
It’s not a crazy idea, but I don’t think appealing to selfishness is strictly necessary in Trump’s case. Most people hate crooks and liars, and Trump is more crooked and dishonest than any American politician in 250 years. That’s why most people hate him! And, roughly speaking, the people who like him either aren’t aware that he’s a crook and a liar or have chosen to forgive him—not because he did anything especially good for Americans, but because he makes liberals so upset.
However! I don’t object to connecting dots between Trump’s corruption and the direct harm he’s done and threatens to do to Americans—particularly when the dots are easy to connect. And if that’ll persuade Democrats to make a greater issue of his corruption, there’s no better case-in-point than his decision to leave 330 million Americans vulnerable to a pandemic disease he knew to be airborne and deadly because he feared that leveling with us would be bad for him personally.
CLASH IN THE PANDEMIC
When Ronald Reagan coined the canonical question in American presidential politics—Are you better off than you were four years ago?—he was challenging an incumbent. But the rhetorical pitch works just as well the other way around, when an incumbent seeking re-election has made the country he inherited better off than it was.