What isn’t Trump’s fault in failures of pandemic response

I recently argued 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 Trump’s culpable failures in the pandemic’s early days — which offered ammunition to readers who found my column to be implausible, pro-Donald Trump special pleading or just obtuse.

Some who found it obtuse asked a reasonable question: Does it matter if we could somehow establish that instead of being responsible for 140,000 out of our 194,000-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. Framed this way, the debate over Trump’s culpability resembles other

FROM THE RIGHT

Ross Douthat Star Parker

Jonah Goldberg Walter E. Williams Pat Buchanan Marc A. Thiessen George Will debates in the Trump era, dividing those who treat his incompetence or authoritarianism as an emergency that throws every other problem into shadow from those who think that the trends that gave us Trump are still the more important forces and that he himself captures too much of our attention. 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.”

The first thing you see is that some failures in the response are less about Trump’s specific faults and more about a debilitating preexisting condition in his coalition — a folk-libertarian hostility to all federal policymaking, a reflexive individualism disconnected from the common good. What I’m calling folk libertarianism is deeply American, not just conservative, and its present expression has many antecedents in our history. And some of its impulses are healthy curbs against public-health overreach and local tyranny. But in the

GOP coalition today these impulses have too much power, or too few checks.

Crucially, Trump is not the prime mover here. He ran against some of these impulses in 2016, as a more pro-government Republican than his rivals. And in the coronavirus era he has often seemed more a captive of his coalition’s culture, echoing its loud media voices and deferring to its don’tlook-at-us lawmakers, than the originator of its pathologies. Some anti-Trump liberals might nod along to this point. But then the second thing you see when you look beyond Trump is more congenial to conservatives — the reality that our public-health bureaucracy, full of liberal technocrats rather than Trumpistas, has also been a locus of pandemic failure.

Some of these failures have been failures of messaging: the early attempts to discourage mask stockpiling, the public-health hypocrisy surrounding the George Floyd protests. Others have been failures of will and imagination: the absence of challenge trials for vaccines, the predictable expert resistance to at-home testing. But the most important one was the bureaucratic calamity at the CDC that delayed effective testing for a fateful month.

An effective president might have addressed some of these problems. But overall they are problems with structures and habits rather than personalities. Certain Trump critics do recognize this more general incapacity. But they are often tempted to depict it as uniquely American. Hence the importance of the third thing you see when you look beyond Trump — the fact that so many countries have had death rates similar to ours.

This, too, may matter after Trump is gone. Where there are crises, they are likely to be general rather than just American. Where there is decadence, it is the shared experience of late modernity. And if renewal comes to an exhausted West, it will not necessarily come through America alone.

Ross Douthat writes for The New York Times.