Last week, Ross Douthat got a lot of deserved grief for a column where he argued (seriously): ”How many Americans are dead because Trump, rather than a normal politician, occupied the White House in 2020?”*
In other words, what if we can only pin some number less than 200,000 on Trump? Times commenters were unsparing. “Alice” wrote:
“The idea of parsing the number of deaths is repugnant. The Trump administration's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been inept at best and criminal at worst.”
Twitter joined in:
So this week, Woodward’s “Rage” tapes come out.
You would think a “reasonable” conservative, as Douthat purports to be, would leave well enough alone.
Nope. He doubles down with “What isn’t Trump’s fault” and his response is even worse than last week:
He writes “some failures in the American response are less about the president’s specific faults and more about a debilitating pre-existing condition in his coalition.”
This is a defense? Trump exploits that coalition for all it’s worth. He was elected because of that coaliation. That coalition is called “Republicans,” Douthat’s party.
Then he blames the “public health bureaucracy,” as if it were not headed by Trump appointees and either ignored or manipulated by Trump.
Finally, he sticks to the duplicitous five EU countries comparision. Reader Keith Van Sickle takes care of that:
Douthat again looks at European death rates versus that of the US and finds them comparable. Let’s break that down.
Last week he compared the 5 largest EU countries to the US. That’s a reasonable comparison, because the total population of the two is almost identical. But what’s not identical is how the two regions have reacted to the virus.
In the period through May 31, when we were all still learning about effective containment methods, the 5 EU countries had total deaths of 136,355 against our 108,907. Advantage USA.
But then they learned and we didn’t.Between June 1 and August 31, the difference was stark: 9,729 deaths in the 5 EU countries versus 78,803 in the US.
And of course, no mention of Canada.
But the main question is “Why?”
Douthat can twist himself into knots about “other factors.” There are always “other factors.” But it is obvious beyond certainty that Trump’s failure has been catastrophic. Attempts to paint it as anything else are poisonous and prove once again there is no such thing as a ‘reasonable’ conservative.
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