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Comment by SomeoneFromCA | Hacker News Reader

It is very strange how he, a master manipulator, missed the obvious danger Covid could cause to his presidency. I mean, really?

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Bad poker players do this a lot. You bully and bully and bully, everyone folds, and your stack grows. You win little pots because the opponents don't like the risk. You win bigger pots because they think they have a chance, but you throw lots of chips in and act confident. Eventually some situation comes along where you've run up the pot, but there's no way people will fold.

Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.

Any illusion Trump was a master negotiator is blown away by listening to Bob Woodward's interviews. He almost incriminates himself, for free, over the phone apparently purely because he wants Woodward to write a better book this time.

Dude's a carnival barker. He's great at working up the crowds, but that seems to be his only talent. Combined with his obvious deficiencies in other aspects of leadership.

I don't think he missed it. IIRC he was appropriately briefed early enough. I just think he vastly underestimated how bad it would be, and once he realized he was wrong, he brand of machismo prevented him from actual showing a strong virus response.

Even during the peak, his team was still trying to play political games (by denying "blue states" federal resources to show it was democratic mismanagement). I think, if he truly made a strong showing (or was at least consistent in his message) he would have blown out Biden.

Trump literally would've won had he had sent free red MAGA masks to every American in March/April.

It was the perfect missed opportunity

He did one better, by signing the stimulus checks and branding the CDC guideline mailer. If those stimulus checks kept coming, I think he'd have won handily.

I tend to agree, and I think that is also why no such further checks were issued. Pelosi would not let Trump have that win, at the expense of the people's wellbeing, and the play worked. Not sure how supporters justify that with all the talk of empathy... maybe "it was worth it in the long run"?

This is not accurate. The HEROES Act was passed by Pelosi and the House of Representatives in May, and it would have included stimulus checks. It was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get...

The thing is he could also have done a macho move by ordering a huge lockdown, have military on the streets, but control the message the way he normally does: claim he was in early, say the economy would have been worse if he hadn't, blame China, point fingers at BLM for defying his orders, and so on.

That seems to fit just as well with his playbook, he just went for the wrong pill.

I think huge lockdowns would have pissed off his base to a greater degree than it would have reassured wavering conservatives. But just shutting up and making sure that his name was on the stimulus checks would have been enough to see him home.

So, assume Trump had a huge lockdown and put military on the streets, trashing the economy, running roughshod over the states, and playing into every narrative about being a totalitarian. Then what? We know from countries in Europe tha tried lockdowns that Covid would just be back in full force by the time of the election. It'd make him look both dictatorial and ineffective, a self-proclamed germophobe that tried to send an army to fight a virus and lost, a paper tiger.

In Europe, it went way down before coming back strongly. In the US, it just stayed big and grew.

The thing about doing something is you can always claim what you did was necessary. It's asymmetric. Do nothing, and if the problem doesn't go away you're an idiot. Do something, and if the same thing happens you can claim it would have been worse if you hadn't. There's always some example somewhere you can abuse to say whatever you want.

Whether someone did badly depends on expectations about how it would have gone if they had done otherwise. Like in sports, you judged less harshly if you lose to the favourite. If you let the "otherwise" happen, people complain that you let it happen.

"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."

Note I'm saying nothing at all about what ought to be done about the virus, just how to handle the PR.

>trashing the economy,

The economy, or by Trump's barometer, the stock market, would have been fine. The Fed juiced the economy and then some, SPY is currently trading at pre-COVID all time highs.

Secondly, it's much harder to pin the blame on ~230,000 Americans dead to negligence if Trump actually took some action. Even if COVID came back in full force, you could then say that we have successfully flattened the curve and are now much better at treating the virus.

Great leaders often work entirely from hunches and gut feeling. I think his whole life he did that and so far he got away with it. So along comes COVID and he simply went with his hunch even in the face of an overwhelming amount of contrary scientific and medical evidence.

That's because he's not a master manipulator: he is aggressive and lucky.

His actions were aggressive: just not against covid. He sought to shift blame onto local governments and claim glory for himself.

This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.

> This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.

I’m not so sure about that. There aren’t a hell of a lot of politicians who have handled it well in my view. There are a few and they are lauded for their efforts, but it’s not common. Have you any examples?

Do you have a source for your uncertainty?

The number of politicians handling the pandemic badly.

I would say Andrew Cuomo has handled it decently as a public health crisis, and handled it very well as a means to improve his reputation.

He didn't miss Covid, he had a plan, but it wasn't the right plan. To be honest, no one could make plans, only bets.

He wanted to use the pandemic as a way to boost nationalism. The evil virus from China vs America's freedom. Turned out, China handled the situation pretty well and blaming them for everything turned out more difficult than expected. And America didn't deliver, the drug industry couldn't find a treatment, and worse, one of the most effective mitigations, masks, rely on imports from China.

Had an American lab found an effective treatment, had a convincing argument been found against China, the situation would have been different for the elections. But how could one know? Trump just lost his bet.

A lot of people have this image of that there exists these perfect villainous masterminds who always know the truth and always say exactly what benefits them, but in the pragmatic universe of real people and limited intelligence, always knowing exactly what to say somehow comes at the expense of always knowing what's actually happening.

The electoral danger wasn't COVID -- sicknesses and pandemics haven't decided elections in the past, I doubt they do now -- the #1 danger to any incumbent is economic depression: Carter, HW Bush.

I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.

You say that like the pandemic and the economic situation this year were entirely unconnected. If the situation would have been handled with more care in the beginning instead of downplaying it, it likely wouldn't have had the economic effect that it did.

I passed no judgment about the effectiveness of Trump's actions.

Just my confidence he was fully aware that the pandemic-affected economy would be an enormous issue (in fact I believe he was hyper-aware...perhaps overly so).

Rereading your initial comment, I can see what you meant.

It still seems strange to me to claim that "X isn't the danger, Y is", if X is a possible cause of Y. That's like people claiming "heart attacks are not what kills people, it's stopped oxygen supply to the brain that does". Sure, it's in a way factually correct, but what's the point in ignore the cause if you know about it?

My point is that Trump was indeed aware of the danger to his election odds that a pandemic-related depression would cause, which is why he opposed lockdowns.

You might disagree with that action, but there's no question he knew (and was motivated by) the threat to his campaign.

I actually think it could have been a great opportunity for him. Generally speaking most leader's approval goes up when they handle a national crisis.

He could have made a fortune on masks with his name and campaign slogans on them, too.

Instead, 237k Americans died and 1,500+ die every from COVID, and many Americans are following his lead by not wearing masks.

You can’t bully a virus or subject it to social pressure

but you can use it to escalate executive powers beyond reasonable limits, like many governors did or like the previous two administrations did for the war on terror.

He claimed to be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected. OTOH, Covid could have been his 9-11 moment, with just a teensy bit of effort the resident of the Oval Office could come out a hero, just don’t screw it up.

OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.

COVID-19 presented a pat situation, so to speak, for Trump administration. No good moves whichever way to go. Imposing quarantine measures would be going against the very much support base, who not only oppose it, they subverted this into a principle point of distinction synonymous to freedom.

Approving a more substantial aid to people and businesses would go along the lines of "entitlements".

Both of such choices would also align Trump's administration, and by extension the Republicans, with the opposition - something made unthinkable in the current climate.

If anything, COVID-19 underscored more the perhaps cliche saying that "Divided we fall". The strategies that play into devisiveness can only provide a situational advantage; for lasting changes there needs to be unity.

It's a herculean task to unite a nation in the current state of polarisation.

Perhaps people could stand back for a moment and ask themselves what or who is it there that makes people so intolerably polarised; is there a vision that could move the nation forward, define challenges that call for such a united power to overcome them?

There was reporting recently were he followed Kushners plan to open the economy and lay the blame for spreading covid at the feet of the state governors for poor implementation. That "blaming the governors" part never really happened that I saw.

That might be the case actually. I do not buy simplistic explanations about being a simpleton bully and such.

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