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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

I find the narrative that Trump hasn't started a new war interesting, but not particularly compelling given his actions with Iran and ongoing incitement of civil unrest.

> The people have spoken, and they want war

I see where you're coming from, as usually I vote third party or abstain to avoid thinking I support one candidate that differs only by an epsilon of cultural preferences. But when one of the choices is responsible for the deaths of a quarter million Americans, it's a little different.

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So you're saying no one would have died from CoVid-19 if Trump weren't in office? Citation needed.

No, but fewer people would have. By contributing to it he's responsible for the entire outcome. It's similar to how two people can both be charged for one instance of murder.

It seems likely that if the national response to covid had tracked with, say, the NY State response, that yes: we'd have seen far fewer deaths. The first 60-100k, mostly in the northeast, probably couldn't have been saved. The initial outbreak happened too fast and too hard. But after that, NY has been flat. They controlled it. The same could have been true for the rest of the country, yet we collectively chose not to.

And yeah, that national response is the job of the executive branch. So very roughly 150k americans are dead now because Trump was in office. Somewhere around there.

The NY state response included sending sick patients into nursing homes. Had other states done that uniformly we'd have even more deaths, not fewer.

That happened in March and April, and obviously it was a mistake. But they controlled it, is the point. Their response after the initial wave has been excellent.

But it's a silly digression anyway. If you don't think NY is a good example, then pick Oregon. Or Canada. Or Germany. The point is that lots of large-scale responses of the form a "typical" democratic administration would have taken have very clearly been effective. While the US response, nationally, has not.

Ordering people to wear masks and shut down businesses is like ordering people to exercise, avoid alcohol, eat vegetables, avoid tobacco, and wear sunscreen. It might be fine as friendly advice, but it becomes dictatorial when the leader requires it. I find the demand for less freedom to be deeply disturbing. If it wasn't so scary it would be funny, because people accuse the president of acting like a dictator and then complain when he isn't enough of a dictator.

> I find the demand for less freedom to be deeply disturbing. If it wasn't so scary it would be funny, because people accuse the president of acting like a dictator and then complain when he isn't enough of a dictator.

You seem to be considering "freedom" as equivalent to irresponsibility. Being a leader means convincing people to do work they don't want to do, like wearing masks during a pandemic. We don't even need to debate whether the federal government should have implemented a national mask mandate. Simply having a president that recommended wearing masks instead of encouraging indignant irresponsibility would have saved tens of thousands of American lives, no laws required.

Trump gets called a dictator because he unilaterally picks nonsensical ideas and then barks them at everyone to get done, while accepting no feedback about how things are actually working out. This is the behavior of a dictator, regardless of how much power he actually wields or how effective he is. The latest example is his hissy fit over losing the election - there's no basis in reality, yet he's continuing to push it anyway. Seeing someone acting like the law does not matter sets off the fascist alarm bells.

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