Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’s recent opinion essay defending former President Donald Trump’s economic record conveniently forgot a few things that happened during Trump’s term — the most notable of which was Trump’s terrible mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic.
Our national amnesia on this point is remarkable. By January 2021, when President Joe Biden was sworn in, the country had shed 2.7 million jobs. Meanwhile, the United States was reporting 146,000 new coronavirus cases a day. Eighty thousand Americans died in January 2021 alone. Of course, every country in the world struggled with the outbreak, but the situation in the United States ended up being much worse than in many other developed countries.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Counterfactuals are always tricky but consider this: the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for decades helped other countries write their playbooks for how to handle pandemic outbreaks. The CDC funded labs around the world to serve as early warning stations and even graded other countries on how well they were prepared to respond!
South Korea was one of the countries the United States helped.
By March 2023, South Korea had 66.5 deaths per 100,000 people from coronavirus; the United States had 341.11. If the United States had managed its coronavirus outbreak as well as South Korea did, using the plan that we had helped them write, only around 200,000 people would have died of covid in the United States and as many as 900,000 American lives would have been saved.
What was the difference in response?
In 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, countries like South Korea executed a well-developed plan and swiftly moved into testing, suppression and containment to shut down the spread of the virus. By April 2020, Korea had tested 1 of every 100 citizens, had “flattened the curve” of infections and, over the coming months, began carefully reopening schools and public places.
Meanwhile, the United States under Trump was in chaos.
Trump likes to bluff his way through crises, but in times of national emergencies, there is simply no substitute for informed and effective executive action. These situations require competence, good judgment and having a group of highly knowledgeable experts — yes, there is such a thing in government — who know what they are doing.
Well before the pandemic started, in 2018, Trump had thrown out the pandemic playbook left to him by President Barack Obama, disbanded the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense — the main group of experts who were supposed to coordinate a pandemic response for the federal government — and installed a controversial AIDS researcher whose main qualification was that he was anti-abortion as head of the CDC. What this meant was that in our sprawling, complex and multilayered government, in a country of 330 million people, there was no clear chain of command and no clear place to go for direction when the pandemic hit in early 2020.
How did this play out? First, the CDC failed to develop its own coronavirus test in a timely way and then inexplicably rejected using tests that were offered from other countries and the World Health Organization. Then, the Food and Drug Administration dragged its feet on approving commercial testing. This meant that in the early days, the most critical period to stopping coronavirus from taking hold in our population, our public health agencies were blind to the spread of the virus and unable to take effective countermeasures. Meanwhile, Trump, as usual, tried to bluff his way through, telling the public that this was all just going to go away by April: it would be a “beautiful timeline.”
In April, at the time that South Korea was carefully managing the outbreak and tentatively reopening schools, the United States had 1 million cases and freezer trucks were pulling up to New York City hospitals because there were more deaths than the morgue could handle. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp was deploying the National Guard to nursing homes to try to stop the death toll.
Things did not get much better after this.
Trump did (thankfully) allocate billions to the development of a vaccine through Operation Warp Speed, which meant we had a vaccine available starting in December 2020, but by the time Biden took office in January 2021, the pandemic was raging out of control, there was no plan or infrastructure in place to actually distribute the vaccine, and, worse, by this time, all the countermeasures, such as quarantines, masks and vaccinations, were so hopelessly tangled and politicized by Trump that by end of 2021 and into 2022, those dying were largely people who had refused a lifesaving vaccine.
Meanwhile, whether Trump could have avoided the post-pandemic inflation is an open question. The coronavirus crisis caused serious economic disruptions that contributed to inflation, including labor shortages and global supply chain disruptions — all of which the Biden Administration had to scramble to fix and largely did. Every country experienced inflation coming out of coronavirus, and the United States did better at containing this than most countries.
Republicans are quick to blame the Biden administration’s deficit spending for inflation, and I’ve long been a critic of some of these unpaid-for initiatives, but Trump was far worse, and he inherited a good economy. Trump approved $8.4 trillion in new borrowing, $4.8 trillion if you exclude the various coronavirus relief packages. Biden only approved $4.3 trillion in new borrowing, $2.2 trillion if you exclude COVID relief.
I have written before about how Trump is likely to continue to subvert our democratic institutions, and this alone disqualifies him in my mind for reelection. But let’s not also forget that his chaotic and incompetent administration left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead. There is a reason many of his former Cabinet members and key advisers do not think he should be reelected. Meanwhile, many of his proposed economic policies including debt-financed corporate tax cuts, tariffs and severe immigration restrictions would increase inflation, not decrease it, according to Wall Street economists.
Georgia cannot afford another four years of Donald Trump.
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