[Genuine Realist]

This isn't a two-to-tango deal. The political dialog has been controlled by Donald Trump for the last four years - what he tweets, whom he denounces, the factual assertions he makes and the basis for them. He's the first President in forever to control the public dialog, and this holds great promise for the future. He could be gentle, wise, witty, warm, even while he's bashing away at his enemies - the English language is infinitely plastic, and everyone appreciates style and class.

He chooses not to be...

He has no choice.  He has no wit, no ability to understand highly complex matters, no empathy, and frankly no decency.  You need those attributes to be able to choose to be better.  He does as he is.

To be sure, the MSM is loathesomely, stupidly rabid. I don't think the New York Times is ever going to recover credibility.

Your viewpoint and I doubt you are in the NYT target audience -- take that however you want.  I never subscribed to them before Trump.  Now I subscribe and appreciate their investigative reporting since it's one of the few things I believe that could save our democratic institutions.

To bring this back to Covid, his performance on the crisis has been disastrous beyond belief. All a President really has to do is avoid politicizing an issue that is inherently apolitical. But he managed to do just that. Some of the criticism is incredibly unfair - I stick to my guns that the reactions to Covid between January and March in such incredible lockstep that the gaiting factor has to be the accumulation of clinical information to some critical mass (reached around March 7th). No Western leader, good or bad, did anything drastic until then. So the suggestion that Trump could have saved the day with some magic word is misplaced.

Your opinion again, and I think it's a really ill-informed one at that.  There's an entire layer of WH-level management that was supposed to act with urgency instead of the complete opposite response, making sure that those who had any urgency were fired or sidelined.  A real pandemic taskforce might have realized how messed up testing was and forced parallel development, or at least gave go-ahead quicker for emergency use of other tests that were indeed available.  Academia in Washington were screaming to let them at least monitor.  The Trump people have downplayed the dissolution of various WH-level pandemic management, but they also never addressed the difference between monitoring for natural pandemics and biowarfare prep.  Those are very different things and transferring remnants of the dissolved task force into these other units was not the same.  And if it was the same, what the hell were they doing when testing broke down and the Nat Sec advisor was sounding the code red.

Many scientists across the US dropped their main research to work on COVID-19, but there's been absolutely no federal coordination nor much funding for those efforts.  You're going to see a lot of very cool and innovative tests and treatments pop up, but they are grassroots and not accelerated by the fed -- and they *absolutely should have been*.

But I will finish on a heresiarchal note. The challenges posed by Covid, in terms of balancing economic duress versus constraining the pandemic, are so enormous that I don't think any executive action would be successful. All you can do is try to get it right, then try again, until society finds its own balance, its angle of repose.

I assume you've seen the charts of GDP hit vs Deaths/Millions and how various countries have handled it.  We are in the worst quadrant by far and when they do an update by next summer, I think it will look worse for us vs other countries.

We haven't even finished the first inning of this game. 

Above all, we haven't the slightest idea of the long range socio-economic effects of the countermeasures. We don't know how the effect of what we do is going to affect the profound social changes that are inevitable in this virus ridden age. We don't know the effect of our nostrums on the flexibility of society to adapt.

What we DO know is only what's easiest to measure, and it could be that's the least consequential of all.

[Genuine Realist]

This isn't a two-to-tango deal. The political dialog has been controlled by Donald Trump for the last four years - what he tweets, whom he denounces, the factual assertions he makes and the basis for them. He's the first President in forever to control the public dialog, and this holds great promise for the future. He could be gentle, wise, witty, warm, even while he's bashing away at his enemies - the English language is infinitely plastic, and everyone appreciates style and class.

He chooses not to be...

He has no choice.  He has no wit, no ability to understand highly complex matters, no empathy, and frankly no decency.  You need those attributes to be able to choose to be better.  He does as he is.

To be sure, the MSM is loathesomely, stupidly rabid. I don't think the New York Times is ever going to recover credibility.

Your viewpoint and I doubt you are in the NYT target audience -- take that however you want.  I never subscribed to them before Trump.  Now I subscribe and appreciate their investigative reporting since it's one of the few things I believe that could save our democratic institutions.

To bring this back to Covid, his performance on the crisis has been disastrous beyond belief. All a President really has to do is avoid politicizing an issue that is inherently apolitical. But he managed to do just that. Some of the criticism is incredibly unfair - I stick to my guns that the reactions to Covid between January and March in such incredible lockstep that the gaiting factor has to be the accumulation of clinical information to some critical mass (reached around March 7th). No Western leader, good or bad, did anything drastic until then. So the suggestion that Trump could have saved the day with some magic word is misplaced.

Your opinion again, and I think it's a really ill-informed one at that.  There's an entire layer of WH-level management that was supposed to act with urgency instead of the complete opposite response, making sure that those who had any urgency were fired or sidelined.  A real pandemic taskforce might have realized how messed up testing was and forced parallel development, or at least gave go-ahead quicker for emergency use of other tests that were indeed available.  Academia in Washington were screaming to let them at least monitor.  The Trump people have downplayed the dissolution of various WH-level pandemic management, but they also never addressed the difference between monitoring for natural pandemics and biowarfare prep.  Those are very different things and transferring remnants of the dissolved task force into these other units was not the same.  And if it was the same, what the hell were they doing when testing broke down and the Nat Sec advisor was sounding the code red.

Many scientists across the US dropped their main research to work on COVID-19, but there's been absolutely no federal coordination nor much funding for those efforts.  You're going to see a lot of very cool and innovative tests and treatments pop up, but they are grassroots and not accelerated by the fed -- and they *absolutely should have been*.

But I will finish on a heresiarchal note. The challenges posed by Covid, in terms of balancing economic duress versus constraining the pandemic, are so enormous that I don't think any executive action would be successful. All you can do is try to get it right, then try again, until society finds its own balance, its angle of repose.

I assume you've seen the charts of GDP hit vs Deaths/Millions and how various countries have handled it.  We are in the worst quadrant by far and when they do an update by next summer, I think it will look worse for us vs other countries.

We haven't even finished the first inning of this game. 

Above all, we haven't the slightest idea of the long range socio-economic effects of the countermeasures. We don't know how the effect of what we do is going to affect the profound social changes that are inevitable in this virus ridden age. We don't know the effect of our nostrums on the flexibility of society to adapt.

What we DO know is only what's easiest to measure, and it could be that's the least consequential of all.