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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

I'd say he also encapsulated the appeal of Trump: he's wrong, sure — they're all wrong — but at least he's a different kind of wrong. People thought they'd give it a shot, because how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.

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> how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.

By showing us that it is all lies by lying about literally everything, we will become wiser? By demonstrating that our democracy is weak by attempting to topple it, we will become stronger?

It sounds like some kind of Tough Love dream. I don't care for it, though, I think draining the swamp is an admirable idea so long as filling it back up with the sewer isn't the second part of that plan. I'm not convinced the path to a better country requires that we destroy it first.

One of the dumbed-down lessons I had re-solidified over those years and choices is that change is not always good.

Which I now realize is a bit ironic, considering who I learned it from.

I subscribe to the idea that people become more conservative as they get older because they've seen all the times change has resulted in worse outcomes, and have lost faith that change will result in something better, so would rather stick with what they know and have spent decades learning to work with than mix it up some more. Life beating pessimism into people until they are jaded.

On the flip side, you have the young who are optimistic enough to think that things will only get better because so many people are hoping to make things better, and with that backing how could it get worse?

This progression might be greater or lesser in some people, or even go in reverse. Regardless, I suspect somewhere in the middle of this is where we usually should be. Where people want change but are cautious because they've seen good intentions backfire and movements be subverted, but also when they haven't become so jaded as to not want change for the sake of not having to deal with it anymore, even when it's important issues that help a lot of people.

That I view myself at where I describe as a good spot in this progression is probably informed by a non-negligible amount of subconscious bias on my part.

I'm pretty sure if Covid had happened during a Hillary Clinton administration, she wouldn't have been stealing PPE and test supplies from state governors and stuff like that.

Pretty sure 100's of thousands of people wouldn't have died.

Pretty sure she would have sanctioned Russia a lot harder, to try to, oh, dissuade them from invading Ukraine.

You're getting downvoted, clearly, but I think you're more right than wrong. I still think the feds would have screwed up the response and just as many people would have died. But the spats with governors likely would not have happened. And she's certainly far more of a hawk than Trump, so I expect you're right that she'd have been more aggressive towards Russia. Not sure if it would have dissuaded them from invading Ukraine, though, Putin is pretty crazy.

Don't think that a Clinton presidency would have nudged needle one way or the other in regards to Covid. The only thing we did that had a real impact was get the vaccines, and that would not have been any quicker with Clinton.

There would presumably been less chaos and drama. Maybe; the Trump supporters would still have been out there. But there isn't a lot to suggest outcomes would have been a lot different.

There were two things that had a major impact. One was the vaccine. The other one was the massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020. The case fatality rate dropped substantially; infections of care personnel became much less common. (Masks had a controversial-relevance impact, but seeing as the international community at large didn't get to masking any faster than the US, it's unlikely Clinton would have changed anything here.)

On that second point, Clinton absolutely would have made a difference, because we know that the administration was aware of the pandemic well before the cases started spiking in New York, and we know [1] that Trump autonomously decided not to publicly release that information or tell the CDC to prepare for a major epidemic. That was a major, avoidable mistake. I doubt it would have prevented 100k deaths; rather somewhere in the range of 10k-50k.

Also, Trump really energized vaccine denialists; he was already catering to them in 2016 [2], and a loss in 2016 would likely have significantly reduced his audience on this point. It's not clear how many more people would have gotten vaccinated in a world where Clinton won in 2016, but it might be significant. Densely urbanized blue states led in deaths per capita before the vaccine came out, but now only New York and New Jersey are in the top 10, and my state of Rhode Island dropped from 4th-most DPC to 18th [3] -- I don't recall there being a strong correlation between Republicans and vaccine denialism before Trump, and in fact, the correlation may have reversed since 2011 [4].

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-told-bob...

2: https://www.historyofvaccines.org/trump-and-vaccines

3: https://worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

4: https://reason.com/2011/10/04/more-anti-science-democrats-or...

> massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020.

This was 100% attributable to Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell's rebellion video to youtube, where he called out the academic doctors for giving doctors like him the terrible advice to ventilate SARS-CoV-2 patients as the best treatment.

Dr. Kyle-Sidell's journal letter discussed his observation of hypocapnic hypoxia. This would've been easy to treat, if Medicine hadn't forgotten about #OxygenToxicity.

The only thing that would have changed meaningfully would be the attitude of the press.

I mean, to the first part, yes, but why aren't you sure it was worse? Do you really want to be ruled by a facist dictatorship in the USA, which is what we'd now have if Trump had a second term? We may yet have that under someone else, but Biden bought us a couple of years, at least.

Or do you just not see the actual danger here and think Trump was a fairly decent guy who's just a bad/corrupt real estate huckster as opposed to a sociopathic grifter?

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