I think weighing and judging reality against an imaginary fantasy is less effectual than weighing and judging an imaginary fantasy against reality. Let me elaborate.
If you are buying a car and narrow it down to two choices, a Ford and a Toyota, and you go with the Toyota- and then 2 years later you have to pay to have the head gaskets replaced, you might assume that everything would have been completely fine had you only bought the ford. Tempting, yet bad logic. Similarly, if you're on Tinder talking to two new dudes, and you decided to get serious with one- and then a year later it doesn't work out, it may also be tempting to think that if you had chosen the other guy you would probably be married to him and happy with children right now. For an in-practice example, when someone calls me with a problem- something they have is broken down- often I will construct a best-case-scenario fantasy in which I only need to twist one little thing to fix it, but upon arrival with insufficient materials and tools, 99.9999% of the time the fantasy fails to play out, the situation is much more complicatedly common, and I have to leave to get more parts.
I get what you're saying. I think this is a very common tendency, and it's not unreasonable for someone who doesn't see Trump as a deeply deranged and incompetent megalomaniac to come up with this reasoning to make sense of what's going on in other's minds.
From this side of the fence: if you leave a crack-addicted monkey in a garage with a set of wrenches and a broken engine - and it doesn't fix the engine - it's not a fool's errand to speculate that leaving the broken engine and set of wrenches in the garage with an actual mechanic would have yielded better results.
Trump has consistently directly demonstrated mental unfitness for office. It's directly observable, no middle-man media needed to interpret for us what we're observing. He's a pathological liar who has systematically demonstrated that he believes he is above the law, that he feels an absolute sense of entitlement to dictate reality - reality IS what he dictates it is - (even bold-faced lies should be treated like the truth, and when they aren't the people who try to hold him accountable or disagree with him get fired and smeared by him - and every time he succeeds, his entitlement grows and it emboldens him to be even
more bombastically authoritarian). It's completely available to not see this, and to say that anyone who does see it is experiencing "Trump Derangement Syndrome". But that doesn't change that the majority of citizens of this country do see it, it doesn't change how directly observable it continues to be for those who can't really see anything else at this point when they look at that behavior. How many times does something have to sound/look/smell/taste/feel like a duck before a person kinda stops wondering what it is? (I've said this before, I would love if someone could look at it and provide an alternative way to make sense of it - but no one has).
If you actually wholly believe people aren't seeing fairly, then maybe be that hero who can directly look at it and effectively say, "Okay yeah, I realize he looks like a deranged megalomaniac because <insert all the reasons here, really listen well enough to be able to list the reasons as well as any Trump hater could list them>, BUT...." and then share this wisdom that proves he isn't. Really, this country definitely fucking needs it. But the strongest thing anyone from that side has said is: "He only looks like a deranged megalomaniac to you because confirmation bias and blah blah", and that does fuck all to bridge understanding. Just like "The only reason you don't see what a deranged megalomaniac he is is because you're drinking the kool-aid" doesn't effectively bridge the gap either. People who show up in these conversations and engage the other side just to deliver that^ message ("You can't see the good because you're brainwashed by MSM" / "You can't see the bad because Koolaid") are really just shitting in the pool. They're just phrases that people dispatch to self-soothe (I'm with whoever said that, it sounds about right) and they do fuck all to bridge the gap.
In sum: it's clearly available to not see how Trump is a dangerously authoritarian megalomaniac, but that's what people over here see. That's why you're "the grass will always looks greener on the side you didn't choose" theory is falling short.
The reality, and I keep saying this, is that this was a black swan event, and governments are slow lumbering forces with all the precision of a falling brick. Having Hillary in the white house wouldn't have changed the speed or effectiveness of the initial too-little-data-to-work-with vs the inertia-of-life-and-society response. I just can't summon a fantasy based on reality in which that would be plausible with a single person swap-out. The baked in failings of governments across the globe to something this sudden and unexpected were far too broad and systemic. If avoiding a mistake involves contradicting the entire inertia of a society's life and expectation there is no other way to learn how to avoid that mistake than the hard way. The only reason south korea seemed to be handing this really well compared to other nations was because they already had their hard lesson with the less communicable and more local SARS epidemic, therefore their lumbering government had plenty of time to construct 'antibodies' if you will (government level protocols) to address the next similar situation. This epidemic will do the same thing for the rest of the world, and we should all be very grateful that the wake up call we needed wasn't far more deadly than this one is.
Yes, the bolded is absolutely true. And I'm not saying there wouldn't be government failings if Hilary were in charge (or that she'd have wiped it out immediately, etc). But I clearly disagree about the extent to which Trump 'did as much as any competent leader reasonably could.' Because in my mind he's as competent as a crack-addicted monkey - his first approach to all of this was to dictate what he wanted the truth to be (instead of discerning, from experts who know far more than him about how the spread of viruses work, what we were dealing with) because that's all he knows: decide what you want to be the truth, and BULLY, COERCE, THREATEN and PUNISH THOSE WHO REJECT YOUR AUTHORITY TO DICTATE REALITY until people fall in line. It worked with the impeachment, and seems to have worked for him his whole life. But you can't gaslight/coerce viruses, and so his method of 'leadership' in this regard fell short. It is completely available for you to think my opinion is based on something other than the truth.
If you factor in the systemic failings of government in general, the inertia and expectations of global society, and the incredible speed with which this virus has outpaced failed human efforts to control and understand it across the board, Trump's handling of this has been great. He started doing the daily briefings, providing the public with full transparency and much needed knowledge about what was going on. He listened to the right experts and took the right steps. He activated governmental intervention and coordination on unprecedented levels, especially for someone on the right side of the isle. Once government finally caught up to the fact that there was a problem- which I believe is a built in delay, not something that is directly Trump's fault- it responded very well and with ferocity.
If you don't watch or read any news / trust any news source, where do you get this? I mean, you're not just presenting it as "this is my understanding, can you prove it's not true?" - you actually seem cocksure of it. Where does that certainty come from?
There's actually lots of evidence that he didn't listen to the experts and didn't take the right steps until the number of confirmed cases and fatalities had progressed to a point where he couldn't continue to assert it would magically disappear. (I personally suspect he really believed he could make it magically disappear by asserting it forcefully enough - because that's how people like him get pretty much anything done).
If people don't understand that the fantasy in which Trump is responsible for COVID19 is just a projected manifestation of older biases and frustrations with the man, they need to do a bit of soul searching.
I don't think there are many people who think Trump is responsible for Covid's existence or the fact that it got into this country. But he did drop the ball in an extraordinary way. And if people don't understand that the fantasy that Trump didn't drop the ball - the fantasy that no other leader could have done a better job - is just a projected manifestation of older biases and frustrations with everyone who doesn't like him, they also need to do a bit of soul searching.
