Trump is certainly to blame for a lot of the botched pandemic response. No argument here. I am by no means a Trump supporter nor have I ever or will I ever vote for that clown.

However, blaming all that’s gone wrong on Trump — as so many do, especially “liberals” — just seems utterly wrong to me. We’d already spent the last 40 years gutting our most important agencies, undermining confidence in government, and slashing budgets wherever we could. Much of that was done by Democrats, or allowed by them. Trump didn’t have anything to do with any of that except the last few years where he cut just a bit more.

I think a lot of the Trump blame stems from the desire not to point fingers at the DNC and for liberals to avoid casting blame on themselves for the vast failures of liberalism. After all, 99% of them bought into the neoliberal swill and hogwash about free markets, were ardent advocates of bootstrapism, and most of them believed and probably still believe that lack of good fortune is one’s own fault.

Trump, then, is just a mild symptom of a disease they actively spread for almost two generations now. How much better would Clinton have done? Some, sure, but in the face of all that’s already been destroyed, and the intransigence and misogyny she would’ve been confronted with, how much better?