[foogazi]

Why do you come here to peddle that BS? What is the point?

Here is a clear example of the federal government siding against state’s lockdown mandates

https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-us-response-trump/2...

“ The Justice Department is pressuring state and local officials over lockdown orders The DOJ is questioning the legal authority of top officials in California and Illinois to extend stay-at-home orders.”

[DuskStar]

Well, when someone seems to be claiming that "everything would be fine if Trump wasn't a fuckup", I try to push back with "even if Trump wasn't a fuckup, there's enough other breakage in the way to prevent things from going perfectly". Trump messed up - that's kind of what he does. But with current US politics, there genuinely may not have been any set of actions Trump could have taken that would have both limited US cases to the levels Taiwan or South Korea encountered and not be impeached for it. (Because it would have meant doing things like "somehow convincing NYC to implement a no-seriously-you-stay-home order" and "implement a travel ban from everywhere", both of which would become a partisan issue and thus gridlocked)

A vox article about how the feds fucked up has no bearing on a counterfactual where the feds treated COVID like an existential threat back in February or early March. In that situation, you'd instead have an article saying that this was a major infringement on the rights of Americans, or that it disproportionately impacted a minority group. Which would have been true! But everything is a trade-off.

And as we can all see, it's not like the American Left has any real commitment to fighting COVID. Just look at how fast "stay the fuck home" turned into "protests are fine".

EDIT: you said "Why do you come here to peddle that BS?". I responded as if you thought my "I'm not sure anything Trump could have done would have turned out well" statement was BS, but you might have meant something else. Let me know!

[foogazi]

To your edit: yes that’s what I meant

You keep bringing politics into this - I think it’s ridiculous that you consider impeachment a threat while Republicans control the Senate

The federal government has taken unscientific actions during a pandemic risking people’s lives

[DuskStar]

And I continue to not deny that the federal government has continually failed. Instead, I've been saying that they're not the only ones to have failed, and that they're not always the ones with the most control. (Federalism is still a thing)

Further, impeachment only requires the House - conviction takes the Senate. And honestly, if Trump was enacting martial law, or anything similar, I don't think it would be too hard to get a few Republican senators to flip.

Really though, I brought up "what could he do without being impeached again" as a decent metric for "how much could he do before some cities and states told him to fuck off and stopped enforcing things". Incidentally, this would have almost certainly have gotten him reelected. Can you imagine the optics of "the states that followed Trump's lockdown orders were fine, while the ones that told him to fuck off have hundreds of thousands of dead"? (But this still wouldn't satisfy the hypothetical of "as good as Taiwan/SK", despite being better for the country and better for Trump personally)