My favorite Covid counterfactuals

My favorite Covid counterfactuals

What if Trump had followed his own guidelines?

Ross Douthat published a couple of speculative columns on Covid Counterfactuals. As someone who loves alternate history as a genre and also took a whole very serious philosophy class about the importance of counterfactual analysis for thinking about history, I like this type of column.

But Douthat left on the table my two favorite counterfactuals, both of which hinge on places where I think close-run decisions plausibly made big differences in the outcomes.

So here they are:

What if Donald Trump hadn’t abandoned his own task force recommendations on reopening?

What if Pfizer announced its efficacy results before Election Day and narrowly pushed Trump over the top?

In both cases, I don’t think we’d necessarily see huge changes to public health outcomes, because I think the evidence shows that Covid has been pretty responsive to changes in human behavior, but not that responsive to changes in policy. But I do think we would have seen significant changes in our politics and discourse.

(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Scott Alexander has this idea of “the scissor,” which is perfectly calibrated to divided people. One of Douthat’s conclusions is that “Covid’s death rate makes it a perfect scissor: It’s high enough to make the alarmed feel vindicated but still low enough that many skeptics feel vindicated as well.” I don’t think that’s correct.

I think instead that Donald Trump turns everything into a scissor, and that his mastery of this is his big strength and big weakness as a leader. And I think that secondarily, the American conservative movement as a whole is built to be scissor-friendly. Its leaders understand that having a high salience debate over their top policy priority (low taxes for rich people) is bad for the cause, so the party’s current incarnation is institutionally built to elevate controversies about anything else.

The plan that wasn’t

It’s easy to forget, but in early April of 2020, the pandemic was not a sharply polarized issue.

On the one hand, the Trump administration released a plan for reopening the economy that wasn’t just a denunciation of all restrictions and a call to take two hydroxychloroquines in the morning. Around this same time, the Center for American Progress — the Democratic Party’s all-but-official think tank — released its own plan that, while stricter than Trump’s, was very much not aiming for Covid Zero.

Delaware’s Democratic governor, John Carney, said the Trump guidelines “seem to make sense.” Lindsey Graham obviously didn’t criticize Trump, but he also cautioned that “you really can’t go back to work until we have more tests.”

The CAP plan, meanwhile, doesn’t say anything about keeping schools closed in fall 2020 and suggests that the federal government develop the capacity to do serological testing so that people who get Covid and recover can be certified as immune and less subject to restriction.

But then Trump, I guess spooked by the terrible headline jobs and GDP numbers in spring 2020, totally abandoned the task force plan and started doing “liberate Michigan” tweets, wholeheartedly endorsing the lifting of as many restrictions as possible in as many places as possible. It was only then in late April — when Georgia opened up sooner than the Trump guidelines would have suggested and an Atlantic article blasted it as “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — that the polarized Covid politics we now know were suddenly born.

If Trump had instead encouraged Georgia to open up in a slower, more phased way (adhering to his own guidelines) while simultaneously pushing states like California to reopen their outdoor spaces (also an Atlantic-endorsed idea!), he could have easily occupied the political middle ground.

Conservatives eventually adopted different rationales for the Reopen Everything policy approach, but back in spring 2020, the actual reason given was Richard Epstein’s comically inaccurate forecast that the whole pandemic would kill at most 50,000 people. If Trump had hewed to a more moderate course, it would have swiftly become clear that Epstein was just wrong and that the more moderate course was justified. Instead, because Trump made the wrong call, the whole conservative movement had to rationalize a policy choice made on false premises. And because Trump was being so irresponsible, the left came to view maximum Covid zealotry as the way to be a good progressive, forgetting both their own relatively moderate spring views and the once widespread consensus that we should try to flatten the curve but couldn’t realistically hope to halt the spread of the virus.

What difference would it have made?

I don’t think any of this would necessarily have generated dramatically different public health outcomes. I think the evidence is very clear that most of the stuff the Covid Cautious people advocate for like masking is in fact quite effective at reducing the spread of the virus if people actually do it. But my interpretation of the huge nationwide case surge in the winter of 2020-21 is that the kind of policy measures blue state governors ordered were not that effective at changing actual behavior.

Now one big part of this is that the absence of orders doesn’t mean nobody took precautions.

I know plenty of people in Texas who spent a whole year social distancing, wearing masks, and otherwise acting just like the majority of my friends in D.C. But I also know people in D.C. who spent a whole year having unmasked, indoor gatherings with wide-ranging groups of people. In other words, regardless of policy, cautious people behave cautiously and incautious people do not — the main difference is whether they’re at a restaurant or in a house.

But I think it would have made a huge difference politically. I think the big story of the 2020 campaign is that Trump took a strong hand and played it terribly. Then after losing, he took the weak hand of being a certified election loser and played it remarkably skillfully — using the myth of the stolen election to retain his untouchable status in the GOP. But a more sensible Trump (or, say, a non-Trump GOP president) could easily have avoided turning Covid into this sharply polarized issue.

The United States is pretty unique in this regard, and I think that’s all about Trump being the Edward Scissorhands of politics rather than Covid being a perfect scissor.

What has made a huge difference and is increasingly driving the pandemic’s evolution as a red state problem is whether people take vaccines. This raises our second question.

Who trusts the Trump vaccine?

In the real world, Trump’s big thing was to tout miracle cures and lie.

He hyped hydroxy, he proclaimed the Regeneron treatment he received to be a “cure,” and then he (falsely) promised free monoclonal antibody treatment for everyone. So when he confidently boasted that we would have successful vaccine trials way ahead of what most analysts predicted, sensible people were naturally suspicious. But by fall, it was clear that mRNA vaccines with a very high likelihood of passing Phase 3 clinical trials had in fact been produced in record time. This generated a lot of anxiety that Trump was going to rush an unready vaccine onto the market as a re-election ploy.

Now as it turns out, Trump didn’t do that. And aware that this controversy was in the mix, Pfizer actually withheld its press release touting its own assessment that their Phase 3 trial was successful until a couple of days after the election.

But what if Pfizer had made the announcement and Trump had been reelected? How would things be different if we were talking today about a Trump vaccine?

Before the election, liberals had varied reactions to the prospect of a Trump vaccine. I think the remarks Kamala Harris made around this time have been spun in a way that’s unfair to her (she said she’d take any vaccine Dr. Fauci recommends, just not one that only Trump was touting), but Andrew Cuomo promising a separate New York State review and saying he’s “not that confident” in the FDA really crossed the line.

I do think the highly educated liberals who are the biggest vaccine enthusiasts today would still be vaccine enthusiasts, Cuomo’s posturing aside, mostly because we know these vaccines were swiftly approved by the European Medicines Agency, Health Canada, and other international regulators. That’s not the kind of thing MAGA people care about, but the most paranoid Trump-haters in the world love a good global consensus and would have been very reassured by Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel vouching for the vaccine. Indeed, the partisan gap in vaccine acceptance was already visible in September 2020, so I think vax-loving libs would have loved the Trump vaccine.

That said, I do think Black vaccine-skeptical celebrities like Nicki Minaj and Bradley Beal would have been more vocal (and sooner) if we were talking about a Trump vaccine. This particular corner of elite discourse largely stayed quiet until Biden started pushing to make vaccines mandatory, but I think this would have come sooner with Trump as a foil.

And while second-term President Trump could not wave a magic wand and make conservative vaccine skepticism vanish, I do think Fox News would be publicly very pro-vax (we know Rupert Murdoch’s UK properties are), and Republican elected officials would be more uniformly supportive in their comments.

I think that dynamic would have somewhat muted the partisan nature of the vaccine divide, with somewhat more Republicans getting the shot offset by somewhat fewer Democrats. I think blue state vaccine mandates would have been seen as politically riskier — potentially anti-Black measures rather than ways of owning the Trumpers. On net, I’m not sure if this makes vaccination rates higher or lower, though it would probably be a somewhat less polarized issue.

The scissors

The moral of these stories, to me, is that the scissor is not Covid but Trump. His instinct for amping up polarization sometimes serves him well politically, but in the spring of 2020, it served him disastrously.

As a defeated former president, his decision to largely stay silent about vaccination (backing down immediately at the first sign of backlash from his base) while Fox News pumps out anti-vax propaganda is probably serving him well. Doing the right thing for the country and for his supporters’ own lives would divide his base of support and make Joe Biden look good by curbing the pandemic more rapidly. Playing Donald Scissorhands, in this case, is smart; it just happens to be getting people killed. But that’s not the kind of thing Trump cares about.