One phrase I have barely seen mentioned this week is COVID 19
Personally, I think we were fucked from the day COVID stepped into our lives.
Even at the simplest level, it was directly responsible for the inflation that ended up being the biggest head wind that we could not overcome.
But even beyond that, I think we massively underestimated the impacts that this period has caused. Like all large traumas, there are lingering after affects that will infect our psyche for years.
In my opinion, the MAGA movement was waning until COVID happened and it found new life in the resistance to COVID policies. The whole "bootstraps" crowd was perfectly happy to endanger entire communities as long as their personal "freedoms" were not hampered. They got new energy, new talking points and an economic environment to use a bludgeon for recruiting.
Perhaps the worst part of it all is how it all aligned with the rise of the RW media machine and radicalizing algorithms in social media. Entire segments of the internet became untethered from reality just when people were cooped up in their homes with little more than the internet to keep them occupied. To say they took advantage of it is an understatement.
So here is the controversial part that you aren't going to like. In my darkest hours over the last few days I have had two thoughts that keep coming back to me.
1.) Sometimes the right policy isn't a winning policy. In my heart, I know we did our best to protect our society from a deadly disease. But our efforts demanded a level of public cooperation and mutual concern that does not exist in this Country. We tried anyway. I think most people held on through the first year. But going into the second summer and fall, I think we lost people. The Country had covid fatigue and we were the ones talking about vaccine mandates and closing another year of school. Right or not, it was not popular and fed many of the narratives that MAGA have been driving ever since. Meanwhile, deSantis opened back up early during his campaign and got re-elected Governor easily. I am afraid that we ended up taking all of the lingering resentment and fueled the populist revolt in the process.
2.) I wonder if it would not have been better to lose in 2020. I always worried that it would be a difficult time to govern. It was pretty easy to see that things were going to be challenging. In the stock world, they call it "catching a falling knife". We inherited a Presidency that had at least 2 years of pain built into it. Even at the time, I figured that it might very well be so painful that re-election would be near impossible. It was a thankless job. If Trump had won, he would have been damaged and dealing with the economy that we got stuck with. It would have sucked for us. But in the end, it would have sucked less than the Trump 2.0 version that we are about to see now with no guardrails.
Just my two cents.
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Anyone remember how Trump wanted churches open for Easter, which was literally about a month after everything was shut down? Pandemics take years to resolve, and Trump is out there at his moronic press conferences promising miracles to his gullible followers. By the way, that also had a nice little ancillary effect of further radicalizing the already-radicalized churches in this country when they found out they wouldn't be able to reopen in a month. "OMG, we're all being persecuted!" 
I really hope that Fauci or someone else from the public health agencies will eventually speak out on what actually happened during the pandemic, because you just know that they were under extreme pressure from the Trump regime. It's the only good explanation for why none of the professionals in those agencies spoke out more at the time about Trump's total botching of the pandemic response in the US.
By the way, there have already been calls from the MAGA chuds--elected MAGA chuds like MTG--for Fauci to be prosecuted. But you probably already knew that. They threaten everyone, even when the case is immediately thrown out--or never even given legal consideration. These people are just bullies, backed up by a bullying far-right media machine.
