Presenting only one side of an argument “doesn’t mean that your premises are false or irrelevant,” the philosopher Peter Suber wrote, “only that they are incomplete.” By that standard President Trump’s defenders—and some of his critics, too—have made only partial attempts to identify culprits for the extent of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Trump’s defenders point their fingers at China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, whose regime censored information about the virus, including about its transmissibility, thereby immensely worsening the pandemic. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s critics single him out for downplaying the pathogen’s threat to Americans, even as the consensus of public health experts and the horror stories out of Wuhan and then Lombardy made it untenable to do so.
Both groups are right. Trump’s negligence, willful ignorance, and devotion to his public image—recall that he said “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the U.S. testing shortage—undoubtedly has cost American lives. So, too, has Xi’s drawing of the Chinese Communist Party line and censoring or “disappearing” prominent figures who don’t toe it.
The cases against both world leaders are damning—and ultimately not in tension with one another. Rather, they are complementary parts of a lesson: that blame for the U.S. contagion is owed not necessarily to a man but a method. That method is “authoritarianism,” a term that may strike American ears as unobjectionable for Xi but exaggerated for Trump, since he isn’t peremptorily locking up his political enemies or otherwise curtailing Americans’ freedoms. But as the world has witnessed, both pure autocracy and the relatively diluted rule of a strongman—Trump, who called alarm about the coronavirus a “hoax,” who continues to bully governors and reporters, and who claimed on Monday that state and local governments “can’t do anything without the approval of the president”—result in calamity.
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Article URL : https://thebulwark.com/trump-and-xi-are-both-to-blame/