I recall many “powerful” people and news orgs ridiculing Trump’s actions early in the pandemic even so far as claiming in some cases to never even use a vaccine created under his administration. A vaccine that the same people now herald as a savior once the current administration took charge. Is that the leadership that you are talking about?

The prior administration actively ignored and undermined all of that (as referenced in some of those prior links, and https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n... ).

The concern with a vaccine at the time was that it was going to be a mickey mouse one designed to show a win, rather than be effective, similar to Trump's claims about hydroxychloroquine and injecting disinfectants. But as people saw Moderna and Pfizer go through proper clinical trials, and be proved effective, even at the accelerated rate, and to be recommended by actual trusted medical professionals, they came on board. Well, obviously not everyone; now that it's been tested and shown to be safe it's Bill Gates' 5G mind control shot, despite Trump having received one.

It was great that they contained Ebola. But, containing a disease that makes you literally bleed from your eyes and requires bodily fluid contact and has an outbreak that starts in a low-density area of Africa, is much different than containing a disease where people who have the disease may only have a fever, and has airborne transmission, and the outbreak starts in a heavily populated city in China.

Only Hitler could unite most the rest of the world, and only then because that was near the peak of colonialism so world power had never been so concentrated.

Similarly, just because the US' leadership is both absent and therefore ineffective in an area does not imply that were the US' leadership present, it would still be ineffective.

Certainly, per the parent comment, we have examples of the US' past leadership in this context leading to a very different outcome. We know that leadership was abdicated (and in fact, actively eviscerated) during the prior presidency.

Second, yes Trump accelerated some things, but deep changes that caused Trump more than they were caused by Trump have been having more effect on international relations far long. Don't forget all the same complaints about not funding the state department were made in the Bush years.

Trump is a bad, don't get me wrong, but this seems like trite hawk Democrat thinking to me. It's precisely the nature of the US-led order in recent years that free trade agreements, IP laws, etc. etc. were more easily done than tackling issues of high global importance like global warming and Covid.

I was also not saying that Trump was a solitary problem.

I was not even judging Trump in my post, or making any partisan claims.

I was pointing out that you're attacking a strawman in your original post (as well as the one above). The original claim was simply "US policy in the past helped prevent pandemics. Under the prior administration, that policy changed, and we got a pandemic".

In response, you talked about global warming and Hitler. So I tried to explain why the logical leaps you took did not make sense.

And they continue to say that. This isn't on Trump.

Even if a president wanted to tackle climate change, a border wall or a Babylon tower they would be unable to get anything done before their term is up. I’m not old enough to know how things felt before Bush, but it seems like Congress used to actually exercise its power in the past