Had an interesting kind of New Year's Eve colloquy, or maybe I should call it an obloquy (he was nice enough to respond to me on several points, but I was mostly just bouncing off him) with the writer Noah Berlatsky, who posted a fun list of 99 unpopular opinions on the Twitter, on all sorts of subjects, one of which was this:
agree on the whole, though I think it helped prevent certain horrors like bombing Iran or North Korea. On the other hand if he had been competent he wouldn't have wanted to do those things.
— Gluten4Punishment (@Yastreblyansky) January 1, 2021
Coincidentally, it turns out this morning that this is a less unpopular opinion than you might think, in part because of some terrific reporting by the New York Times White House gossip department on Trump's handling of the pandemic and his inability to understand that it involved the needs of anybody other than himself:
Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?
