– Trump committed a serious political mistake – VG

More than 600,000 people have lost their lives to the coronavirus since the pandemic began. Over 35 million cases of infection have been registered. And the trend is going the wrong way – Several states are struggling with low levels of vaccination and overwhelmed hospitals.

Donald Trump was the President of the United States when the pandemic broke out – and he chose to go against demands for face masks and social distancing. He chose for a long time to de-dramatize the coronavirus.

– We shut it out and stopped it, on March 12, 2020.

Lost by a narrow margin

During a press conference in April, he threw out hypothetical ideas about whether one can inject light or disinfectant in the body as a treatment against the coronavirus – something several doctors immediately warned against.

Half a year later, Joe Biden won the US presidential election, with 306 against 232 voters. The margin was tight: there were only 12,000 votes in Georgia, 10,500 in Arizona and 155,000 in Michigan.

– Trump committed a serious political mistake. Had he taken a strong lead in the fight against the corona, and used it to gain even more power, he would probably have been re-elected with a fairly solid margin in the election last autumn, Melby says to VG.

– Impossible for many

One consequence of the line taken by Trump and the Republicans is that Americans are divided on how dangerous the pandemic is and how it should be handled. In many states where Republicans are in the majority, the death toll and infection rates are higher.

Svein Melby believes that Trump’s “handling of the corona problem made it impossible for many to stand behind him”.

“Even with all his abominations and dubious democratic dispositions, he would probably have won the election if he had not just downplayed the whole pandemic problem and come up with all sorts of oddities in that regard,” says Melby.

«Lost on the long side»

Sigrid Rege Gårdsvoll, commentator in Amerikanskpolitikk.no, believes the rhetoric of Donald Trump was decisive for the election result.

– It was not the corona itself, but Trump’s handling that won the election for Joe Biden, Gårdsvoll says to VG and adds:

– Trump would hardly have had to deal with the pandemic differently if he had only spoken in a different way. Donald Trump’s opponents have always portrayed him as “out of touch” with reality. For many, it was probably extra real during the corona.

Like Melby, Gårdsvoll believes that many Americans were alienated by Trump’s pandemic management.

– It took a very long time for Trump to win re-election, but has lost on the last long side. It was the corona that did it. Americans want a leader who understands them. Trump was just that for very many. There were probably some who were motivated to vote in a different way when they felt that Trump did not understand them.

Gårdsvoll does not believe that the increasing polarization and disagreement about pandemic management will subside immediately.

– All kinds of corona measures and vaccinations have become a political marker for many Americans, she says about it skewed vaccine and infection statistics in the country.

At the same time, she emphasizes that African-Americans have one far lower vaccination rate than whites.

VG has previously written about how US authorities from the 1930s until the 1970s, black men over the age of 25 with syphilis recruited for experimental medical studies. The study is one of the darkest stories in the United States medical research – and is also stated as a reason why some blacks are skeptical of vaccination.

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Gårdsvoll believes that vaccine pressure, corona measures and discussions about corona passes can lead to increased polarization in the future.

– Some Americans may think that the authorities are trying to force them to take the vaccine. In recent years, Americans have tended to politicize everything that can be politicized. That development seems to continue, she says.

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