Coronavirus is not Trump’s Vietnam!

Sentient humans like to benchmark their successes and failures. So it’s understandable that in trying to put the coronavirus’s toll in perspective, some Americans have fastened their eyes on one particular grim milestone: The 58,300+ deaths in the US from Covid-19 over the last three months have now surpassed US casualties from the Vietnam War (58,220 deaths recorded from 1956 to 2006, according to the National Archives).
But juxtaposing those casualty figures is one thing. It’s something else entirely to
call the coronavirus “Trump’s Vietnam” — a historical analogy that’s getting increasing screentime. At a White House press conference earlier this week, for instance, a reporter asked, “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be re-elected?”
To be clear: President Donald Trump’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus will go down as a landmark failure of leadership. But to compare his feckless mendacity and the senseless deaths it has so far caused to the US conduct of the Vietnam War is also to commit a form of historical malpractice — one that obscures Trump’s culpability and slights an earlier, greater American tragedy.
The two events are radically different in cause, scope and ultimate consequence. Put in the simplest actuarial terms, the wars in Indochina led to more than five million deaths; the current global toll of the pandemic is about 215,000. One represents an inexorable collision of history’s seismic plates; the other is a tremor that, in the case of the US, has badly rattled a termite-infested house tended by a malicious and incompetent landlord.
Say what you will about the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War, but it was a national project that germinated for more than a decade before the first US combat troops came ashore on South Vietnam’s beaches in 1965. Steeped in established strategic doctrine and carried out by a well-resourced, fully staffed military and civilian bureaucracy, the war also enjoyed majority public support. Not until August 1968 (the peak year for the number of US soldiers deployed as well as killed) did a majority of Americans regard the decision to send troops to Vietnam as “a mistake.” Notably, public opinion was not polarised along party lines.
Contrast that with Trump’s response to the pandemic: a toxic blend of ad hominem attacks and ad hoc policy administered by denuded cabinet agencies run by yes-men (and the occasional yes-woman). Public approval of his handling of the coronavirus crisis crested at just under 50% on March 25 — far below the usual crisis poll bump enjoyed by his predecessors — and even that was driven largely by Republican respondents.
—Bloomberg