Anybody who paid serious attention knew that Trump’s stream-of-though comments should never be taken seriously, and that’s what the light and Clorox comments were. They mean nothing.

Trump’s management wasn’t perfect, but his errors have to be balanced against his remarkable successes. Some epidemiologists can believe whatever they want, but certainly early on, the blame should fall on the hidebound bureaucracies at CDC and FDA, which kept Trump and the rest of us in the dark about the extent of the epidemic due to their pathetically testing missteps and bureaucratic silliness. It took Trump’s task force to hammer them into allowing outside labs to develop their own tests, and to allowing tests to be performed by anyone but the FDA.

I don’t think another President would have done better. I think the messaging the the top could have been a lot better, but I doubt another President would have taken the steps that got the US the vaccines so quickly and in such huge numbers. And, the messaging from CDC was and continues to be very poor, and the public health establishment’s lies about masks early on made it very difficult to get people to believe mask recommendations, and caused them to resist mask mandates. How many lives did that unnecessarily caused distrust cost?

Furthermore, those epidemiologists need to explain just how those 100,000 deaths could have been averted? Just blaming Trump is not information, it’s finger pointing.