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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Episodes / E0: COVID-19 Political, Economic & Social Ramifications featuring David Friedberg
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Chamath @ 00:16:23Wrong
politicseconomy
Conditional prediction: If President Trump successfully secures an enormous economic stimulus package in response to COVID‑19, then (1) retrospective historical judgment will be that he handled the crisis well, and (2) his probability of winning reelection in the November 2020 U.S. presidential election will be higher than it would have been if the coronavirus crisis had never occurred.
if he is able to salvage an enormous economic stimulus package, I think the odds are on a side that history will judge that he will have done a good job. And more than that, his odds of getting reelected are actually higher than in the absence of corona.
Explanation

The antecedent of Chamath’s conditional prediction clearly occurred: on March 27, 2020, Trump signed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, widely described as the largest economic stimulus package in U.S. history, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. (en.wikipedia.org)

However, both implied consequences are not borne out:

  1. Historical judgment of his COVID‑19 handling – Early scholarly and expert retrospectives characterize the U.S. federal response under Trump as slow, mismanaged, and marred by political interference in health agencies, despite some notable achievements like Operation Warp Speed. Academic analyses describe the U.S. as having “responded badly” to COVID‑19 and emphasize failures of executive leadership. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) Public opinion during and after 2020 also skewed negative: majorities consistently disapproved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and judged the U.S. response as less effective than that of other wealthy countries. (pewresearch.org) In broader historical evaluations, Trump has been ranked near the bottom of U.S. presidents overall and last in a prominent 2024 “Presidential Greatness Project” survey, indicating that historians and political scientists do not, on balance, view his crisis leadership favorably. (businessinsider.com) This contradicts the claim that “history will judge that he will have done a good job” on the crisis.

  2. Effect on his reelection odds – Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden. (en.wikipedia.org) More importantly for the probabilistic claim, multiple political‑science studies using county‑level data find that higher local COVID‑19 case counts reduced Trump’s vote share and that, all else equal, he likely would have been reelected had the pandemic been somewhat less severe (e.g., 5–10% fewer cases), implying that the pandemic hurt rather than helped his reelection chances. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) Pew’s synthesis of 2020 public opinion likewise concludes that the pandemic’s impact on the election was “hard to overstate” and that Biden supporters overwhelmingly cited Trump’s handling of COVID‑19 as a major reason for voting against him. (pewresearch.org) This evidence runs directly counter to the prediction that, conditional on a big stimulus, his odds of reelection would be higher than in a world without the coronavirus crisis.

Since the condition (securing an enormous stimulus) was met, but both projected outcomes (favorable historical judgment of his crisis performance and improved reelection odds relative to a no‑COVID counterfactual) are contradicted by subsequent evidence, the conditional prediction is best classified as wrong.