I have been thinking about this for a few months, but now I find I have only a few hours left to write it. This is a note to future historians, who might be reading this years, decades, even centuries from now. Future historians might look back at the Trump administration, and especially 2020, the year that saw the Covid-19 pandemic, and wonder the context in which all of this happened. My basic mention to future historians: yes, we did know better, and almost everything that happened was an unforced error, when people en masse decided to ignore what was, at the time common sense and common knowledge.
Let me back up a little: when we discuss history, we often try to understand the context of attitudes, knowledges and experiences that might lead people to act a certain way. There are two extreme ways to treat past actions, and it is easy to construct and destroy a strawman. In the first, people can only be judged by the prevailing morality and information of the time. At the other…