Pandemic Lesson #4: Was Donald Trump the Best Of All Possible Worlds?
The fourth of five lingering thoughts that I'm taking away from the pandemic: mostly an excuse to discuss an under-appreciated Enlightenment thinker.
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To put my cards on the table, I think history will remember Donald Trump as the worst president in American history. However, I also think there is a strong retrospective argument that he was the best possible president to have in office during the pandemic.
Now that I’ve irritated absolutely everyone, how do we resolve this seeming contradiction? The answer lies in a semi-obscure Enlightenment thinker.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz has one of those biographies that seem fictional save for the fact that it’s true. He is most well-known for independently co-inventing calculus at the same time as Newton.1 While that alone is impressive enough, it undersells his intellectual resume.
Take this quote from his Wikipedia biography:
In April 1661, he enrolled in his father's former university at age 14, and completed his bachelor's degree in Philosophy in December 1662. He defended his Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation [in] June 1663. Leibniz earned his master's degree in Philosophy [in] February 1664. In December 1664, he published and defended a dissertation, An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right, arguing for both a theoretical and a pedagogical relationship between philosophy and law. After one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelor's degree in Law [in] September 1665.
If three university degrees by the age of eighteen isn’t impressive enough, by the time of his death in 1716, his interests included, and I quote, “mathematics, physics, geology, medicine, biology, embryology, epidemiology, veterinary medicine, paleontology, psychology, engineering, linguistics, philology, sociology, metaphysics, ethics, economics, diplomacy, history, politics, music theory, poetry, logic, theodicy, universal language, universal science.” And these weren’t just passing interests; just the list of his “notable ideas” on Wikipedia requires a "show/hide" drop-down button.
While both the breadth and depth of Leibniz’s mind are impressive, this newsletter is focused on a single one of those notable ideas: his ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’ argument.
One of the most famous arguments against the existence of God is the problem of evil. If God is omnipotent, omniscient , and omnibenevolent, then how why does the world contain evil and suffering?
In 1710, Leibniz published Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, which contains one of the most thought-provoking attempts at a solution to the problem of evil.2
Leibniz recognized that there are near infinite ways in which that events in the universe could unfold, but that in any complex and meaningful universe, entities within that world will naturally come into conflict with one another. For the rabbit to evolve its swiftness and agility, it must be hunted by the fox. And for the fox to develop the desire to hunt the rabbit, it must suffer from hunger and starvation. There are no mountains without volcanos and earthquakes; there are no rivers and oceans without tsunamis and floods. This natural conflict makes it logically impossible God from creating a meaningful and complex world with zero evil.
However, the critical step is the recognition that while God couldn’t eliminate evil, he could minimize it. By knowing the totality of events in every possible universe, God can ‘add up’ the total amount of good and evil in each possible timeline. Using his omnipotence, he then makes sure that the universe plays out according to the one that minimizes, but not zeroes, evil across the entirety of the timeline. In calculus terms, God calculates the integral of evil in every possible timeline and picks the smallest one. This ‘best of all possible worlds’ framing explains how short-term, local pain and suffering is allowed to happen; it’s a necessary part of the timeline that minimizes evil over the long term.
To quote Leibniz in his own words:
53. Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.
54. And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves.
55. This is the cause for the existence of the greatest good; namely, that the wisdom of God permits him to know it, his goodness causes him to choose it, and his power enables him to produce it.
Since this newsletter is about the pandemic, let’s try a COVID example:
Since species naturally compete with and take advantage of one another, it’s logically impossible to have a complex tree of life without disease. Of relevance, coronaviruses have learned to hijack human biology for their replication. Prior to 2019, there were already four coronaviruses endemic in the human population, and two novel coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1 and MERS) had caused a small pandemic and a severe outbreak, respectively, in just the last twenty years. Given how close bat coronaviruses were to human biology on the evolutionary landscape, it was impossible3 that another novel coronavirus wouldn’t eventually jump into humans, and there were many research articles that directly mentioned the likelihood of this.4
If a novel coronavirus was eventually going to jump into humans, the physical properties of the ‘wild-type’ virus mattered greatly, since this is the one that the immune-naive population would face. All else being equal, we’d prefer a virus with less virulence or was less transmissible.
And that’s what happened. During the pandemic, the ‘wild-type’ CoV-2 evolved into both Delta (more lethal) and Omicron (more transmissible). It was only a handful of amino acid mutations that provided these jumps in abilities; there was nothing preventing the original virus from having them. The fact that CoV-2 originated as the ‘wild-type’ virus that wasn’t maxed in either virulence or transmissibility, helped buy us the time for the development of the safe and effective vaccines that prevented tens of millions of deaths globally when the more lethal/transmissible variants arrived.
Now that we’re familiar with Leibniz’s ‘best of all possible worlds’ argument, how does it relate to the 2016 election?
At a certain point in 2016, there were only two possible future presidents: Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.5
Perhaps through some strange butterfly effect, Clinton winning in 2016 would've prevented the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's impossible to defend endless counterfactuals, so let's just assume that the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in central China in late 2019 was independent of the 2016 election.
There are numerous reasons to believe that Hilary Clinton would've been a competent head-of-state to have in office during the pandemic: an experienced manager who is level-headed and detail-oriented, who would've listened to and considered plans from a wide range of experts and fields, and as a career politician would've weighed the various pros and cons from multiple angles and how they would’ve affected everyday Americans.
That being said, through no fault of her own, I think it is extremely likely that a hypothetical Clinton administration would've been a catastrophe with respect to the pandemic.
While the pandemic influenced essentially every aspect of society, there are two main areas that take precedence in this analysis: the economic and the public health. In both, a hypothetical Clinton administration would’ve magnified the severity of the situation.
The Economic
Imagine telling someone in 2019 that Mitch McConnell would lead the largest expansion of the American welfare state in modern history or that Tom Cotton would vote to give illegal immigrants no-strings-attached cash. It would’ve seemed ridiculous, but in yet another reality-is-stranger-than-fiction example, both turned out to be true.
The Trump administration put Republicans in a position where they had to defend the most unpopular president ever during one of the worst economic crises ever, all during an election year. To use Joe’s phrasing from above, “Republicans were f****** terrified.” In response, they ‘turned on the money printer,’ and passed the largest economic stimulus in in American history. ‘Money printer go brrrr’ became a meme because it was an accurate description of what was happening. American’s disposable income increased during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (below, top), and for awhile, we had the most generous unemployment insurance in the entire world (below, bottom).
This massive fiscal response was only possible because Donald Trump was in office and Republicans needed to defend an extremely unpopular president in an election year. Beyond all reasonable doubt, Congressional Republicans would’ve drastically limited the size of the fiscal response if an unpopular Clinton administration was facing re-election6 which would’ve caused another anemic ‘lost decade’ for the American economy.
And that massive fiscal stimulus worked! The American economic recovery was the strongest in the developed world (below, top) while simultaneously have the lowest inflation (below, bottom). Unemployment fell to a 50-year low while labor force participation increased to a multi-decade high. Real personal consumption expenditures fully recovered and remain on or slightly above the pre-pandemic trend. And despite negative media headlines and poor consumer sentiment, the American economy remains strong; last month the economy added 336,000 jobs and the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDP tracker has Q3 2023 GDP growing at 5.1%.
Public Health
As I mentioned in “Pandemic Lesson #2: The Complexity Ocean,” it remains shocking that a Republican president funded rapid vaccine development by American private businesses, both the clinical trials and the results were released during his presidency, and subsequently the American Right rejected those vaccines in mass. Operation Warp Speed should’ve been the crowning achievement of the Trump presidency. Instead, it lead to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths on the political right.
But I think that very little thought has been given to the counterfactual of vaccines being funded by and developed during a hypothetical Clinton administration. Absolute disaster doesn’t even begin to describe what that vaccine rollout and campaign would’ve been.
America already has the lowest vaccination rate of any OECD nation with the ‘Trump vaccine.’ Think of all the hatred directed at Bill Gates, Pfizer, and the World Health Organization without a President Hilary Clinton being involved. The conspiracy theories would’ve written themselves. A hypothetical ‘Clinton vaccine’ would’ve led to wholesale rejection of vaccination by the political right and perhaps even somewhat less vaccination on the political left. It’s quite likely that had the vaccines been developed under a Clinton administration, there would’ve been hundreds of thousands to even a million more American deaths than we already experienced.7
Conclusion
In retrospect, having Donald Trump in office during the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have been the best of all possible worlds. The unique set of circumstances surrounding him allowed for both a robust fiscal stimulus that jumpstarted the American economy and a moderately-successful vaccination campaign. It’s very likely that both of these would’ve failed under a hypothetical Clinton administration, leading to a severe economic recession and an American death toll pushing and potentially surpassing two million.
This piece isn’t a suggestion of playing 4-D chess in trying to predict how the country will respond to future presidential administrations during a crisis. It’s merely a retrospective acknowledgement of strangely lucky aspects of America’s COVID response. Reality remains stranger than fiction.
“Pandemic Lesson #1: Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,” was about our chronic underinvestment in the physical world.
“Pandemic Lesson #2: The Complexity Ocean,” was about the growing complexity of the modern world.
“Pandemic Lesson #3: We Need an Air-Quality Revolution,” was about a simple change that would improve multiple aspects of our lives.
In fact, much of modern calculus retains Leibniz's notation, not Newton's.
Another example of Leibniz’s influence is that any attempt to solve the problem of evil is now known as a “theodicy,” coined in the title of his publication.
Here is a good place to mention the subtle difference between logical and physical impossibility. Logical impossibility only arises from contradiction (e.g. he is a married bachelor). Of course, it is logically possible that another coronavirus never evolves to infect humans, It’s like how it’s logically possible that all the air particles in the room that you’re sitting in suddenly shift to the other sides of the room and you suffocate to death, but this has never happened and will never happen in reality, because the probability is so infinitesimally low, that it is zero.
Another example of logical vs physical possibility. Yes, third parties exist, and while it is logically possible that one could’ve won the presidency, with America’s first-past-the-post electoral system, our system guarantees either a Democrat or a Republican winning the presidency.
Remember that Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats limited the size of the 2009 stimulus package under freshly-elected-and-incredibly-popular Obama. Hilary Clinton would’ve been much more unpopular than 2009 Obama and in 2016 Republicans were already saying they’d prevent her from filling Supreme Court seats.
1,145,958 total confirmed American COVID deaths, at the time of writing.