The Coronavirus Is Not Trump’s Vietnam
More Americans have died from Covid-19, but it’s not worthy of serious comparison.
He doesn’t need your analogies.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP
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 U.S. from Covid-19 over the last three months have now surpassed U.S. 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?”1