Convicted felon Donald Trump made some major claims in the first of two 2024 presidential debates on June 27, but among the biggest reaches was his attempt to shift blame for the COVID-19 pandemic onto Joe Biden.
The current president inherited an awful situation when he took office in 2021, and Trump’s abysmal decision making during the early days of the pandemic was a major culprit. Biden and his administration worked hard to get the virus under control, enacting mandates and sprinting full-speed toward an inoculation, but the nation was in crisis when he took over.
In the years since, we’ve seen COVID-19 deaths shrink substantially, and the virus is no longer considered a pandemic-level threat. It’s still out there, and it still poses a risk, but the looming danger of illness no longer lingers behind every unmasked face.
Most of that is due to the actions of the Biden administration, but Trump would like people to see it another way. He’s working to paint Biden as the villain in the COVID saga and even made the claim that more COVID deaths occurred during Biden’s administration than his own. It seems like a wild claim, given his massive bungling of the pandemic, but there’s more than just the obvious to consider when it comes to something as complicated as a global pandemic.
Did more COVID deaths happen under Trump or Biden?
Donald Trump and Joe Biden both found themselves faced with a terrifying, unprecedented situation when COVID-19 reared its head. Trump was still in charge when the virus initially reached our shores, and the disgraced ex-president spent the first months of the pandemic waving off concerns, ignoring advisors, and generally fumbling the bag at every step.
Which left Biden to inherit a spiraling country with sky-high deaths when he stepped into office on Jan. 20, 2021. He worked, and worked hard, to reduce the number of deaths, enact necessary life-saving policies, and turn the situation around, but it took months before any real progress could be made.
Which brings us to our answer: Yes, more COVID deaths occurred under the presidency of Joe Biden than that of Donald Trump. There are a few massively important factors to consider, however, which largely exonerate the current U.S. president from culpability.
For starters, Trump was president for less than a year, overall, of the COVID-19 pandemic. The danger didn’t truly reach the United States until March of 2020, and by late January of the next year, Trump was out of office. Biden, on the other hand, was president for several more years of COVID, which easily shifts the numbers in Trump’s favor.
According to the Statista Research Department, approximately 384,536 COVID-19-related deaths occurred in the United States in 2020. In 2021, that number increased to 462,193, and in 2022 it sank considerably to a far more manageable (but still harrowing) 244,986, but the numbers are undeniable. Simply considering those three years, 384,536 lives were lost under the Trump administration, while a full 707,179 lives were lost under the Biden administration.
That doesn’t even consider lives lost to the virus in 2023 or 2024, both years that have seen plenty of lives lost to the virus. The number would be even higher with those included, but 2021 and 2022 illustrate the point fine. Biden was in office for a far greater period of time during COVID-19, and the abysmal state of affairs that he inherited contributed greatly to the higher number of COVID-19 deaths.