“We should not send you back to work until it’s safe to send you back to work. This is a false choice. The way you revive the economy is you defeat the disease,” the two-term former vice president and 36-year Delaware senator told MSNBC Thursday.

Meanwhile, Trump has reiterated that he doesn’t want “the cure” to “be worse than the problem itself,” announcing on Thursday his guidelines for “opening American again” as deaths from the illness tick up in excess of 33,000 nationwide.

But the former real estate mogul and reality TV star, who prides himself on his business smarts, now presides over an economy in which 22 million people last month applied for unemployment benefits, a record high.

In March, his White House struck a deal with a divided Congress for a $2.2 trillion virus-related federal economic relief and stimulus package. Negotiations are underway this week for an additional $250 billion to replenish the small-business aid program after funds keeping those entities afloat were quickly drained.

Pollster John Zogby believes the economic environment could benefit Democrats since it prevents Trump from running on the issue but warned “that sucker punch” was loaded with caveats.

“You can see why the Republicans want to move on the economy. Because they need it,” he told the Washington Examiner. “What you’re seeing, the kind of unemployment and shuttering of businesses, the lack of future for people, it’s very hard to reelect somebody on that.”

The federal government’s handout approach, though needed, has also blunted GOP attacks asserting Democrats are teetering dangerously close to socialism because their own strategy is “a combination of Andrew Yang and Franklin Roosevelt,” according to Zogby. He added it hurt the Republican deficit reduction platform too.

Though the economic “rug has been pulled out from under the president,” Zogby said the possible boon was complicated by a messaging predicament for Democrats unless the recovery effort’s rollout became mired in complaints regarding technical difficulties, wastefulness, or cronyism.

“How do the Democrats run? ‘We’ll spend money we don’t have more efficiently.’ That’s a hell of a bumper sticker,” he said.

“Democrats have to run against Santa Claus now. That money is coming from Donald Trump’s government. Is this the guy we want to throw out?” Zogby said. “And also, in typical Trumpian fashion, he’s insisting that all the checks have his name on them.”

As many people mark more than a month in quarantine, personal and political frustrations are beginning to boil over through protests in states such as Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio. Governors, however, are resisting Trump’s insistence he can lift mitigation restrictions unilaterally, forming regional task forces to map out their own plans.

For North Carolina-based Democratic strategist Scott Falmlen, it was important his party provided potential voters with support via public health information and resources, as well as governmental and legislative action. Democrats were additionally asking the Trump administration critical questions “about how we got in this situation and how we’re going to reopen our society at the right time,” he told the Washington Examiner.

“This crisis is an example where good policies and performance equal good politics,” he said, pointing to concessions his party extracted for the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. “I think Dems have handled this pretty well all things considered.”