President Trump said in his Oval Office address Wednesday night that the spread of the coronavirus isn’t an “economic crisis” and that “we must put politics” aside to deal with it. Unfortunately, he’s wrong on both fronts.
Lest the president had not seen just before his speech, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has plunged more than 20% from its high. That comes as everyone is being told to stay home, become hermits (we’re now calling it “social distancing”), and withdraw from normal day-to-day buying and spending.
I don’t know what we can label that other than, at the very least, a sign of an economic crisis.
It’s nice to think that we might “put politics aside,” but, if Trump wants to win the next election and save us all from either a repeat of the depressing Obama years (with Joe Biden) or a complete social justice revolution (with Bernie Sanders), he has no choice but to make this not just a fight over the nation’s health, but also over politics.
Let’s not act like Democrats aren’t doing this already. On the campaign trail, Biden said in a recent presidential debate that he was in office for the management of the 2014 Ebola crisis and that, if he were president, he would manage the coronavirus situation the same way. It’s a stupid comparison because Ebola doesn’t spread as easily as the coronavirus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Ebola requires direct physical contact of bodily fluids between humans, whereas the coronavirus can apparently transmit through a sneeze or cough.
Trump has no choice but to point that out and point it out often. He’s dealing with a unique contagion, and, while that’s no excuse for any of his administration’s shortcomings to address it (like the embarrassing and lasting shortage of test kits), it’s at least true that Biden, or any other Democrat, has any clue how to handle this any better.
Trump, in three years, has not endeared himself to the public at large because he’s a handsome, charismatic figure. He has been tolerated by the public because he has performed well on the economy and because the alternative to his presidency, for a lot of people, is more repulsive than he is.
If Trump wants to win reelection, this is a fight that is about the economy as much as it is going to have to be political.
