| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Tough to imagine a story more evocative of Donald Trump's presidency than this one from the Washington Post: The Treasury Department has ordered President Trump's name be printed on stimulus checks the Internal Revenue Service is rushing to send to tens of millions of Americans, a process that could slow their delivery by a few days, senior IRS officials said. As the Post details, similar checks sent out during other administrations did not have the president's name on them. In fact: "It will be the first time a president's name appears on an IRS disbursement." In this case, the checks will only go to the minority of eligible citizens for whom the IRS doesn't have direct-deposit information. So no one who gets Social Security or has received a tax refund recently that was handled without a check.
Let's think this through. The plus side for the president is … virtually nothing. Yes, Trump's business career over the past 20 years depended largely on building up and cashing in on his name. And his subsequent fame certainly helped him win the Republican nomination in 2016. But that's all ancient history now. He's the president. Adding his name to stimulus checks won't increase his name recognition. Nor is it likely to affect voters in any other way. He's the president! No one needs to see his name to make the association. If people are happy about the checks, they'll be happier about the government and (on balance) more likely to vote for Trump. If the checks are deposited and then forgotten by the time people head to the polls in November, having had the president's name on them won't make them more memorable. The truth is that multimillion-dollar political advertising campaigns from the spring are forgotten by the fall. Trump's name on a check isn't going to help him at all. The downside? If it's true that the checks are being delayed as a result of this ploy, which the Post reports but the Treasury Department denies, then there could be a real economic effect. Remember, the goal of these checks isn't just to help people in need; it's also to boost the overall economy by encouraging them to buy more stuff (thus keeping more people employed, which allows them to buy more things and so on). Delay the checks, and the scheme doesn't work as well. There's also an obvious public-relations problem. Trump looks vain, self-serving and indifferent to the interests of voters. Most citizens won't care, given that they already either strongly support or strongly oppose this president. But on the margins, Trump has managed to turn a mildly positive story into one that's going to be at least partly negative. He's also causing trouble for himself within the government. In fact, it seems likely that this story wound up in the newspaper to begin with because IRS bureaucrats were upset with Trump's politicization of the process, which violates the professional norms of the agency. Trump typically dismisses such people as "deep state" operatives out to get him, but it's far more likely that he has just angered career civil servants who care more about professionalism than partisan politics. Such attitudes are, to be sure, a real obstacle to presidents. But misunderstanding them makes it a lot harder to overcome or work around them. I want to be clear: There's nothing wrong with a president attempting to publicize his or her accomplishments. Indeed, there's nothing wrong, in my view, with a president being motivated entirely by re-election concerns. And I'll add there's nothing wrong with Trump claiming credit for these payments even though his preference was for something different. Once he signs the bill, anything in it is fair game. It's just that Trump has gone about this all wrong, and there's apparently no one at the White House who could convince him otherwise — perhaps because no one who's there at this point knows any better. Stuff like this is why Trump, over the course of his first term, has consistently ranked among the least popular presidents in the modern era. 1. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon at the Monkey Cage on Trump and the World Health Organization. 2. Matthew Dickinson on President Gerald Ford and the swine flu. 3. Charles Stewart III on the Wisconsin election. 4. Rick Hasen points out that vote-by-mail is going to need a functioning postal service. 5. Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris profile House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the pandemic. I'll repeat my criticism that Congress should be in Washington right now. Beyond that, though, Pelosi has done well for her caucus — and we shouldn't overlook the dog-not-barking story about the lack of public dissent from House Democrats. 6. Jonathan Chait on the problem with Trump's plan to blame China for the pandemic. 7. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on Trump's "weak but boastful presidency." Quite correct — although weak presidencies are dangerous to the republic, and perhaps more so than powerful ones. 8. And Senator Amy Klobuchar on voting by mail. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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