| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. All the wise guys had a good laugh Tuesday when President Donald Trump tweeted out his intention to push for a new $2 trillion infrastructure package. "Infrastructure Week" has long been a running joke for this administration — advertised frequently, but never actually getting anywhere. But, yes, this time could be different. The key is what one of the cynics, Matt Yglesias, noted: "I can't think of any examples of Trump successfully defying GOP leadership on a policy question." That's pretty much correct, and it has helped doom infrastructure plans in the past. Trump doesn't really know how to fight for policies he supports, rarely seems to care that much, and generally winds up accepting whatever various portions of the Republican Party want. But the question then becomes: What will Republicans want to do when it's time for a stimulus bill? To be sure, Trump is jumping the gun. We're still (in a distinction I haven't always been careful about) in a situation that calls for relief, not stimulus. The real need now, for as long as everyone is being asked to stay home due to the coronavirus, is to keep people and businesses (along with state and local governments) afloat. That's what the first three bills Congress has passed have aimed to do, and it's likely that at least one more — what's being calling the "Phase Four" bill — will be needed to provide more relief. Eventually, though, it will be time to get the economy moving again. And here's where Trump's call for infrastructure spending might really make a difference. Many Republicans, after all, are skeptical of Keynesian economics. Sure, they'll always tend to favor certain tax cuts. But they generally lack an ideological formula for writing stimulus bills because they mostly don't think in those terms. (The tax cuts they advocate aren't contingent on the business cycle; they advocate them whenever there's political room, boom or bust.) And yet it seems likely that Republicans will be facing electoral disaster if the pandemic fades but the economy stays stuck in neutral or worse by mid-summer. At that point, they may get religion on stimulus, and be (relatively) open to new possibilities. Democrats, whose votes will be needed for any such bill to pass, are likely to put together a package containing lots of goodies their coalition will support. Trump probably won't care about most of them. In fact, he probably won't care about the broad parameters of the bill as long as it has stuff in it that he can claim to have built, and as long as he can call it his own. (Yes, he'll probably strongly oppose any provisions that support wind power. Democrats will wisely trade those off for other climate-friendly infrastructure.) At least … that's how it should play out. Perhaps Republicans will insist on only tax cuts and no additional spending, even if it means nothing passes. Perhaps Democrats will refuse to help save the economy when it could mean saving Trump's presidency. Perhaps the process will collapse on itself with Democrats insisting on their pet projects, Republicans insisting on theirs, and Trump undercutting his own negotiators and generally creating chaos. There are plenty of ways that such a bill could misfire. But the basic trade-off here — Democrats get their policy preferences, Republicans get fuel for the economy in time for the election — is close enough to a win-win that we shouldn't laugh away the possibility this time. 1. Miranda Yaver at the Monkey Cage on using the coronavirus to stop abortion. 2. William D. Adler, Julia Azari and Perry Bacon Jr. on the Veepstakes. 3. Annie Lowrey on what's needed on the economic front. 4. Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer on what's going wrong with testing now. 5. Mark Blumenthal notes: Everybody loves Dr. Fauci. Rare bipartisan agreement. 6. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen on the workforce after the coronavirus. 7. And Jonathan Chait on the preposterous idea that Trump couldn't handle the pandemic because of impeachment. 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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