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I write this just before we learn how historically bad the unemployment numbers for April will be. I write after the U.S. death toll from the pandemic passed 75,000. And how is the president of the United States dealing with these disasters? Passive resignation — and Senate Republicans seem to be on the same page.
President Donald Trump is so far from aggressively acting against the virus that he was about to disband the task force meant to deal with it before he caved to outraged reaction. Now he's merely burying his administration's systematic, reality-based plan for reopening the economy while treating the virus that's killing 2,000 Americans a day as a messaging problem. Yes, the work of government goes on despite the president's apparent indifference. But for every achievement — testing levels continue to increase, for instance — there's at least one more fiasco.
Nor is there anything resembling urgency on the economic front, either from Trump or from Senate Republicans. Why? Greg Sargent of the Washington Post suggests that Trump is convinced that his only way out is to "create the illusion that the country is returning to normalcy" and that he's so keen to do so that he's actively blocking real progress, since that would shatter the illusion. Perhaps. It's true that Trump said once again this week that testing makes things "look bad."
I hesitate to call Sargent's theory the #CleverFallacy — the pundit tendency to ascribe clever motives to things that Trump simply does at random — because there's nothing very clever about his version of Trump. Relying on spin instead of attempting to solve problems is a bad strategy for a president seeking reelection. But my guess is that it's wrong nevertheless; I don't think Trump is actively doing much of anything.
Take, for example, the looming meat shortage. As far as I can tell, Trump ignored this growing problem for weeks. He then focused on it long enough to issue a proclamation, forgetting that presidents can't actually do much just by signing edicts. As the BBC put it: "Although President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week deeming meatpacking facilities 'critical infrastructure,' seven more plants have shut since then." Trump, however, seems to think he's solved the problem. There's no follow-up, no plan, no nothing. And, in the supermarkets soon, perhaps no beef and no pork.
The one thing Trump may have going for him is that most voters probably find it difficult to believe that the president isn't working hard to solve either the public-health crisis or the economic disaster. But with the effects so obvious, that may not last for long.
1. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas on how the administration's staffing turnover and general chaos have affected the pandemic response.
2. Leticia Bode and Emily Vraga at the Monkey Cage on coronavirus misinformation.
3. Dan Drezner on the foreign-policy establishment.
4. Chaz Nuttycombe on state legislative elections this fall.
5. Fred Kaplan on Trump's go-it-alone foreign policy during the pandemic.
6. E.J. Dionne urges the House to get back to work. I can't blame Republicans for this one. If Democrats wanted to be in Washington, the House would be in session. Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears happy to accept the centralized authority that a scattered House gives her, and rank-and-file Democrats seem content to let her run things. Not good at all.
7. And Laura McGann on reporting the Tara Reade accusations.
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