Donald Trump Has No Plan
Thousands
are dying each week, the economy is cratering, and the president is at a total
loss.
May 12, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
It’s been 111 days
since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States. It’s
been 57 days since President Trump issued social-distancing guidelines, and 12
days since they expired.
Yet the Trump
administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its
fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded
testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas
beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for
hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the
Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a
quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.
Echoing his breezy
language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days
returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own
accord, without a major government response.
“I feel about
vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and
we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
He added: “They say
it’s going to go—that doesn’t mean this year—doesn’t mean it’s going to be
gone, frankly, by fall or after the fall. But eventually it’s going to go away.
The question is, will we need a vaccine? At some point it’s going to probably
go away by itself. If we had a vaccine that would be very helpful.”
As for the cratering
economy, which on Friday produced the worst jobs numbers on record, Trump
shrugged. “We’re in no rush, we’re in no rush,” he said.
The president’s
shiftlessness in the face of the greatest crisis of his presidency, and the
greatest political threat during it, is confounding. Of course, Trump has faced
mortal political threats before; less than five months ago, he became only the
third president in American history to be impeached. He’s shown a remarkable
ability to survive damaging situations. And his plans have often been derided
by skeptics as unwise, unrealistic, or simplistic. This situation is different,
though: Grappling with a multifront crisis, Trump seems to have no plan at all.
Let’s begin with
efforts against the illness itself. The 45 days during which Trump recommended
social distancing were meant to prevent hospitals from being swamped with
patients, and give the government time to devise more effective measures. But
when that period ended at the end of April, Trump simply let his
recommendations lapse, opting not to extend them in favor of vague calls for
reopening the economy.
Those six weeks
didn’t actually buy the country much time, because the White House wasted them.
With New York City removed from the numbers, the national curve hasn’t flattened at all.
States continue to fend for themselves on tests and personal protective
equipment. Trump held a White House event yesterday to tout growth in testing
in the U.S., but the president’s rhetoric was misleading. The U.S. does not, as
he claimed, lead the world in testing, on a per capita
basis. He also continues to compare the U.S. rate favorably to South Korea’s, eliding that South Korea was able to control
its outbreak sooner by testing faster, and thereby reducing its need for
testing.
As my colleague Robinson Meyer has reported, based
on figures in the COVID
Tracking Project, which is housed at The Atlantic, the U.S.
has increased testing but still needs to expand it dramatically to match expert
recommendations. “To an almost astonishing degree, the U.S. has no national
plan for achieving this goal,” Meyer writes. “There is no effort at the federal
level that has mustered anything like the funding, coordination, or real
resources that experts across the political spectrum say is needed to safely
reopen the country.”
One possible problem
is that to muster the kind of government effort required to catch up, Trump
might have to acknowledge that his various premature “Mission accomplished” announcements were
grievously wrong. Instead, he has repeated them. “We have met the
moment. And we have prevailed,” he said yesterday.
Having declared
victory, Trump has begun calling for the country to reopen. He is correct to
note that social distancing has knocked the American economy flat, but once
again, he has no plan for how the reopening should occur. The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention did have a plan—but as the Associated Press
first reported, the White House quashed it, telling
the CDC its guidelines would never “see the light of day,” then lied about the process by which they were
killed.
In any case, the
White House push to reopen is based on a serious misunderstanding of the causes
of the economic damage. In Trump’s imagination, which seems fired largely by
the rowdy and often heavily armed—but highly unrepresentative—protesters gathering in
state capitols, the problem is that governors and mayors have tyrannically
consigned brave American “warriors” to their homes, when in fact the populace
wants to be going about its business of haircuts and meals out and gym sessions
as though there weren’t a deadly pandemic sweeping the country.
This is simply wrong.
Commerce has ground to a halt because many Americans have decided they don’t
want to risk infecting themselves or their family, regardless of whether there
are formal government policies instructing or mandating that they stay home. As
Jordan Weissmann (drawing on OpenTable
data) points out, restaurants in states that have lifted
stay-at-home orders have seen a tiny increase in attendance, but nowhere near
enough to save those restaurants, much less float the economy. Nate Silver notes that states that have opened
up aren’t seeing significantly more movement than those that haven’t.
In short, Trump has
placed most of his energy behind a vain hope, without any plan to accomplish
reopening even if it were plausible. That has distracted his administration
from any other efforts to boost the economy for what is likely to be a very
long slog. The first three phases of stimulus have been, despite some
complaints, positive measures, but they’re also clearly insufficient; Friday’s
epochally bad jobs report came despite the billions Washington has already
spent.
The government will
need to spend much more to prop up the economy. This should be no problem, at
least as a matter of politics. Democrats are already clamoring for more
spending, and there’s little chance Republicans would balk en masse if Trump
demanded a new bill. Some members of the administration acknowledge the
seriousness of the problem. The White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on
Sunday forecast unemployment rates topping 20 percent, though he said he hoped
policies so far had bought the White House time.
But others are
inexplicably sanguine. Larry Kudlow, who incapably played an economist on
television before being hired as the director of the National Economic Council,
dismissed any need for new spending anytime soon. “We put all this money in,
which is fine,” he said Friday at the White House. “It’s well worth it. Let’s
see what happens. As we move into the reopening phase this month, maybe spill
over to June, let’s have a look at it before we decide who, what, where, when.”
Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin, who worked well with Democrats on earlier phases of stimulus
and has few clear ideological precommitments, would be a logical champion for
more spending, but he appeared to remain fixated on reopening during
a Sunday interview on Fox News.
Meanwhile, a faction
of fiscal conservatives, reportedly led by new White House Chief of
Staff Mark Meadows and budget chief Russ Vought, has suddenly discovered the
concern for deficits that Republicans displayed throughout the Obama presidency
and abandoned completely when Trump became president. They’ve returned to the
theme at the worst possible time, both economically and politically. Austerity
will only further crush the economy, and a cratering economy will make Trump’s
reelection tougher.
Surveying the
situation, Eric Levitz concludes that Republicans are
simply “not cynical enough” to recognize the opportunity posed by stimulus
spending: “For Republicans, some things are more important than winning elections—and,
apparently, denying government assistance to desperate workers and their
underfed children is one of them.”
That charge might be
leveled at fiscal conservatives, as inconstant in their creed as they may be,
but it is clearly not true of Trump. The president has no particular attachment
to desperate workers or underfed children, as he has demonstrated throughout
his life and now in his time as president. But he also has no attachment to
fiscal conservatism either, nor will he be out-cynic’ed. For Trump, as for
Vince Lombardi, winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.
Even with a clear
imperative to spend, Democrats eager to work with him, and little need for
wonky detail—all he has to do is sign a huge check—Trump hasn’t managed to
commit to the most straightforward thing he can do to boost the economy and
therefore his own reelection chances.
This isn’t because
Trump is confident about November. White House reporters say the president is privately “glum and
shell-shocked by his declining popularity.” His public behavior betrays the
stress. He tweeted incessantly and manically on Sunday, then stormed out of a
press conference yesterday after a jarring, testy exchange with reporters. He
has begun a bizarre bombardment of his predecessor, Barack Obama, part of an
unending search for villains. Trump is also deeply engaged in other efforts to boost his
chances, including a campaign against voting by mail—a step many experts say is
necessary to protect voters’ health, but which he has concluded (without much
evidence) will help Democrats in November.
So much of Trump’s
handling of the coronavirus was easily foretold. Experts had warned for years
of a global pandemic. The president is obviously overmatched in his job. Trump
badly botched the response to previous natural disasters, most prominently
Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and pundits had predicted that he would stumble
worse when faced with a larger test. His chaotic style of governance, lack of
faith in his advisers, and inability to maintain his attention were all
manifest before the coronavirus, and are on vivid display now. He has never
been interested in the actual work of policy. None of this should have been a
surprise to anyone paying attention for the past three years.
But through it all,
Trump displayed a clear will to win, and a keen instinct for what it took to do
that. This makes his failure to come up with even a semblance of a plan—good,
bad, or unclear—a true mystery. Yesterday, the U.S. death toll crossed 81,000,
a mark Trump had previously said it would never touch. More recently, he’s
offered 100,000 as a likely figure. Will the president have a plan for the
pandemic by then? At the moment, he’s in no rush.
