Trump’s convention is the ultimate gaslighting exercise
Opinion by
Columnist
August 24, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. CDT
Be prepared for the convention from Earth 2. In this parallel universe from which Republicans will beam out their messaging, President Trump created the greatest economy ever. Trump did better than anyone on the planet in handling covid-19. And he has been the best president ever for Blacks — well, other than maybe Abraham Lincoln. Back on Earth 1, it is an entirely different story.
Even before the novel coronavirus hit, Trump’s economic performance was underwhelming. Steven Rattner, former car czar in the Obama administration, reminds us in a New York Times op-ed that in the pre-pandemic period, the economy was “weaker than during the last three years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Almost exactly 1.5 million fewer jobs were created on Mr. Trump’s watch than during Mr. Obama’s final three years.” Even with a misguided tax cut that blew up the debt, Rattner writes, “annualized growth under Mr. Trump ranked seventh among his 11 predecessors. And growth actually slowed during each of Mr. Trump’s three years.”
Trump’s coronavirus performance has left us with more than 170,000 dead. While much of the West is now reopened and conducting in-school education, we are limping around, watching the virus surge in the Midwest and the South. We have more coronavirus deaths by far than any country. We have 4 percent of the world’s population and more than 20 percent of the world’s covid-19 deaths.
Moreover, as BBC reports, “When you look at deaths per capita — as a proportion of each country’s population — the US is no longer top of the list, but remains in the top 10 worst-hit countries.” Unlike European countries such as Germany, we have no effective national testing and tracing program. We know it is not effective because the virus in the United States has not abated. Johns Hopkins reports: “[S]everal countries effectively controlled the spread of the virus through testing programs that had a far lower number of tests per capita than the U.S. Meanwhile, despite having the highest rate of tests per capita, the U.S. faces the largest outbreak in the world and new cases continue to trend upwards in many states.”
The United States remains the only advanced country to have “suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months," the New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes. “In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.” Trump played down the pandemic, refused to avoid shortages and price hikes for personal protective equipment by fully activating the Defense Production Act, goaded states into opening too soon and disparaged mask-wearing.
Perhaps most ludicrous is Trump’s regular claim that he is practically the best president ever for Blacks. He has a single Black Cabinet official, and his senior staff is almost entirely devoid of African Americans. He has not nominated a single African American to an appellate court. (As Bloomberg Law reports: “Just one of Trump’s 53 confirmed appeals court judges is Hispanic and none are Black. That compares to about 27% of President Barack Obama’s and roughly 15% under President George W. Bush, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of Federal Judicial Center data.”)
Trump and many of his Cabinet officials have denied there is systemic racism in the United States. Trump continues to spew racist rhetoric, plays to Whites’ fears of integration and defends symbols of white supremacy. He has declined to pursue police reforms designed to decrease police abuse, which falls heavily on African Americans.
The Post also reports that the administration has “severely curtailed” pattern-or-practice cases against police forces designed to address discriminatory behavior “along with other efforts to force broad police reforms or quell civil unrest — as the Justice Department’s posture has shifted to one that is far more deferential to law enforcement.”
Blacks have suffered far more than Whites with regard to the pandemic. On a per capita basis, Blacks are 2.6 times as likely to contract the coronavirus, 4.7 times as likely to be hospitalized and 2.1 times as likely to die from it.
Economically, Trump has been terrible for Blacks. “By almost every metric, Black Americans have fared far worse than whites, including higher rates of closure of Black-owned businesses,” Rattner says. “And that’s after struggling under the Trump administration since long before the virus hit — Black median household incomes, which were 66.5 percent of those of white households in 2016, had dropped to 62.4 percent of the level of white households by 2018.” As of last month, the unemployment rate for Blacks was 14.6 percent, compared with 9.2 percent for Whites.
Trump retains the distinction as the only recent president to lose jobs on net during his watch, the most incompetent world leader in fighting covid-19 and the worst president for Blacks since before the civil rights era. The notion that he has excelled on jobs, the coronavirus and racial equality is farcical.