Six on Coronavirus: Forget 2016. This time, Donald Trump faces destruction; Trump and His Allies Are Worried About More Than November; Mike Pence Insists the White House Is On Top of Coronavirus Testing; Protesters Really Think They're Civil Rights A
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"But it’s finally time to forget what happened then. Chances of it happening again this time are going up in smoke. Mr. Trump is running with a collapsed economy, one of the worst handicaps an incumbent seeking re-election can have. In addition, with the United States having suffered more losses in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic than any other country, he now has a war record to run on, a record of unpreparedness which has cost his country gravely.
No president can realistically expect to win under such conditions, least of all this one. Mr. Trump had so much other baggage that he was trailing the Democrats even before the pandemic affliction bore down on him. If he was behind when his economy, in his words, was “the greatest ever,” how is he going to do when it’s one of the worst ever?
If he was behind when, to a large extent, there was peace, how’s he going to fare when it’s seen how other countries succeeded in containing and repulsing the enemy – countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore – while under his leadership the greatest power in the world was left flailing?
The Trump Republicans are hopeful that when the lockdown is lifted, the economy will come roaring back. Not by the fall it won’t. The stock market might be back up but the unemployment and GDP numbers will be brutal. The Republicans never win with the economy in the tank.
They lost in 2008 when George W. Bush left behind a shattered economy. They lost in 1992 when his father was in power and the economy was downward bound. They lost in 1932 when Herbert Hoover faced the country during the Great Depression.
There will likely be a huge sense of relief when the country starts getting back to work in a month or two as COVID-19 recedes. Mr. Trump might get a boost, a temporary one. But he’s taking a big risk if he reopens the country too early. And there are going to be aftershocks no matter what. Epidemiologists predict a second wave of the virus in the fall."
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In one short month, the United States has made a significant leap toward a kind of emergency social democracy, in recognition of the fact that no individual or community could possibly be prepared for the devastation wrought by the pandemic. Should the health and economic crisis extend through the year, there’s a strong chance that Americans will move even further down that road, as businesses shutter, unemployment continues to mount and the federal government is the only entity that can keep the entire economy afloat.
But this logic — that ordinary people need security in the face of social and economic volatility — is as true in normal times as it is under crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low. And in the wake of two political campaigns — Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s — that pushed progressive ideas into the mainstream of American politics, voters might begin to see this essential truth."
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"Adding insult to caucacity, some of these protesters—who would typically ignore or condemn anti-racism protests—are even likening themselves to actual civil-rights icons.
“I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks — they are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties,” Stephen Moore, a conservative economist and a member the White House council to reopen the country, said, according to the Post. Moore believes that “there’s a boiling point that has been reached and exceeded” and that these protests are a result of that.
In Michigan, one of the hardest-hit states with more than 30,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 2,200 deaths, Michigan Conservative Coalition member Matthew Seely wants to declare “mission accomplished” despite the very much ongoing health emergency.
“I feel terrible about the lives lost, but at some point, we have to say ‘Mission accomplished’ and come up with the next phase of this that doesn’t have us continuously locked inside our homes,” Seely said.
David Helm, an attorney who is currently arguing in federal court on behalf of plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits alleging that government regulations are destroying their businesses, says that statewide stay-at-home orders violate property and due process rights because most of Michigan’s coronavirus cases are limited to two hard-hit counties in metro Detroit—you know, the parts with all the disproportionately vulnerable
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For Trump, though, it was probably not a difficult decision. Beyond his need to find an external scapegoat for his administration’s pandemic missteps, the president views organizations like the WHO as unwelcome constraints on American power and impediments to the national interest. Since entering the White House, Trump has inveighed against the United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the European Union and other pillars of what policymakers loosely brand the international order.
That order was already fraying seven decades after it emerged out of the ashes of World War II, a process accelerated by the ascent of illiberal demagogues in some of the world’s major liberal democracies. But the coronavirus pandemic is providing a genuine existential test to an aging U.S.-created status quo. “The political winds and pressures of the 21st century, from human migration and extreme income disparity to protectionism and rising new powers, have weakened its foundations, leaving it ill-equipped to handle the first truly global threat to its very existence,” wrote my colleagues Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly this week.
“The currents of populism are so great now that leaders are no longer inclined or rewarded for behaving in terms of international cooperation,” Stewart Patrick, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Bloomberg News. “There is a growing risk that these organizations could weaken and atrophy. There just aren’t enough leaders out there taking an enlightened view of the international interest.”
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