Friday - April 10, 2020

What Pat Said, But Worse

Pat Buchanan: Trump’s Decision Point Is All That Matters

Upon this question now, the Trump presidency appears to hang:

Will Trump’s actions flatten the curve and put the pandemic on an irreversible downward course in daily cases and deaths, as he produces a U-turn, if not a V-turn, dramatically driving the economy upward from depression and toward national prosperity?

Can he revive the economy without reviving the virus?  Or will the coronavirus so severely cripple the economy that the depression it produces will kill the Trump presidency?

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie framed the issue thus: “Politically, nothing else matters. … I have never seen a time when an opponent is more irrelevant. And that’s not an insult to Vice President Biden.

“But in the end, the American people are going to decide, has the president of the United States stood up to this crisis, and done right by them and protected their lives and their property, or hasn’t he?”

Trump’s true adversary in this election is not Joe Biden, the hermit candidate sheltering in place. Biden is but a name on the November ballot you mark if you want to remove and replace Donald Trump.

Trump’s real antagonists are the media who detest him and are determined, having failed to impeach and remove him, to drive him from office by portraying him as a foolish, failed president in the worst crisis to hit the country since Pearl Harbor.

The crucial decision Trump will make is to choose the exact moment to reopen the country and the economy, without igniting a new spike in the pandemic that induces despair and causes a panic.

The president’s aides in charge of the medical crisis want the longest delay possible. His economic and political advisers, fearing Trump could be forced to run as Herbert Hoover did, at the nadir of a new depression, want an earlier decision to start opening up the country.

Action cannot long be delayed if we are to survive the medical crisis only to endure a longer and more costly economic crisis.

Thursday morning, jobless claims revealed that another 6.6 million Americans had lost their jobs, bringing to 16.7 million the number who have filed for unemployment in just three weeks.

One in 10 Americans is now out of work.

Six weeks ago, Trump was boasting, and justifiably so, of having the greatest economy of any president in recent memory. Now, the possibility exists that he could go into the fall election with the worst economy since Hoover and the Great Depression of 1932.

Trump’s decision, which will determine the fate of his presidency, is likely close at hand.

And this is why the CDC is directing coroners to fudge the death stats to make the COVID numbers higher. That’s extra ammo to the “Trump didn’t protect us” mantra.

And while I don’t deny Buchanan’s numbers, he is leaving out a significant skewing factor: an awful lot of people work in government. And NOT ONE of them has been fired, laid off, furloughed, or reduced to minimal hours. Not one. This extends all the way down to the guys who mow the grass in the town parks you aren’t allowed to use right now. From the federal government to the state government to the county government to the town government to the hamlet leadership to the managers of the HOAs and condo parks. As a very rough guess, I’ll say that’s 20% of the overall workforce, 2 in 10, and I’m probably very low. So if we have 10% unemployment, that means actual unemployment for everyone else is 12.5%. And if we hit 20% by Pat’s overall standard, that’s 25% for everybody else.

Pray for our President.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/10/2020 at 10:25 AM   
Filed Under: • Pandemic Pandemonium • Politics •  
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