No, Trump Is NOT Acting In The Best Interest Of Americans-- Nor Will He Ever

OK... What Now? by Nancy Ohanian

Last night we took a brief look-- almost in passing-- at Amy Goodman's important interview this week with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. I'd like to look at his remarks with the seriousness they're due. He started by reminding us that "In the 2008 crisis, Rahm Emanuel, who was the chief of staff of Obama, said, 'You shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste.'" We saw yesterday how the Trumpist Regime is using the current crisis to advance it's extremist right-wing agenda. Stiglitz continued that the moderate Obama adminsistration "did let that crisis go to waste. We needed to reform our financial system. We needed to reform our economy. And we didn’t. The money went to the big banks, and we didn’t get the money to the people who really needed it. So, the question is, as your very-- as your excellent clip from Naomi Klein said, 'What will we do with this crisis? Will this reinforce the ugly tendencies we’ve had for growing inequality, for corporate welfare, or will it actually succeed in reforming our economy?' You know, it’s remarkable. Just a little while ago, people said we couldn’t afford this program helping college students with immense debt, or we couldn’t afford providing healthcare for everyone. And all of a sudden, the president is talking about a $1 trillion, $2 trillion bailout. We always could have afforded these things. It was just our prioritization was wrong."

Stiglitz is a fan of the talk around DC-- everywhere but in Pelosi's office-- of "sending checks to everyone. I think the amounts that they’re talking about are inadequate, and it’s not just a one-time thing. If, as many epidemiologists say, this is going to last for several months, there will have to be a second and third and fourth... If we don’t do that, people whose income is collapsed, people who are left unemployed-- remember, we have the worst unemployment system of any of the advanced countries-- all these people who are not going to be able to pay their bills, and we’ll have a cascade of problems. And while it’s a good thing that the Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to stop evictions and foreclosures, it doesn’t apply to the private sector banks. And their evictions and foreclosures may well go on. And that’s where most of the evictions and foreclosures will occur. So we need to get that money into the system, and we need to get the money to ordinary individuals."

Stiglitz, like all progressive economists took issue with the corporate bailouts the Trumpists are planning, particularly "giving money to the airlines or the cruise ships... [A]irlines had a huge bonanza from the tax bill of 2017. And rather than use that money to build up buffers in times of emergency, they had billions and billions of share buybacks. So, if we give them money, we have to make sure that they satisfy certain conditions, conditions corresponding to the environment, to governance, to labor. And we need warrants. That’s a way of making sure that the American taxpayer is protected against the risk. And then there are whole set of things that the bailout-- that the package doesn’t address. Our state and localities are going to be facing a very difficult time. Their revenues are plummeting. They don’t have the luxury of running deficits. Most of them have what are called balanced budget frameworks. So, if their revenues go down, there’s going to be a cutback in education, in health, in the basic ingredients of making-- that ordinary people need so much. So, a higher priority than bailing out the cruise ship companies is helping the states and localities. So we need a massive revenue-sharing program between the states and localities."

He continued that "the Trump proposal is another instance of trickle-down economics-- give money to the corporations, and maybe, maybe, it will trickle down to ordinary citizens. And we know from the past it’s not going to happen. The 2017 tax bill did not lead to more investment, did not lead to significantly higher wages. It led to bigger-- almost a trillion dollars of share buybacks... [W]e need is a bottoms-up approach... if you give money to these industries, they aren’t going to necessarily behave well. And you see that so clearly in the fight that the big companies fought against paid sick leave. And let me say why that’s really important. It’s not just helping the workers; it’s helping all of us, because if they don’t get sick leave, they’re going to go to work. And if they go to work, it will help transmit the disease. So, we need a system that people can say, 'If I’m sick, I don’t need to go to work.' And the decision of the Trump administration to fight having universal sick leave is another example of their contributing to the spread of the virus and making the pandemic all the worse."

We created economy without resilience. I illustrate that by the cars today that don’t have spare tires. You save a little money in not having a spare tire. The fact is that when you get the flat tire, you realize what a mistake that was. Not having a spare tire makes-- in short run, it looks like you’ve saved a little money; in the long run, you really suffer. And we’ve created a whole economic system that is extraordinarily fragile-- just-in-time production with no inventories. And as we’ve created this system, where you try to squeeze every ounce out of the-- of waste out of the system, you’ve also squeezed ordinary workers. And that is what’s contributed to this growing inequality. And those two are the same-- you know, different sides of the same coin.

So, our growing inequality and our increased fragility are issues that-- hopefully, the lessons that we learn from this crisis is we need to construct a different kind of capitalism, a different kind of economy, that I call in my book “progressive capitalism,” but it recognizes that the market doesn’t work very well in addressing the major problems our society faces-- resilience, inequality, climate change, you name it. They haven’t done a good job on it.

...Why don’t these people at the very top say, “Well, at this moment of crisis, we’re all in it together. I’m going to cut off my multimillion-dollar pay. I’m going to go make a major sacrifice, and I’m going to give everybody paid sick leave, paid family leave. I’m going to show that from the top down. And, of course, I hope that you will be equally generous”? But it should start from the top. And that’s what’s so bad about both the administration and the example that you just gave. Leadership should start from the top by example. And obviously, we’re not getting that in this country.

...Because of the devastation of our administration, of our government, that has occurred in recent years-- you know, they disbanded the White House pandemic task force; they defunded the Centers for Disease Control, which is the basis of getting us information and developing our response to a crisis like this-- we are less able to respond. And that means it’s almost a fantasy to believe that we can get checks out in two weeks.

That’s why some of the other things I talked about are so important. We have to make it absolutely clear that nobody is going to be evicted, there’s going to be no foreclosure, not only on the part of the government, but on the part of the banks, landlords. People can’t have their utilities cut off, because those checks won’t be there, and there’s a lot of Americans living on the edge. Data I talk about it in my book about the fraction of the population, a very large fraction of the population, that has reserves of less than $500 or $1,000. They’re living from paycheck to paycheck. And right now there are no paychecks. So, this inability to respond is going to be a major problem.

And then the other point that you made has gotten a lot of attention more recently, that even companies that have said that they have sick leave policy, when employees ask for the sick leave, they get punished. And so, we have to set up administrative mechanisms that say, “We will hold the companies that don’t grant their workers these benefits-- we’re going to hold him accountable.” Of course, with the president saying, “I’m not responsible,” you might ask, “What does that mean?” But what that means is that there needs to be significant fines on any company that deprives any worker of his basic rights, including the right to sick leave.





The point that this crisis makes clear is that we’re all in it together. The virus doesn’t discriminate. Just like the virus doesn’t have a nationality, the virus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality, of race, of religion. And so we’re all in this together. So this is a moment-- it should be a moment of national unity.

And as Naomi pointed out, there are two directions we can go. We could either exacerbate the divisions, or we can say there’s another direction. One of the reasons I wrote my book, People, Power and Profits, on progressive capitalism, was to lay out that alternative agenda, to make it clear that we-- there are a lot of ideas about how to transform our society into the kind of society that deals with the problems that we’re facing-- the problem of inequality, climate change, the moral turpitude that we’ve seen, so pervasive in the financial sector, Dieselgate, in the drug companies, in the food companies. There is an alternative. And so I actually think we have the ideas with which to respond. And they’ve been articulated in the primary contest, many of these critical ideas.

So, my hope is that as Americans realize how badly things have gone, how the kind-- that this crisis, we didn’t turn to the private sector to solve it. We turned to the government. We realize that we have to do this collectively, that if we’re all on our own, it won’t work. The private sector did not provide the masks, did not provide the tests on its own. And a failed government-- and the Trump administration is a failed government-- didn’t work. But there is a different kind of government that can work, and we’ve seen that in a number of countries, where things are going much better. So, we can see that if we pull together, there is an alternative, and one which will protect us against this disease, but also-- also-- can create a society with greater shared prosperity and address the climate crisis.

...[T]he stock market reflects investors’ expectations about what is going to be happening in years to come. And when Trump became the president and gave this huge tax cut to the corporations, they celebrated. They had a big party. And they focused on the short term, not the long term, not the risks that Trump represented to our economy, to our world. They celebrated the additional money they had in the pocket. And that meant the stock market went way up. It was a shortsighted perspective.

Now that optimism has turned, has flipped into extreme pessimism. They know that the president is incompetent. They know that this is beyond the capabilities of the administration. We’ve seen this incompetence in the areas of testing and the response to the coronavirus. And quite frankly, they’re very worried, and rightly so, as the economy goes down. And one of the things about the stock market is it’s very risk-averse. It always thinks about, when things go bad, the worst possible scenario, just like when things are good, they think about the party going on forever and ever, just like they did before the crisis of 2008. So, what we’re seeing now is, as they focus on the worst-case scenarios, there’s a flight out of the stock market. And interestingly, there was a flight out of the bond market yesterday. People want cash. They’re not sure what’s going to happen to the market. And cash gives them a little bit more security than anything else they can have... here will be follow-on effects from the collapse of the stock market. But the stock market is reflecting a deeper problem. You know, if you go back to the Great Depression, the stock market helped bring on the Great Depression, but the stock market was a reflection of some deeper problems that our economy was facing. So it was both cause and consequence. The same thing is true now. The stock market is going down because the realization that the economy is going to be very constrained. People are not going to work. Businesses are shutting down. And at this point, to a large extent, this stock market is reflecting the economic reality that things are not going well.

But going forward, the fact that so much wealth has been destroyed on people’s balance sheet, people-- retirement accounts have been wiped out-- that will mean that when the economy recovers, when the disease gets under control, people may be not in position to spend in the way that they were before. And so, it could help prolong the economic downturn, unless we take appropriate measures.

And the kind of measures that the Trump administration has proposed are obviously not the right kinds of measures. Let me illustrate. He began by saying, “We ought to have a payroll tax cut.” A payroll tax cut isn’t going to get money into individuals’ pockets. It’s going to put in jeopardy the Social Security program, be underfunded. And so it’s not going to make people more confident about the future. It’s not going to allow them to spend. It just increases the potential of undermining our social safety net, particularly for our elderly. So, it will be undermining the fiber of our economy. So, that’s an example of the wrong kind of economic policy. It doesn’t help now, and it really hurts going forward.

...[W]e are facing a real problem, the spread of disease. Epidemiologists, anybody who understands epidemiology, would have realized two months ago that there was a great risk. And obviously Trump didn’t. He’s not surrounding himself with anybody with the competence to be able to do that. And that’s why he ignored the warnings.

But you don’t have to shut down an economy to bring it under control. Singapore has provided as a very good example where their economy has continued. They do testing. They do tracing. Whenever there’s a source of contagion, they identify it and make sure it’s contained, quarantined. So they’ve shown that you can bring the disease under control without shutting down the economy.

Now, to the extent that you need to restrain the economy to reduce contact, one can-- one needs to address the issue of how are ordinary people going to survive. You know, it’s one thing for a well-off hedge fund to say, “Oh, shut down the economy. I have millions, maybe billions, in my bank account. I’m not gonna worry.” But for ordinary Americans, who have $500 or less in their bank account, no paycheck coming in puts them at great risks. So, I think the answer to that is this proposal of sending everybody a $2,000 check-- the $1,000 is not going to be adequate-- suspending all evictions, suspending all foreclosure, making sure that the credit card companies don’t charge the usury rates that they’ve been charging-- say, going during the period of this pandemic, you can’t charge more than maybe 3, 5% interest rate; after all, the T-bill rate is down to zero-- a suspension of student interest-- interest on student loans. We will have to respond to the exigency, the crisis of the moment, in ways that make sure that those who are the restaurant workers, those who are low-income workers, wherever the sector they’re in, can survive with dignity and don’t have to be excessively stressed by how they’re going to live.

Yesterday, in an essay for The Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This, Adam Serwer showed exactly were responsibility for the virulence of the pandemic in the U.S. lies. Trump, he wrote, "is a menace to public health...The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity... [S]oon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest."

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And-- we’re-- we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s-- going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.

Except Trump was not preparing. He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time. In February, while Trump was lying to the public about being “close to a vaccine” and that “cases were going to be down to zero,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier was telling reporters that Americans should get ready for “significant disruption to our lives.” The day after Trump told the public that “it will go away,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that “we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now." Trump wasn’t trying to maintain firm resolve in the face of a crisis. He was lying to the public about the dangers it was facing in order to preserve his public standing.

Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond. Trump has dealt with the pandemic with all the competence you would expect from someone whose main experience is pretending to be a tough businessman on television. The administration failed to ramp up testing capacity in time to determine the scope of infections, while lying to the public that “millions of tests” were available; it failed to mobilize federal resources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Disaster Medical System, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump declared a state of emergency only on March 13, reportedly concerned that doing so earlier “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” As of Tuesday, according to the New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers was “still awaiting orders.”

In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.

Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.

Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.

The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.

A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”

Trump and the conservative-media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told the Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”

Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgement that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.

It’s true that the media often make mistakes; they are, after all, made up of human beings. Media conventions can be subverted, facts can be misunderstood or misreported, sources can mislead, reporters can succumb to confirmation bias, and editors can fail to see the big picture. For the most part, though, these outlets are trying their best to inform the public.

Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president. Many conservatives don’t distrust the mainstream media because they are biased; they distrust the media because the media do not tell them what they want to hear, and their own outlets have trained them to believe that the truth can only be exactly what they want to hear.

Nor can mainstream media bias explain why many Trumpist media outlets, supposedly so much more committed to the truth than their mainstream counterparts, consciously endangered their audience by disregarding and dismissing public-health warnings. Fox News told its audience that the coronavirus was a minor problem their heroic leader was quickly resolving, while quietly having its staff follow the very precautions its hosts were ridiculing on air. The mainstream press didn’t force Fox News to do that.

The coronavirus pandemic provides a rigorous case study in the priorities of most of the conservative press: Faced with a choice between informing their own audiences about dire threats to public health, and propping up a Republican president, they chose the latter, because informing the public is not their job. The job of outlets like Fox News is to ensure that the conservative masses believe that their leader is infallible, even if it causes them tremendous personal harm.

As cases began flooding into hospitals and medical facilities all over the country, the president shifted his tone, finally recognizing the reality of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that threatens both the health and livelihoods of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump declared that “this is a pandemic,” and that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.

Predictably, Trump drew praise from some cable-news personalities for doing a passable job of portraying a president on television, even as the administration’s failures continued to exacerbate the personal and economic toll of the pandemic. This is somewhat understandable; Americans want to believe that their leaders are competent, engaged, and concerned about their well-being. Recognizing that the presidency is occupied by an incompetent narcissist whose major life accomplishment is parlaying an inherited fortune into reality-show celebrity is rather less comforting, but it is the world we live in.

Yet the incentives for the president and the conservative media have not changed. All that has changed is that it is now in the president’s personal and political interest to cushion the terrible impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a positive development as far as it goes, in that, for the moment, the national interest and Trump’s interests are one and the same. But Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality persists, and where maintaining the image of the infallible leader conflicts with the needs of Americans affected by the pandemic, the former will take precedence. The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.

Having failed to will the coronavirus pandemic into nonexistence, the president, his party, and his propaganda machine will seek to rewrite history to render the false impression that Trump was aware of the threat of the coronavirus pandemic all along, and that he acted decisively to address it. The truth is that, in the weeks and months Trump and the conservative press were busy pumping stocks, juking stats, and misleading the public, valuable time to prepare for the pandemic was lost. Americans, both those who get sick and those whose workplaces and businesses will close as a result, will suffer dearly.

A global pandemic would have been a challenge for any administration, for any government. But the scale of this tragedy was not inevitable. America’s shuttered storefronts, overflowing emergency rooms, and shattered families are the toxic fruit of a political culture in which Donald Trump’s image, as the avatar of the will of the people, matters more than actual people do.

Barrons just reported that "Goldman Sachs is now projecting a massive U.S. economic contraction in the second quarter of the year. The bank is forecasting a 24% decline in economic activity next quarter, compared to their previous forecast for a 5% decline. That’s because U.S. economic data (specifically manufacturing data) have already started to miss economist estimates, even before Americans started to stay home to avoid spreading the coronavirus... If Goldman’s economists are right, that means the U.S. is approaching the sharpest single-quarter decline in gross domestic product since the U.S. started measuring GDP in its current form." And, apparently, Trump's p.r. approach is working-- at least for now. Believe it or not, 55% of respondents approve of Trump’s management of response to the pandemic, while just 43% are savvy enough to disapprove.