Was The Trump Tweet Yesterday A White Flag?

Trump's tweet was hilarious Wednesday morning. I wondered if it gave McConnell heart failure; I'm certain it sent Pelosi into a state of near exultation, if not euphoria. He completely undercut McConnell's already weak bargaining position on the must-pass pandemic relief bill-- telling the Republicans (i.e.- McConnell) to "go for the much higher numbers." It also looks like Trump told Meadows to get a bill done. Right after the tweet, Meadows told the media he feels "optimistic" and that "If the Speaker is willing to stay in, I'm willing to stay in, the Secretary [Mnuchin] is willing to stay in and negotiate."

In May the House passed a $3.4 trillion bill (Heroes Act), which McConnell has refused to even allow to be debated. Instead a joke of a "skinny bill," offering a shameful $650 billion. The Republican bill doesn't give any money to local governments, doesn't do anything about battling COVID-19 and would trigger a Depression. Yesterday, before the tweet, The Atlantic's Derek Thompson suggested the reason Trump, stuck in a Pollyannaish fantasy of his own making," isn't trying to save the economy. Bad economies defeat incumbent presidents and, noted Thompson "The 2020 economy is worse than weak; it is, for many, an outright catastrophe. Look beyond the healthy housing market and the stock market, and you will see a depressed leisure-and-hospitality sector, 8 percent unemployment, and tens of thousands of small businesses on the brink of collapse. The implication seems obvious. President Donald Trump faces an array of obstacles on his path to reelection. But he could do one thing, right away, that would, in all likelihood, immediately improve his odds with almost no downside risk: Call for Congress to open the cash spigot and buoy the lackluster economy on a wave of stimulus. All he has to do is announce his intention to sign a second major economic relief bill-- a CARES Act II, essentially-- and count on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to muddle through. Such a law would almost certainly improve the financial state of countless families at a time of mass desperation, and just weeks before the election."

Maybe Thompson's article is what spurred Trump's tweet. It wouldn't surprise me. But why hasn't he done so before yesterday's tweet? Thompson reiterated that "With no pressure from the top, Senate Republicans rejected the HEROES Act, the multitrillion-dollar stimulus package that Democrats passed in the House, and countered with a stingy-- or “skinny”-- stimulus that did not include another round of checks for taxpayers or state and local government aid."

On the campaign trail and in his television ads, Trump proclaims that a great and historic economic recovery is afoot. The notion that the economy is sick enough to require a trillion-dollar booster shot is in direct tension with the claim that it’s thriving. So, the theory goes, Trump is unwilling to advocate for stimulus, because he doesn’t want to acknowledge that the economy is broken in the first place.

Trump’s approach to the enfeebled pandemic economy resembles that of a certain cartoon dog sipping coffee in a burning room. It’s the “This Is Fine” style of American politics. Surrounded by evidence of a crisis, Trump seems content to make up promises about a fictionalized economy rather than take action to fix the real thing.

Meanwhile, the people around Trump aren’t urging him to reject this faulty logic. Some of them are simply afraid of objecting to a leader with a taste for punishing his intraparty rivals. But the GOP, as a group, has also convinced itself that more stimulus is unnecessary. Republicans are more dubious about Keynesianism than Democrats, even though they stood by quietly as deficits mounted under Trump before the plague hit. The GOP largely prefers targeted social insurance over the broad-based stimulus of mailing checks to hundreds of millions of American households. They don’t believe that states and local governments need a huge bailout. They’re reluctant to top off unemployment-insurance checks with hundreds of dollars in pandemic bonuses.

The generous interpretation is that Republicans believe the economy will rebound without federal assistance; the critical one is that, just as Trump is delusional about economic realities, the GOP is delusional about economic policy. The Great Recession demonstrated clearly that without emergency support after sharp recessions, state and local governments lay off workers, whose unemployment delays the overall recovery. But the GOP, refusing to learn from the experience of past economic conflagrations, is clasping anachronistic ideas about economics with both hands. In other words: “This Is Fine.”

It would be one thing if the tendency to ignore reality were limited to Washington. But the inability to see reality through the smudge of one’s own ideology is a national affliction. As a general rule, Americans pick sides first; the thinking comes second.

Overall, Americans’ evaluation of the economy these days has very little to do with reality. An analysis by the University of Michigan’s Richard Curtin found that partisan differences in how people perceive the state of the economy has never been higher. In other words, at any given moment, Democrats and Republicans claim to be seeing almost completely opposite countries. Take, for example, a Fox News poll from last week. Two-thirds of Republicans said the economy is “excellent” or “good,” almost the exact same share who approved of Trump’s job performance. Meanwhile, just 16 percent of Democrats said the economy was “excellent” or “good,” also close to the same share who approved of Trump’s job performance.

Meanwhile, a pandemic followed by an unprecedented fast freeze of the face-to-face economy has scarcely updated Americans’-- and, particularly, Republicans’-- views of the world. National approval for Trump’s handling of the economy is not meaningfully different than it was in the summer of 2018 or 2017, even though the economy has gone from extremely strong to severely distressed.

In the past 100 years, economic conditions have determined voters’ political preferences. But today, especially on the right, political preferences shape most voters’ attitudes about the economy. For many, it doesn’t matter if the world is freezing, on fire, or just right. “This is fine,” and it will always be fine, just as long as your team is in power.

I asked Nate McMurray, the union-backed western New York (NY-27) candidate running against billionaire reactionary Chris Jacobs (R) if the state of the economy and the stubborn, systemic Republican Party refusal to pass the pandemic relief package is impacting his own race. "For decades," he told me this morning, "my district has been plagued by out-of-touch Republicans who chase power, abandon the people in pursuit of power, and end up resigning in disgrace. Is it any wonder that NY-27 has one of the worst job markets in the country? To Chris Jacobs, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and any other do-nothing politician that stands in the way of working-class families putting food on the table in the middle of a global pandemic that they lied about: History, and the voting public, will not forget the death and ruin you caused by abandoning the American people. If we don't take a clear stand in support of humanity and our democracy, we will lose both of them. If I were in Congress today I'd be fighting for monthly direct payments to individuals, a free and universally available vaccine, rent, mortgage and student loan forgiveness; a full-blooded bill that actually answers the cries of families like mine that are struggling to survive in Trump's America."