Trump, Hoping To Get People's Mind Off His Economic Disaster, Floated The Idea Of Postponing The Elections

Maybe he just wanted to get peoples' minds off the worst economic report in American history, but Trump's tweet (above) about postponing the election didn't go over well. Now every Republican running in November is being asked if they support Trump's call for postponing the election.

Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the Trumpist dysfunction has caused a breakdown in government's ability to meet the most basic needs of the American people. Late Wednesday evening, before the dire economic news broke, Washington Post reporters Erica Werner, Jeff Stein, Seung Min Kim and Rachel Bade wrote that "Negotiations on a new coronavirus relief bill hit an impasse on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, leaving no clear path forward even as millions of Americans face a sudden drop in unemployment benefits, and the economy teeters on the brink. A meeting between top White House officials and Democratic leaders ended with no agreement on extending emergency unemployment benefits that expire Friday or on reviving a moratorium on evictions that lapsed last week. That means some 20 million jobless Americans will lose $600 weekly enhanced unemployment benefits that Congress approved in March, which could send the economy reeling."

That, as much as anything, defines Trumpism for us... or against us. Though the House Democrats passed a $3 trillion package that would avert the coming catastrophe Trump and McConnell are leading the country into, "Each side," wrote The Post team, "said the other was to blame for the failure. Paying the price will be the unemployed at a moment of deep uncertainty and fear, with coronavirus cases spiking and states pulling back on reopening as deaths near 150,000 in the United States. The talks could get back on track in coming days, but the signs Wednesday were not promising. 'I don’t know that there is another plan, other than no deal,' said White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. 'Which will allow unemployment, enhanced unemployment, I might add, to expire... No deal certainly becomes a greater possibility the longer these negotiations go... We are nowhere close to a deal.'"

“Our Republican friends don’t seem to come close to meeting the moment. … They’ve put us up against the wall. We have two cliffs because they wouldn’t negotiate for months,” Schumer said.

“They’re tied in a total knot because of the disunity in their caucus, because of their inability to gather votes, because the president says one thing one day, he says another thing the other day,” Schumer added. "We want to come back and keep talking to them. But they don’t have anything to say.”

...Earlier Wednesday Trump had called for a quick fix to address the unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium, saying other issues could wait.

“The rest of it, we’re so far apart, we don’t care, we really don’t care,” Trump told reporters outside the White House, referring to divisions between the two parties.

But Democrats called that approach wholly inadequate.

“We don’t know why the Republicans come around here with a skinny bill that does nothing to address really what’s happening with the virus, and has a little of this and a little of that. We’re not accepting that," Pelosi said. "We have to have the comprehensive full bill.”

McConnell has not embraced the piecemeal approach either, insisting any bill must include a five-year liability shield for businesses, healthcare providers and others-- a non-starter for Democrats.

More than 20 million Americans remain unemployed and have been receiving a $600 weekly emergency unemployment payment that Congress approved in March, on top of whatever benefit their state offers. That extra federal benefit runs out Friday.

Democrats want to extend the extra jobless payment at its current level. The Senate GOP bill released Monday proposes cutting it to $200 weekly until states can phase in a new system that would aim to replace 70 percent of a worker’s wages before unemployment.

Underscoring the continued need, the head of the Federal Reserve said Wednesday that rising coronavirus cases since mid-June are beginning to weigh on the economy, based on consumer credit card spending and hotel occupancy data as well as some labor market indicators.

“On balance, it looks like the data are pointing to a slowing in the pace of the recovery," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said during a news conference Wednesday. "I want to stress it’s too early to say both how large that is and how sustained it will be.”

Powell said funding from the $2 trillion Cares Act passed in March was key to keeping people in their homes and jobs. He pointed to the success of the small-business Paycheck Protection Program for getting money directly to businesses that couldn’t necessarily have been saved through a Fed lending program.

“Lending is a particular tool, and we’re using it very aggressively, but fiscal policy is essential here," Powell said. “As I’ve said, more will be needed from all of us, and I see Congress is negotiating now over a new package, and I think that’s a good thing."

...Some Republicans don’t want to spend any more money at all, and there are deep divisions over the $1 trillion bill McConnell released Monday, which proposes to send a new round of $1,200 stimulus checks to individual Americans and inject more money into the Paycheck Protection Program, among other provisions. McConnell said in his PBS interview that there are about 20 GOP senators who would prefer to take no additional action because of deficit concerns.

Trump's only concerns seem to be personal-- legislating a 100% deduction for fat cat restaurant meals, which would result in millions of dollars added to his hotels' and restaurants' bottom lines, and a $1.8 billion fund that would keep the FBI in a building Trump fears would otherwise become a hotel that competes with his own. This guy should be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail-- and then brought back for a trial. And the pandemic that most of the world has gotten a handle on and that Trump has made into one of the worst catastrophe's to ever hit America... just keeps rolling on. Yesterday there were 68,569 more confirmed cases reported nationwide, bringing the U.S. total cases to 4,634,985. Most of the states with the worst daily reports, once again, are state with Trumpist governors who have followed his insane denialism and who seem to have embraced his tragic incompetence as though it was a policy-- while their constituents continue contracting the disease more rapidly than anyplace else on earth. These were the dozen governors-- actually 10 governors and 2 state legislatures-- who gave their states the worst one day new cases yesterday:

• Ron DeSantis (R-FL) +9,956 (21,482 cases per million Floridians)
• Greg Abbott (R-TX) +8,843 (14,943 cases per million Texans)
• Gavin Newsom (D-CA) +8,174 (12,503 cases per million Californians)
• Brian Kemp (R-GA) +3,963 (17,169 cases per million Georgians)
• Doug Ducey (R-AZ) +2,525 (23,465 cases per million Arizonans)
• The North Carolina Republican legislature +2,588 (11,499 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Bill Lee (R-TN) +2,049 (15,063 cases per million Tennesseans)
• Kay Ivey (R-AL) +1,980 (17,491 cases per million Alabamans)
• Tate Reeves (R-MS) +1,775 (19,347 cases per million Mississippians)
• Henry McMaster (R-SC) +1,726 (17,009 cases per million South Carolinians)
• The Louisiana Republican legislature +1,708 (24,626 cases per million Louisianans)
• Mike Parson (R-MO) +1,712 (8,043 cases per million Missourans)

Trump Has Also Triggered A Mass Mental Breakdown-- An Economic Meltdown Will Only Make It Worse

If you're a regular DWT reader, you probably wonder, at least some of the time, how prevelent is mental illness among Trump supporters. Most people think rabid Trumpists are just stupid, but there is a big difference between mental illness and low IQs. Yesterday, USA Today published a report by Kelly Tyko about the Arizona woman, Melissa Rein Lively, who, earlier this month filmed herself tearing down a mask display at a Target in Scottsdale. She spent a week in a mental-health facility after the incident, and is using the public meltdown as a warning to others to seek help for issues related to mental health, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. She said what happened to her "was scary and it changed my life forever. I felt I had absolutely no control over my actions."

Nicknamed "Q-Anon Karen," Lively, who was arrested at her home after the incident, claimed she worked for the Trump regime. Her husband filed for divorce and she also lost all the clients she had at her public relations firm, the Brand Consortium Public Relations. Lively told Tyko that extreme stress from the pandemic triggered what she called a "manic bipolar episode... I can absolutely see that how I acted was unbelievably inappropriate not to mention classless and just completely out of character for how I conduct myself, professionally and personally."

Though police spoke to her at Target and let her go, when she got home, she said, her husband called police out of concern about her mental state. She livestreamed the exchange on Instagram. It was in that video that she told officers she had connections at the White House, asked officers to call President Trump and said she was a spokesperson for Q-Anon.

Q-Anon Karen

"Everything that I was kind of doing was facetious and sarcastic and I realize now the world, obviously, took everything I was saying seriously like I really believed that," she told USA Today. "I was not arrested, I was taken in for a mental health evaluation. That was something that like really opened my eyes to this whole process."

Her husband, Jared Lively, said he feared it was an escalation of a days-long decline in his wife’s mental health and a continuation of a problem that he said had manifested itself the year before. The Republican Party has the exact same problem. In fact, the party is now running almost a dozen Q-Anon candidates for Congress, at least some of whom are in districts red enough to guarantee that there will be Q-Anon believers in Congress next year, part of a dwindling and increasingly irrelevant Republican congressional minority.

And then this happened today too

Although they don't all act out the way Lively did, the stress we're all going through, is especially hard to deal with for someone who supports Trump, since Trump supporters are likely to be angry, paranoid, self-centered and self-righteous (as well as stupid). A psychologist friend of mine wrote today that "Here he is in front of us, an insane, narcissistic, ignorant, destructive loon who has excelled his whole life at lying, destroying things and cheating people, and a third of the country still worships him. Even though he hates them and hates everyone and is immune to others’ deaths and suffering. Social psychology at its worst... Lively obviously had a lost moment, when she did what she did. Yes, people will be having mental breakdowns. Abuse in the home will be rising drastically out of frustration. There will be many more deaths. Iraqi psychologists talked about the lost generation of mental health in the children exposed to all the horrors there. We will have our very own lost generation, too, of children exposed to horrors at home, captive with no outlets-- school? I suspect many won’t open and of those districts that do, many parents will not send their children. I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of destruction so far."

Yep... tip of the iceberg for sure. The upheaval is just beginning. Early this morning, the NY Times reported that the economy has been collapsing and that "Economic output fell at its fastest pace on record last spring as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the United States to close their doors and kept millions of Americans shut in their homes for weeks. Gross domestic product-- the broadest measure of goods and services produced-- fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 percent... The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics."



NPR listeners heard it termed "the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history... The economic shock in April, May and June was roughly four times as sharp as the worst quarterly decline during the Great Recession."

And another 1.43 million people filed for unemployment-- just as Trump and Senate Republicans are signaling that they don't want the federal government helping. Anyone think this isn't going to help trigger even more mass psychosis?

We're In A Deep Recession And McConnell And Congressional Republicans Are About To Turn That Into The First Depression Since 1929

The Senate Republicans-- Mitch McConnell and his cronies-- have decided to let the 4 month long moratorium on evictions during the pandemic lapse-- despite the fact that the pandemic is raging worse than ever. Friday saw +78,009 new one-day cases and 1,141 one day COVID deaths. The pandemic is out of control in Florida, southern California, Texas and Georgia and rapidly and dangerously rising in smaller states like Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Wisconsin, Arkansas... McConnell forced the moratorium to end Friday night, knowing full well that it would cause a surge of evictions from coast to coast-- including in Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green, and Owensboro in his own state. And McConnell planned to see that the ban on evictions would end just as pandemic-related enhanced unemployment benefits also ended. Millions-- literally, millions-- of Americans will lose their homes because of two very wealthy men: Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, the former having married into wealth and the latter who inherited it. Around 20 million Americans are now unprotected by either federal or state eviction moratoriums. Landlords who were covered by the moratorium-- 12 million households-- must give tenants 30 days notice before they can actually evict them from their homes.

In May, the House passed a rescue package-- enhanced last month by the addition of legislation that would extend the federal eviction ban until March of next year-- and both Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren have introduced similar legislation in the Senate. McConnell and his Republican cronies have adamantly and arrogantly refused to take any of the bills up. On Thursday, on the Senate floor, Sherrod Brown said that "Right now, millions of Americans are in danger of losing their homes. The last thing we need in the middle of a public health crisis is families being turned out on the streets." This is a list of senators whose names should appear on every eviction notice-- along with Trump's-- before November 3:

• Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
• Cory Gardner (R-CO)
• Steve Daines (R-MT)
• Susan Collins (R-ME)
• Thom Tillis (R-NC)
• Joni Ernst (R-IA)
• Martha McSally (R-AZ)
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
• Kelly Loeffler (R-GA)
• David Perdue (R-GA)
• Shelley Moore Capito(R-WV)
• John Cornyn (R-TX)
• Dan Sullivan (R-AK)
• Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
• Ben Sasse (R-NE)
• Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
• Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS)
• Mike Rounds (R-SD)
• Tom Cotton (R-AR)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)

Neither rent relief nor unemployment relief are priorities for the Republicans; legal immunity for businesses that kill their employees is what drives them. As Annie Lowrey wrote Friday for The Atlantic, "Now We'll Know What The Recession Feels Like-- Congress Is Severing A Lifeline For Millions Of Americans. This week, Congress will decimate the economy, in an unfortunately literal sense: It will cut unemployment-insurance payments to more than 25 million people, more than one in 10 American adults. When it does, the coronavirus recession, already historic in its severity, will become far, far worse. The CARES Act, the coronavirus-relief legislation, included a huge expansion of the unemployment-insurance (UI) program, to include gig workers and freelancers not normally eligible for benefits. It also added a $600-a-week bonus payment to state UI payouts, which generally range from $100 to $400 a week. For four months, these $600-a-week bonus payments have prevented the country’s jobs catastrophe from becoming a catastrophe for family budgets too. They have helped laid-off workers pay their rent, put groceries on the table, and keep the lights on... [T]he $600-a-week payments were a lifeline. Research by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, a think tank housed in the mega-bank, found that the recession and the pandemic cut the spending of employed workers by roughly 10 percent. That makes sense: Many workers had their hours cut, many families spent less as they sheltered in place and worked from home, and many cut back due to fear and uncertainty about the economy. But unemployed workers actually spent a little more than they did before the pandemic hit, due to the additional UI money. The think tank concluded that 'expanded unemployment benefits are acting both as a source of stability for unemployed individuals and also as a form of stimulus to the overall economy.' Congress is now severing that lifeline. The $600-a-week bump functionally expires on Saturday. Even if Congress were to pass an extension now, state UI systems would not be able to program the benefits back in quickly enough to avoid a lapse for millions of recipients. Nor do Republicans want to extend the benefits in full. Concerned about the economy not restarting (a result of the virus, not UI), concerned about the $70-billion-a-month cost of the payments (chump change, given that the economy is collapsing), concerned about disincentivizing work (which, again, does not appear to be happening), Republicans are proposing to cut the payments to just $100 or $200 a week through December, or perhaps to cut them to $300 a week and then extend them only two more months."

Obviously, this kind of a reduction "will hurt families struggling to navigate the dangers of an incurable virus, the disastrous loss of child care and in-person education, and the worst job market in 80 years. Reopening is not leading to a boomerang in economic activity-- indeed, the number of people employed fell from mid-June to mid-July, the Census Bureau reported this week. Jobless workers can’t just go out there and make some money. Now they won’t be able to go out there and spend money either." In other words, what McConnell and his cronies are doing is quite simply "turning a stalled recovery into a double-dip recession. Workers on UI will see their income drop. With no work and no UI, they will spend less, hurting local businesses. Those businesses will purchase less from suppliers, cut their investments, and perhaps lay off employees. This vicious cycle will repeat millions of times, in millions of places across the country. The United States’ economic problems will get worse, not better." Republican politicians are already figuring out how to blame this catastrophe on Biden and the Democratic Congress in the 2022 midterms!

Last week, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, Ruth Simon, Amara Omeokwe and Gwynn Guilford wrote that small businesses are bracing for a prolonged crisis. Many small businesses are shutting down or slashing jobs again after having "brought back staff beginning in mid-April, believing they could get back to business. Now, many are shutting down or slashing jobs again as local officials and consumers pull back and the pandemic shows no signs of abating... [M]any business owners are facing make-or-break challenges. Many may not last. Businesses are entering this phase just as many are exhausting their rescue funds from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, a $670 billion coronavirus stimulus measure launched in April to offer loans to small firms." Billions of the PPP money was stolen for Trump and congressional cronies

An estimated 1.85 million U.S. businesses closed their doors or temporarily suspended operations in the second quarter, according to Oxxford Information Technology Ltd. in Saratoga, N.Y., which tracks roughly 32 million U.S. businesses of all sizes using data from credit bureaus, surveys and government sources.

Raymond Greenhill, Oxxford’s president, forecasts that total losses this year will be greater than in the last recession, when 20%, or roughly 4.5 million businesses, disappeared in just over a year. He added that some of the losses will be offset by new business formation.

Mr. Greenhill said small firms are especially vulnerable now and will account for most of the losses. He said most lack the working capital to survive the downturn or to meet customer needs when the economy recovers. He added that it’s more difficult for young businesses and for other businesses that entered the year in weak financial shape to tap funding from banks and other sources.

As states eased restrictions in May and June, spending at small businesses-- which commonly offer in-person services-- recovered more slowly than in the rest of the economy, according to Womply, a data and technology company with 500,000 small-business customers, mostly in the food and beverage, retail, health and beauty and automotive services sectors.

...Enterprises with fewer than 500 employees accounted for almost half of private-sector employment in 2017, the most-recent data, according to the Census Bureau. Small firms also employ a majority of the workers in industries such as restaurants and personal care that are most affected by capacity restrictions.

“If a small- or medium-sized business becomes insolvent because the economy recovers too slowly, we lose more than just that business. These businesses are the heart of our economy and often embody the work of generations,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said last month during testimony before Congress.

Michael Gibbons, co-owner of three restaurants in Portland, Ore., with his wife, Evelyn, reduced his staff in mid-March to 10 from 97 after shifting to takeout and delivery. The business experimented with outdoor dining on Father’s Day, but scrapped it. “Some guests are just not compliant with safety measures,” he said. Staffing was a hurdle too, as former employees were reluctant to return because they were concerned about their safety and earning more by collecting unemployment benefits, he said, adding that protests in the city didn’t factor in his decision.

Mr. Gibbons said he plans to test outdoor dining again later this month, but also said that Oregon’s uptick in Covid cases is worrisome.

Consumers are pulling back across the country, but spending in small-business categories such as food and beverage, retail, health and beauty has fallen even more sharply in places with rising coronavirus cases, such as Texas, Florida and Arizona, said Michael Stepner, economist at Opportunity Insights, a nonpartisan research institute.

At bars, for example, national spending in mid-July was less than half what it was a year ago, with even worse numbers in Texas, Florida and California, according to Womply.

“It’s hard for small businesses to weather the storm when they don’t know when this will be over,” Mr. Stepner added.

...Nearly one-third of small businesses had less than one month of cash reserves on hand at the end of June, according to the Census Bureau.

Congress sought to allay those strains with PPP funds. The program provided a quick influx of cash to struggling businesses, allowing many of them to retain employees or bring back workers. The loans are generally forgivable if businesses spend a certain share of the funds on payrolls and meet certain other requirements.

The federal government as of July 21 had approved about five million PPP loans, worth a total of $518 billion, according to the Small Business Administration, the agency overseeing the program.

But lawmakers designed the PPP to help owners manage through a V-shaped recovery-- a steep but brief collapse in demand, followed by a swift rebound. Many firms have now burned through the loans, but sales have only barely picked up-- leaving them without funds to keep paying their full pre-pandemic workforce.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Congress should consider automatically forgiving PPP loans taken out by the smallest U.S. businesses and offer a second helping of aid to some firms.

...A July survey conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business advocacy group, found roughly 22% of PPP loan borrowers have laid off or anticipate having to lay off employees after using their loan, according to the 615 survey respondents.

A renewed downturn in activity could especially affect minority-owned businesses, which have been harder hit by the pandemic and slower to rebound.

Robert Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that 81% of Black-owned businesses and 82% of immigrant-owned businesses that had been up-and-running in February were still operating in June, compared with 95% of white-owned businesses, in a study that analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Immigrants and minorities are more likely to be in industries, such as restaurants and personal services, hard hit by social-distancing mandates and economic and health concerns, he said. Even more important, many of these businesses “are really small,” Prof. Fairlie said. “It’s much harder for them to operate during the pandemic, and many lack the financial resources to move forward.”

He said that Black and immigrant business owners tend to hire from their local communities. “If the business owners are struggling and the employees are struggling, it’s a double hit to those communities,” he said.

For some industries, economic pain might not end until the health crisis is fully extinguished.

A survey by Drizly, an online alcohol delivery company, found 13% of respondents said they would return to bars and restaurants again only when a coronavirus vaccine became available. A further 31% said they had no plans to return to bars soon.

Washington Post's Jeff Stein and Erica Werner reported that Mnuchin and the Democrats have said they want a deal by the end of the month, but McConnell said that reaching an agreement could take several weeks, "a timeline that could leave many unemployed Americans severely exposed... Part of the problem stems from a push by administration officials and GOP lawmakers to reduce a $600 weekly payment of enhanced federal unemployment benefits. The White House and the GOP disagree about how to do this, and talks remain highly contentious. They hope to release a proposal early next week... In practice, the coming lapse in the jobless benefit means millions of workers are receiving their last enhanced benefit payment this week... [L]eading Republican lawmakers have argued for cutting the $600-per-week bonus down to $200-per-week, these people said, with one possibility being that this amount slowly phases out over time."

The proposed legislation could come on Monday, a lag that has prompted scorching criticism from congressional Democrats who have been demanding action for months. Congress has not passed any coronavirus relief legislation since approving four bipartisan bills in March and April that pumped around $3 trillion into the economy. McConnell wanted to wait to see how the unemployment benefits and other programs approved in that unprecedented stimulus effort played out before taking additional action.

“This weekend, millions of Americans will lose their unemployment insurance, will be at risk of being evicted from their homes, and could be laid off by state and local government, and there is only one reason: Republicans have been dithering for months while America’s crisis deepens,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said in a joint statement Friday.

If adopted, the new unemployment plan could complicate negotiations with congressional Democrats, who favor extending the $600 weekly payment through January. And it’s unclear if balky state processing systems would have the capacity to implement a complicated new formula on such short notice.

“We’re dealing with the mechanical issues associated with that,” Mnuchin told reporters about the wage replacement plan.

The proposal would, in key respects, meet the conflicting political and economic pressures bearing down on the GOP and White House as the unemployment deadline looms for millions of Americans months away from Election Day.

Senate Republicans and White House officials have been clear that they are not willing to extend the $600-per-week benefit, which conservatives and many business organizations say encourages people to stay home rather than work. Many economists dispute this notion. Senior Republicans have also said they do not want additional federal unemployment benefits to go away entirely, acknowledging that some additional federal help should still be provided to those made jobless during the pandemic. The benefits are politically popular, with a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll finding close to 60 percent of Americans supporting their extension.

...Congressional Democrats and many economists say the current benefit should be extended in full to prevent a crucial stimulus from disappearing from an already wobbly economic recovery.

Given the difficulty of reaching a deal with Democrats before the existing benefits expire, Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Thursday floated a stand-alone extension of unemployment provisions as part of a package with school funding and a type of lawsuit shield to make it harder for employees to sue their employers if they become sick with the novel coronavirus.

Senior lawmakers in both parties oppose this piecemeal approach, but if they are unable to reach a deal, they might be forced to pass some type of stand-alone benefit extension next week.

In March, lawmakers initially discussed increasing unemployment benefits so they would represent 100 percent of a worker’s prior income. Congress ultimately abandoned the idea in favor of the universal $600 bonus, in part because Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia warned that the nation’s unemployment systems could not handle the complexity of matching every individual’s unemployment benefits to the person’s prior income, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who led those negotiations.

“Scalia said, ‘It can’t be done,’ ” Wyden said in an interview. “We have not seen a single piece of paper describing how this would be administered without the downsides Scalia pointed out months ago.”

Mnuchin acknowledged the technical challenges posed by converting from one system to another when addressing reporters on Thursday. He said the matter was being discussed with state unemployment offices. “Let me just say, different states are in different places,” Mnuchin said. “Some states can implement this quickly. Some states will take time."

Some experts are skeptical. State unemployment offices have been badly overwhelmed by the unprecedented surge in claims, and there were another 1.4 million claims last week. Thousands of the newly jobless have struggled for months to obtain benefits and in some states have camped outside unemployment offices overnight to be ahead in line for help.

The $600-per-week bonus was chosen for its simplicity compared with targeted, individual wage replacement-- but it has proved tremendously difficult for states to implement as the nation’s unemployment rate spiked to 15 percent before falling to 11 percent.

Will It Be Fair To Refer To The Coming Great Depression As "The Trump Depression?"

I was born in 1948. My grandparents used to tell me about the Great Depression. There's no one alive today who was a sentient enough being at the time to remember it first hand. And many Americans under 40 relate to it about as much as they relate to the Battle of Yorktown. Yesterday, both the New Yorker and New York Magazine published vital pieces on the Great Depression and what it has to do with us in 2020-- Susan Glasser for the New Yorker and Eric Levitz for New York. Hint: our White House is occupied by Donald J. Trump.

"In September 2006," wrote Levitz, "Nouriel Roubini told the International Monetary Fund what it didn’t want to hear. Standing before an audience of economists at the organization’s headquarters, the New York University professor warned that the U.S. housing market would soon collapse-- and, quite possibly, bring the global financial system down with it. Real-estate values had been propped up by unsustainably shady lending practices, Roubini explained. Once those prices came back to earth, millions of underwater homeowners would default on their mortgages, trillions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities would unravel, and hedge funds, investment banks, and lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could sink into insolvency. At the time, the global economy had just recorded its fastest half-decade of growth in 30 years. And Nouriel Roubini was just some obscure academic. Thus, in the IMF’s cozy confines, his remarks roused less alarm over America’s housing bubble than concern for the professor’s psychological well-being. Of course, the ensuing two years turned Roubini’s prophecy into history, and the little-known scholar of emerging markets into a Wall Street celebrity."

Roubini isn't buying onto the nonsense about a V-shaped recovery. He sees an "L-shaped depression," although he expects thing to get better before they get worse. "He foresees," continued Levitz, "a slow, lackluster (i.e., 'U-shaped') economic rebound in the pandemic’s immediate aftermath. But he insists that this recovery will quickly collapse beneath the weight of the global economy’s accumulated debts. Specifically, Roubini argues that the massive private debts accrued during both the 2008 crash and COVID-19 crisis will durably depress consumption and weaken the short-lived recovery. Meanwhile, the aging of populations across the West will further undermine growth while increasing the fiscal burdens of states already saddled with hazardous debt loads. Although deficit spending is necessary in the present crisis, and will appear benign at the onset of recovery, it is laying the kindling for an inflationary conflagration by mid-decade. As the deepening geopolitical rift between the United States and China triggers a wave of deglobalization, negative supply shocks akin those of the 1970s are going to raise the cost of real resources, even as hyperexploited workers suffer perpetual wage and benefit declines. Prices will rise, but growth will peter out, since ordinary people will be forced to pare back their consumption more and more. Stagflation will beget depression. And through it all, humanity will be beset by unnatural disasters, from extreme weather events wrought by man-made climate change to pandemics induced by our disruption of natural ecosystems."

Levitz's interview with Roubini is something you should read unless something like this will keep you up nights:

There’s a conflict between workers and capital. For a decade, workers have been screwed. Now, they’re going to be screwed more. There’s a conflict between small business and large business.

Millions of these small businesses are going to go bankrupt. Half of the restaurants in New York are never going to reopen. How can they survive? They have such tiny margins. Who’s going to survive? The big chains. Retailers. Fast food. The small businesses are going to disappear in the post-coronavirus economy. So there is a fundamental conflict between Wall Street (big banks and big firms) and Main Street (workers and small businesses). And Wall Street is going to win.

Not scary enough for you? How about this? Is this the kind of thing you can lose sleep over?

You’re going to start having food riots soon enough. Look at the luxury stores in New York. They’ve either boarded them up or emptied their shelves,  because they’re worried people are going to steal the Chanel bags. The few stores that are open, like my Whole Foods, have security guards both inside and outside. We are one step away from food riots. There are lines three miles long at food banks. That’s what’s happening in America. You’re telling me everything’s going to become normal in three months? That’s lunacy.

The Republicans have lost their minds entirely if they thing that Donald Trump and the crew of misfits and sycophants he's hired to run the government are the right people to save the country. And the Democratic electorate is just as clueless, passing on Bernie and Elizabeth in favor of Status Quo Joe, who only looks "good" in comparison to Trump but is certainly not up to this job:

The market, as currently ordered, is going to make capital stronger and labor weaker. So, to change this, you need to invest in your workers. Give them education, a social safety net-- so if they lose their jobs to an economic or technological shock, they get job training, unemployment benefits, social welfare, health care for free. Otherwise, the trends of the market are going to imply more income and wealth inequality. There’s a lot we can do to rebalance it. But I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. If Bernie Sanders had become president, maybe we could’ve had policies of that sort. Of course, Bernie Sanders is to the right of the CDU party in Germany. I mean, Angela Merkel is to the left of Bernie Sanders. Boris Johnson is to the left of Bernie Sanders, in terms of social democratic politics. Only by U.S. standards does Bernie Sanders look like a Bolshevik.

In Germany, the unemployment rate has gone up by one percent. In the U.S., the unemployment rate has gone from 4 percent to 20 percent (correctly measured) in two months. We lost 30 million jobs. Germany lost 200,000. Why is that the case? You have different economic institutions. Workers sit on the boards of German companies. So you share the costs of the shock between the workers, the firms, and the government.

Meanwhile Susan Glasser wants to remind us that the GOP is all about diversion. They want the electorate to think about anything rather than the "side"-effects of the pandemic. "In recent days," she wrote, "the Republican-controlled Senate has not considered any major legislation related to the virus and the historic havoc it has wrought on the country’s public health and economy. Nor does it have any current plans to do so, leaving the fate of a three-trillion-dollar relief measure passed by the Democratic-controlled House last Friday uncertain... Trump right now is mass-proliferating diversions, from last week’s spurious 'Obamagate' to this week’s threat to withhold federal funds from Democratic-led states that make it easier for voters to cast ballots by mail this fall. If it seems as though Trump is generating more controversies than usual these days, that’s because he is. He is a superspreader of distraction. It’s an excellent way to make one forget, at least for a while, about the death and economic destruction currently rampaging across the country."

Of course Trump is trying to distract. The emerging politics of the pandemic are not good for him, nor are they likely to get better. They have recast the fall election as a referendum on Trump’s basic competence to lead the country through a once-in-a-century convergence of crises. During the pre-pandemic impeachment era, Richard Nixon was the inescapable historical point of comparison for Trump’s corruption-ridden Presidency. Now it is Herbert Hoover. Running for reëlection after the stock market crash of 1929 and three failed years of trying to stop the Great Depression, Hoover promised Americans that “Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner.” Upbeat predictions amid bread lines didn’t cut it, and Hoover lost badly. The brutal political reality of running for another term while the country is experiencing mass unemployment is one that almost no President can overcome. In fact, the last time an American incumbent successfully won during a recession was in 1924.

Then again, Hoover’s campaign slogan seems like a winner today compared with the clunker Trump has been trying out in recent days: “Transition to Greatness!” On May 7th, Trump débuted the phrase, saying at a White House appearance with Texas Governor Greg Abbott that, while the economy was cratering now, he expected that late this year-- preferably, right around the November election-- it would begin to “transition into greatness.” A fantastic 2021 would follow. “I think next year we’re going to have a phenomenal year,” the President insisted.

The line stuck with him. By the next day, at an appearance with Republican members of Congress, Trump was calling it his new campaign mantra, claiming to have invented it on the spot (although he had used the same phrase just the day before), and insisting it was a more brilliant advertisement for his reëlection than anything the professionals could come up with. “It’s a great term. It just came out at this meeting,” he told the Republicans as reporters looked on. “That’s right. It came out by accident. It was a statement and it came out and you can’t get a better one. We can go to Madison Avenue and get the best, the greatest geniuses in the world to come up with a slogan, but that’s the slogan we’re going to use: ‘Transition to Greatness.’ And it’s starting right now.”

I suppose it’s not a surprise, more than three years into his Presidency, that Trump will lie about anything, even the coinage of a campaign slogan, but on simple grounds of political malfeasance alone this one seems to be an epic Presidential fail. It’s safe to say that nobody ever got reëlected to anything by promising a “transition.” You would think the guy whose 2016 success was aided by a catchy campaign slogan on a red baseball cap would know a dud when he sees one. Politicians win by attacking the other team, as Trump did so effectively four years ago, by ripping off Ronald Reagan’s 1980 promise to “Make America Great Again.” It is a lot harder to do that if you’re an incumbent, and harder still if you’re the incumbent at a time of epic death and economic suffering. If the record you’re running on is so bad that your own slogan vows to do better next time, it’s hard to envision winning. Yet that is exactly what Trump is selling these days. “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS,” Trump tweeted this Monday, at 4:39 a.m. On Tuesday, emerging from a lunch with Senate Republicans, he explained once again his theory of the case. “It’s a transition to greatness,” Trump said. “Above all, next year, you are going to have a tremendous year.” On Wednesday, he promised, on Twitter, a “normalization!” that somehow, miraculously, will take America out of this mess, “now that our country is Transitioning back to Greatness.” Madison Avenue is surely grateful that Trump is claiming responsibility for this at least.

The U.S. is reporting 95,379 deaths today (Friday), 1,116 more death since Thursday. By Memorial Day the U.S. will be very close to the gruesome 100,000 mark, most of whom should not have died, had our political leaders-- foremost Trump-- done their most basic jobs of protecting the country. This week presidential historian Robert Dallek, writing for Time, reminded his readers that "Herbert Hoover, who won the election of 1928 and had a reputation as a brilliant mining engineer and highly successful businessman, likewise struggled to respond to the stock market crash of 1929 and economic collapse beginning in 1930. The problem for Harding, Hoover and the Republicans who controlled Congress in the 1920s was an unyielding faith in free market capitalism. Convinced that the markets would automatically turn up, as they had in 1921, Hoover repeatedly urged the country to believe that prosperity was right around the corner. With conditions worse than ever and unemployment reaching 25% of the work force in 1932, Hoover lost the presidency in a landslide to New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt... Roosevelt’s leadership fostered renewed hope, with expanded job opportunities provided through public works projects, including dam-building and flood control that protected the environment, as well as projects for artists and writers. As important, his administration humanized America’s industrial economy with Social Security to insulate seniors from hardships, unemployment insurance and minimum wages and maximum hours that gave laborers unprecedented protections from market swings. On the strength of that success and his leadership in World War II, he won a record four presidential elections." Stuck with a status quo nothing as the Democratic nominee, what we need to do now is elect as many progressive as we can to Congress-- like the men and women you'll find listed by clicking on the thermometer on the right.

Trump, who is no student of history, says that he has presided over the best economy ever in the United States and accomplished more in his first year and a half in office than any previous occupant of the White House. Never mind that the coronavirus has triggered a precipitous downturn with over 1.4 million Americans infected and more than 89,000 fatalities. In the beginnings of a reelection campaign in which Trump has to explain away nearly 15% unemployment, the worst since 1933, he is predicting a third-quarter resurgence and a fourth-quarter expansion that will carry over into next year.

...Certainly no one can blame the pandemic itself on Trump, but he has overseen a slow and shortsighted response to the infectious virus. The Washington Post has cited more than 18,000 questionable statements he has made, including numerous outright lies. His credibility problem has played a significant part in making him the first president since polling began in the 1930s to go through almost four years without achieving 50% public approval-- evidence that many people cannot square his rhetoric of alleged accomplishments and self-congratulation with public realities.

There is no question but that the country is facing a national crisis demanding an imaginative response like FDR provided with his New Deal. We can’t simply talk our way out of this challenge by ordering cities and states to reopen public businesses without an escalating death toll. The lackluster response to the economic problems of the 1920s shows just how cheap talk is in this kind of situation: leaving massive national problems to work themselves out without serious federal intervention only made things worse.

...Today, Americans are once again facing the consequences of a failure to act, and a mistaken belief that a miracle solution is on its way. The past has already shown that there is a better way forward-- but as the coronavirus crisis continues, it only seems more likely that FDR’s is not the history Trump plans to repeat.

Just As Trump's Great Corona Cover-Up Kicks Into High Gear, It Appears To Be Backfiring On Him

On Thursday, Politico interviewed Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and she set the Trump Regime on fire for their incompetent, dysfunctional and bungled response to the pandemic. Their over-all grade wasn't an "F"-- presumably because Trump hasn't fired Fauci yet-- but a D minus. One thing she cited was "a lack of a coordinated, national response," noting that governors were stepping up with '50 different homegrown state solutions,' instead of a national response coming from the top... You know, if we were doing the things that the exemplar countries are doing, like Germany, we would be testing. We would be testing, first, health care workers and then the most vulnerable, and you’d be doing contact tracing. And we would be able to start thinking about slowly, slowly reopening places in society in safe and healthy ways, but we have a lack of a coordinated effort. That’s just the truth, across the United States.'" That means things are going to get considerably worse.

One of the states-- where the governor is an empty-headed and completely worthless Trumpist hack who has done everything to kill as many Iowans as she could, Kim Reynolds-- is experiencing a major pandemic surge. On Thursday, Iowa experienced 655 new cases and shot up to a horrifying 3,631 cases per million in its population, second only to Nebraska of any of the other states headed for the leadership roles in the state II summer catastrophe of those that have refused to take social distancing seriously. These were the newest numbers per million for the states begging coronavirus to come stay:

• Nebraska- 3,717
• Iowa- 3,631
• Indiana- 3,438
• South Dakota- 3,361
• Colorado- 3,190
• Georgia- 3,020
• Mississippi- 3,054
• Virginia- 2,618
• Tennessee- 2,064
• Nevada- 1,973
• Ohio- 1,894
• Florida- 1,825
• Utah- 1,880
• Alabama- 1,874
• North Dakota- 1,870
• Missouri- 1,558
• South Carolina- 1,441
• Arizona- 1,446
• Texas- 1,274

We had some insight into Iowa this morning from a Des Moines Register report by Donnelle Eller on a doubling of cases when a Tyson plant in Waterloo was prematurely forced to open. "More than 1,000 workers," wrote Eller, "at the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo have tested positive for the coronavirus, a county public health leader said Thursday-- more than double the number Gov. Kim Reynolds had said were infected the day before." Reynolds reported 444 workers with COVID-19 on Wednesday and Black Hawk County officials reported 1,031 at the pg slaughtering facility with the disease on Thursday. Chris Schwartz, a Black Hawk County supervisor, said he was disappointed that Tyson officials, who were part of the briefing Thursday, didn't take responsibility for failing to act sooner to add more protections for employees. "It was incredibly shameful," he said. Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson expressed concern that some businesses and parks were reopening. "Malls are supposed to operate at 50%. How on Earth do you monitor that?... our numbers are not decreasing yet, have not yet hit a plateau," and that the number of deaths is increasing.

On a national level, you've no doubt read by now that the U.S. jobless rate hit 14.7%, the worst since the Great Depression. Heather Long earlier today: "Over 20 million people lost their jobs in April, the Labor Department said Friday, wiping out a decade of job gains in a single month. The staggering losses are roughly double what the nation experienced during the 2007-09 crisis, which used to be described as the harshest economic situation most people ever confronted. Now that has been quickly dwarfed by the fallout from the global pandemic." The stock markets-- which reflexively hate workers, or at least hate the whole idea of companies paying workers-- moved higher on the news. Analysts are warning "it could take many years to return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate the nation experienced in February. The sudden economic contraction has forced millions of Americans to turn to food banks and seek government aid for the first time or stop paying rent and other bills. As they go without paychecks for weeks, some have also lost health insurance and even put their homes up for sale. 'This is pretty scary,' said Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel. 'I’m fearful many of these jobs are not going to come back and we are going to have an unemployment rate well into 2021 of near 10 percent.'... As horrific as the April unemployment figure, economists say the official government rate almost certainly underestimates the extent of the job losses. The Labor Department said the unemployment rate would have been about 20 percent if workers who said they were absent from work for 'other reasons' had been classified as unemployed or furloughed."

Worst hit are African-Americans, Latinos and low-wage workers in restaurants and retail. "Many of these workers," noted Long, "were already living paycheck-to-paycheck and had the least cushion before the pandemic hit... Women had a higher unemployment rate than men."

Trump regime dysfunction and gross incompetence have resulted on millions of workers "still battling outdated websites and jammed phone lines to try to get unemployment aid and a relief check. Economists are urging Congress to act now to ensure aid does not end this summer when the unemployment rate is still likely to be at historic levels."

There’s a growing consensus that the economy is not going to bounce back quickly like Trump wants, even as more businesses re-open this month. Many restaurants, gyms, and other firms are only able to operate at limited capacities, and customers are proving to be slow to return as they are fearful of venturing out. Many businesses also won’t survive. All of this means the economy is going to need far fewer workers for months-- or possibly years-- to come.

“We’re not going to go sharply down and sharply up. We went sharply down and we’ll go gradually up,” Thomas Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said Thursday.

A new Ipsos poll for ABC News found that the vast majority of Americans think-- regardless of what politicians say-- it's too soon to reopen. Imagine that: ordinary citizens are smarter than the leaders who have wormed their way into top positions!

64% of Americans say it's too soon to reopen. They includes 92% of Democrats. Only 35% of Republicans agree but what it says is that most of us believe the risk to human life of opening the country outweighs the economic toll of remaining under restrictive lockdowns. 65% of self-identified Republicans say that salvaging the economy is more important than the lives of the people who will die from a premature reopening.

Sill, when asked about the likelihood of agreeing to get a safe and effective vaccine, the new survey shows some skepticism about being inoculated. One-quarter of Americans said they were not likely to get vaccinated, even if a safe and effective vaccine was developed. About three-quarters said they would likely get the immunization.

Those Americans who are opposed to getting a vaccine, experts say, often fall into one of two categories. But, unlike most things in American politics and concerning the coronavirus outbreak, those groups are not partisan in nature, with about equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans saying they were likely to get the vaccine.

"There's always been an anti-vaccine group of individuals that are going to refuse vaccines no matter what," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert, and a professor of medicine, epidemiology and global health at Emory University. "The question is, how do they impact other people."

...More states, too, began easing restrictions this week, despite the number of confirmed cases continuing to climb. As more governors began lifting orders this week that were put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Trump acknowledged in an exclusive interview with ABC News World News Tonight anchor David Muir that there might be more deaths from COVID-19 during the reopening process. "It's possible there will be some because you won't be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is," Trump said. "But at the same time, we're going to practice social distancing, we're going to be washing hands, we're going to be doing a lot of the things that we've learned to do over the last period of time."

Trump's approval for the handling of the coronavirus pandemic continues to be underwater among Americans and sharply polarizing among political tribes.

Too long for so early on a Friday morning? Tell me about it! But this post wouldn't be complete without a quick look at how Trump is trying to tightens grip on pandemic information. The Washington Post's Tolouse Olorunnipa reported Señor Trumpanzee "has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy and the rekindling of an economy that has been devastated by public health restrictions aimed at mitigating the outbreak." The criminal regime "has sidelined or replaced officials not seen as loyal, rebuffed congressional requests for testimony, dismissed jarring statistics and models, praised states for reopening without meeting White House guidelines and, briefly, pushed to disband a task force created to combat the virus and communicate about the public health crisis. Several Republican governors are following Trump’s lead as an effort takes shape to control the narrative about a pandemic that has continued to rage throughout a quickly reopening country. With polls showing most consumers still afraid to venture out of their homes, the Trump administration has intensified its efforts to soothe some of those fears through a messaging campaign that relies on tightly controlling information about a virus that has proven stubbornly difficult to contain."

So far, the Trumpist attempts to rewrite reality are failing. "If the message were to go out with complete objectivity, it would be disastrous for Trump," said Max Skidmore, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the author of a book on presidential responses to pandemics. 'So he is doing his best to prevent experts from speaking out or using their expertise, and he’s simply trying to divert attention."

Trump’s information-control tactics are being replicated in states across the country, where governors are lifting stay-at-home orders against the advice of public health officials.

In Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey (R) is pushing businesses to reopen, the state health department abruptly halted the work of a team of experts who predicted the outbreak’s peak was still about two weeks away. The department reversed the decision amid an outcry after it became public.

Governors in Georgia, Texas, Iowa and elsewhere have been praised by Trump as they ignored recommendations from doctors and health officials in their states to begin phased reopenings. States such as Florida have limited or redacted public information about their coronavirus deaths.

Administration officials say the moves reflect a shift, driven by Trump, away from focusing on the health challenges caused by the pandemic and toward restarting economic activity and pulling the country out of recession. The evolution is being driven in part by the political calendar, with just six months before voters decide the president’s fate.

...One senior administration official said the public-health experts are scaring people, and their dire warnings have often been at odds with the president’s call to “open up our country.”

...The administration also has not released guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that have been in the works for weeks and offered advice on how to reopen certain businesses and facilities.

In a sharply worded statement Thursday, the White House blasted the guidelines.

“Issuing overly specific instructions-- that CDC leadership never cleared-- for how various types of businesses open up would be overly prescriptive and broad for the various circumstances States are experiencing throughout the country,” the unnamed task force official said in a statement released by the White House press office following an Associated Press report that the guidelines had been shelved. “Guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City.”

The CDC, which has seen its public role significantly downsized since the early days of the crisis, continues to play a more limited part in the coronavirus response than it has in previous viral outbreaks, according to experts and administration officials. That has unnerved some lawmakers and public health experts.

“Irony around CDC not issuing it’s reopen guidance, whatever the reason, is a lot of business literally can’t reopen without it because CDC is a de facto regulator in a public health crisis,” Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, wrote Thursday on Twitter. “CDC must publish its umbrella document to publish more detailed industry specific guidance.”

The limits of Trump’s ability to shape the public’s understanding of his coronavirus response could be tested next week, as major congressional hearings featuring career government health officials are set to take place. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and a member of Trump’s task force, is one of several officials scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on May 12.

Fauci has regularly contradicted Trump’s sunny descriptions of the crisis and described the administration’s early testing efforts as “a failing.”

While the White House blocked Fauci from testifying before the Democratic-controlled House, its blanket policy of limiting congressional testimony has not stopped the oversight process. A senior government scientist who filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the Department of Health and Human Services made critical mistakes in the weeks before the outbreaks ramped up into a pandemic is expected to testify before a House committee next week.

Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said in his complaint that his early efforts to take proactive measures against the virus “encountered resistance from HHS leadership, including Secretary [Alex] Azar, who appeared intent on downplaying this catastrophic event.”

Trump has tried to dismiss Bright-- who was demoted from his position after his warnings-- as a “disgruntled” employee.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attacked House Democrats for trying to stage a “publicity stunt” with their requests for hearings, including with Fauci. Trump called the House “a bunch of Trump haters” as he defended his decision to block testimony before the congressional body.

But the White House’s effort to tightly control which officials are allowed to testify before Congress has been criticized by Democrats and some Republicans.

Rep. Tom Cole (OK), the top Republican on a House panel that requested Fauci’s appearance, said Wednesday that it would have been “useful to this country” to hear from the high-profile member of the president’s coronavirus task force.

Democrats have been more forceful in their criticism.

“President Trump should learn that by muzzling science and the truth, it will only prolong this health and economic crisis,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement Monday. “The president’s failure to accept the truth, and then his desire to hide it, is one of the chief reasons we are lagging behind so many other countries in beating this scourge.”

Trump’s shift toward message-control comes as he has been frustrated with scientific experts, data and models that have failed to support his desire for a quick solution to the crisis.

“These models have been so wrong from day one, both on the low side and the upside,” Trump said Tuesday in an interview with ABC News. “They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack. And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong.”

The administration released multiple statements this week disavowing a draft report that projected as many as 3,000 daily coronavirus deaths beginning on June 1. The report, which carried a CDC logo and was featured in a Federal Emergency Management Agency briefing, had not been vetted by the White House, McEnany said.

On Tuesday, a day after the White House attacked the report, the United States recorded more than 2,400 coronavirus deaths.

...The steadily high number of coronavirus cases and the growing death count have stood in sharp contrast to Trump’s cheerful language about reopening the economy. The president has encouraged several states to begin relaxing stay-at-home orders even though they have failed to meet benchmarks from the White House’s own guidelines. Those guidelines encourage states to wait to see a decline in cases over a two-week period before relaxing social distancing measures.

Skidmore, whose 2016 book Presidents, Pandemics and Politics describes presidential leadership during health crises as critical, said Trump’s push to turn the battle against the coronavirus into a form of information warfare will ultimately fail.

“It will work for some people, but he can’t get over the fact that many, many people are dying-- and they’re dying on his watch,” Skidmore said. “Too many people are dying, and that’s the fact that he can’t cover up however much he tries.”