Trump Plays with Trucks While Pandemic Recession Demands Attention

While Donald Trump turns the Rose Garden into a campaign stage for elaborate and failed visual aids, the coronavirus economy is approaching critical points that require decisive policy action to avoid disaster:

A stretch of critical decisions from mid-July until Labor Day will lay the foundation for what the U.S. economy will look like in October before voters make their final decisions. And White House officials are scrambling to prevent a dangerous pileup.

Governors must tame raging Covid-19 outbreaks across the South and West to avoid another lurch into a deeper recession. Whether cities and states reopen their schools on schedule will determine whether many of their parents can return to work. And congressional leaders are starting to debate a fourth economic rescue package to prop up a shaky recovery — while the president monitors cues from the stock market, one of his favorite barometers of success [Nancy Cook, “Trump Stares Down a Ticking Economic Time Bomb,” Politico, 2020.07.16].

I’d feel a lot more confident about our chances of navigating the pandemic recession if we had a President who read his daily briefings and studied economic data rather than a tyrant-child who wants us to watch him play with trucks.

Related Reckoning: Donald Trump has no idea what to do next, because he’s not trying to fix problems, only the next election:

“There’s no agenda because he himself is the agenda,” said presidential historian Jon Meacham. “In 2016, Trump was a vehicle; now, amid a cataclysmic pandemic that he has failed to manage, fewer people outside the core base want to hear anything other than how do we get safely back to real life. Because he has no answer to that overarching question, he just talks — about, inevitably, himself” [Jonathan Lemire, “Four More Years? Trump Struggles to Outline Second Term Plan,” AP, 2020.07.16].