It’s misjudgment, not messaging

The media this morning is marveling at Donald Trump’s changed messaging. After months of downplaying the threat of Covid-19, he is saying he takes it seriously and always did. That is a lie: he has consistently opposed taking vigorous action against the virus fearing the impact on the US economy.

What allegedly changed his mind are the projections of deaths: somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 in the best of cases, which is unlikely to materialize because many states have still not taken vigorous action to limit exposures and the projections are based on keeping vigorous measures in place until June 1. They are currently scheduled to expire at the end of April.

The issue here isn’t messaging. It is misjudgment. Trump thought the virus was going to disappear with the spring and told the country so. He also thought it wasn’t worse than the flu. And he thought blocking travel from China would protect the United States. All of these assumptions were false: it is not disappearing with warmer weather, it is far more transmissible than the flu apparently during a period when infected people show no symptoms, and the virus appeared quickly in the US even after travel from China was blocked.

Trump thought acknowledging the facts would hurt his re-election prospects. That may be true.

Let’s assume the strict “social distancing” measures last until June 15 or so, which is not an unreasonable time frame. Even then, few–including me–are going to want to go back to work unless others there are tested for Covid-19 on an almost daily basis. Tests will need to be cheap, fast, and universally available. They are nowhere near that now. But let’s say that problem is solved by the end of June.

This would mean the Conference Board’s “May reboot” of the economy is already overtaken by events. We’d be looking at either a summer rebound or a fall recovery, more than likely the latter. Either would mean 6% or so shrinkage of the economy in 2020 relative to 2019, and unemployment up to 15% in the third quarter of 2020. No president should want to compete for re-election with unemployment at that rate, especially if he is personally responsible for making it so.

Trump inherited an economy that was in good shape: it had grown about 2.4% per year under Obama since the recovery from the recession began in mid-2009. The growth rate in Trump’s first three years was about the same (2.5%), but the deficit was worsening rapidly due to the giant tax cut the Republicans gave corporations and the wealthy in his first year. Now the deficit is exploding due to new spending to meet the corona virus challenge, but interest rates are low so the full impact of the borrowing is not being felt.

Former Vice President Biden has the advantage of the Obama recovery to brag about, and Trump’s ineptitude in meeting the challenge of Covid-19 to criticize. But the Democrats haven’t been very successful yet in pinning the tail on the elephant. Polls show an uptick in Trump’s approval rating, up to 46%. That is low for an incumbent president, but high for Trump. Rallying around the flag may be the reason, but that is unlikely to persist through hundreds of thousands of deaths, continuing personal confinement, and a 15% unemployment rate.

We can be pretty much certain that Trump will lose the popular vote by even more than the 2.8 million or so votes in 2016. He has treated California, New York, New Jersey and other more populated Democratic-majority states with disdain before and throughout the epidemic. They will vote overwhelmingly against him. His base is concentrated in more rural, less populated states overweighted in the Electoral College. Covid-19 has not yet hit many of those states hard. What will happen to his votes then is anyone’s guess, as his base has remained intensely loyal so far.

An epidemic doesn’t lend itself to messaging. It’s all about getting it right. Trump got it wrong. I find it hard to imagine that there will be no punishment for that.