No one else

I’ve been wrong a lot about American politics, but I’m going to hazard one more prediction: President Trump is hurting his own re-election chances by urging earlier-than-justified reopening of the US economy. There is already a surge in Covid-19 cases in “heartland” (i.e. non-coastal, non-metropolitan) areas. He is losing support even among evangelicals. The epidemic is going to get a lot worse. Rural areas and white Evangelicals are Trump country.

The situation in “swing” states is also precarious for Trump. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan–the three states whose narrow margins brought him victory in the Electoral College in 2016–all have Democratic governors who are winning plaudits for their deliberate approach to reopening.

The overall picture is also grim for Trump. By August, close to 150,000 Americans will have died of Covid-19. If each of them has 100 relatives and friends of voting age, that is 15 million people with good reasons to vote against Trump. Thirty million Americans have filed unemployment claims, and more millions have lost their jobs but aren’t eligible for unemployment.

The Conference Board outlook for the economy varies from bad to miserable:

Our friends there have pretty much given up hope for the V-shaped recovery and are betting now on the U-shape, which would give Trump some bragging points during the fall campaign. He could continue to claim, as he has already, that we are on the way to recovery. But I suspect the early reopenings in states that have not met the Federal government criteria will make the W-shape, or something like it, more likely. There are no campaign-time bragging rights at all in that instance.

Trump will blame it all on China, claim Obama didn’t prepare properly, say the CDC failed to produce good tests, and assert that he acted early and decisively. There are elements of truth in all those allegations. Chinese local officials did try to ignore the initial outbreak and Beijing has not been as forthcoming as it should be. Obama did prepare, including a playbook handed to the Trump transition team, but it prioritized preparations for biological warfare over an epidemic. CDC did fail in designing its first tests. Trump blocked Chinese from entering the US early, but then did nothing for weeks and continued to allow American citizens to return home from China and Europe without proper testing and tracking.

None of that really matters, because the Trump Administration had adequate warning (even beginning in December), failed for three years in office to prepare while dismantling Obama-era programs intended to give early warning, and then dawdled for months doing almost nothing to make tests available, supply personal protective equipment to health workers, or counter the spread of the virus.

The buck should stop in the Oval Office. President Trump’s hope that the virus would just disappear, or more likely that he could convince people to ignore the virus and the fatalities is has caused, is the root cause of the American Covid-19 disaster. It has also wrecked the decently growing economy the present Administration inherited from Obama. No one else is to blame but Donald Trump. He should be held responsible November 3.