It's a MAGA Microbe Meltdown

[dajoki]

It’s a MAGA Microbe Meltdown
Trump utterly fails to rise to his first real crisis.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opinion/trump-coronavirus-economy.html

For three years Donald Trump led a charmed life. He faced only one major crisis that he didn’t generate himself — Hurricane Maria — and although his botched response contributed to a tragedy that killed thousands of U.S. citizens, the deaths took place off camera, allowing him to deny that anything bad had happened.

Now, however, we face a much bigger crisis with the coronavirus. And Trump’s response has been worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined. He has treated a dire threat as a public relations problem, combining denial with frantic blame-shifting.

His administration has failed to deliver the most basic prerequisite of pandemic response, widespread testing to track the disease’s spread. He has failed to implement recommendations of public health experts, instead imposing pointless travel bans on foreigners when all indications are that the disease is already well established in the United States.

And his response to the economic fallout has veered between complacency and hysteria, with a strong admixture of cronyism.

<<snip>>

So what’s going on? What we’re seeing here is a meltdown — not just a meltdown of the markets, but a meltdown of Trump’s mind. When bad things happen, there are only three things he knows how to do: insist that things are great and his policies are perfect, cut taxes, and throw money at his cronies.

Now he’s faced with a crisis where none of these standbys will work, where he actually needs to cooperate with Nancy Pelosi to avoid catastrophe. What we saw in Wednesday’s speech was that he’s completely incapable of rising to the occasion. We needed to see a leader; what we saw was an incompetent, delusional blowhard.

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

And when it comes to the economy, Trump seems to fluctuate day to day — even hour to hour — between assertions that everything is fine and demands for enormous, ill-conceived stimulus.

His big idea for the economy is a complete payroll tax holiday. According to Bloomberg News, he told Republican senators that he wanted the holiday to extend “through the November election so that taxes don’t go back up before voters decide whether to return him to office.” That is, he apparently said the quiet part out loud.

This would be an enormous move. Payroll taxes are 5.9 percent of G.D.P.; by comparison, the Obama stimulus of 2009-2010 peaked at about 2.5 percent of G.D.P. Yet it would be very poorly targeted: big breaks for well-paid workers, nothing for the unemployed or those without paid sick leave.

Why do it this way? After all, if the goal is to put money in people’s hands, why not just send out checks? Apparently Republicans can’t conceive of an economic policy that doesn’t take the form of tax cuts.

Trump also reportedly wants to provide aid to specific industries, including oil and shale — a continuation of his administration’s efforts to subsidize fossil fuels.

Democrats, by contrast, have proposed a package that would actually address the needs of the moment: free coronavirus testing, paid sick leave, expanded unemployment benefits and an increase in federal matching funds for Medicaid programs, which would both help states meet the demands of the crisis and sustain overall spending by relieving the pressure on state budgets.

Notice, by the way, that these measures would help the economy in an election year, and therefore arguably help Trump politically. But Democrats are willing to do the right thing anyway — a stark contrast to the behavior of Republicans after the 2008 financial crisis, when they offered scorched-earth opposition to anything that might mitigate the damage.

[Firestorm49]

2. Add to the list of Trump's meltdown syndrome, deflection. Obama caused it! Moron.

[uponit7771]

3. "first"?!?!? Puerto Rico, kidnapping children, hurricanes he has never risen to anything

[Phoenix61]

4. He has never, ever, had to deal with the consequences

of his poor choices....until now. Sadly, he is dragging the entire country along with him.