President Trump focuses on Reopening the Economy! President Trump focuses on reopening the economy despite saying 2 weeks ago that the nation could expect the most difficult period of the Coronavirus and could expect hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The US death toll continues to rise, with record fatalities over a 24 hour period rising regularly. However, despite the near 33,000 deaths in the country, stay-at-home measures and increased testing across the country shows signs of slowing the pandemic’s incredibly rapid spread.
The economic damage from the shutdown has mounted as Americans have cut retail spending by an incredible amount. Industrial output has dropped to its steepest rate in more than 70 years. Economists laid on by signaling that recovery will be slow, with business executives predicting slow growth and a return to normalcy only when a vaccine is deployed. It is expected that the vaccine will be at least a year away from deployment.
President Trump has focused on issues other than the death toll as a result of the mounting economic and human cost to the Coronavirus. His new goal is to reopen the economy as quickly and as safely as possible, while battling criticism of his administration’s perceived slow response to the crisis.
On Thursday, he released guidelines on the governments under lockdown to follow and meet before lifting economic restrictions.
In recent weeks, President Trump has shifted and directed blame on the severity of the pandemic’s impact on factors like the media, China, and other executives of states like governors’ and his predecessors’ lack of preparedness.
In White House meetings with officials, advisors say that President Trump is very bothered over the optics of how much blame he might get for his administration’s slow early response to the crisis. He also reportedly ponders how to position himself and his administration to receive as much credit as possible in efforts to revive the stuttering economy.
White House Aides have been asked for economic response plans that would allow him to take credit for successes while asking for wiggle room to assign blame and fault for any failures that may occur. “People have made clear to him that’s an impossible goal just two completely contradictory goals…. but I’m not sure he’s convinced”, said one person in contact with the administration.
The administration has introduced measures to boost the economy while also insulating him from political damage if they fail. This includes the business advisory council whose goal is to reopen the economy – as a consequence, hundreds of members of some of the biggest companies in the country are involved.
A bipartisan task force includes every republican in the US Senate except Mitt Romney of Utah, who voted to remove President Trump from office earlier this year during the impeachment trial.
The president also relies extensively upon top advisors including Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, to discuss political ramifications.
The general consensus is that criticism by Democrats, the media, and others that the administration was slow to respond isn’t as damaging as first thought. They just have to reopen the economy.
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