Trump’s speech didn’t comfort anyone

“Happy talk, keep talking happy talk.” Those are the lyrics of a song of that name in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.” They also describe Trump’s initial approach to the outbreak of the coronavirus. At a February 27 news conference, he said, “when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Trump seemed like Nero in the well-known (but not by Trump) expression, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”  A clueless Trump retweeted an image he received of himself playing a violin; the caption said, “My next piece is called nothing can stop what’s coming.” Trump then tweeted, “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”

Healthcare professionals and governments around the country and around the world didn’t accept Dr. Trump’s optimistic diagnosis of Covid-19. Investors are also ignoring Trump’s opinion. No matter what Trump tweets, stock prices are dropping. That’s what really has Trump upset. A healthy economy – a rising Dow Jones average, a falling unemployment rate – is the key to his reelection, but it’s not looking good for Trump’s campaign: more than half of likely voters surveyed say Joe Biden, his probable opponent in November, is more capable of handling a crisis.

Last week, Trump finally acknowledged the extent of the coronavirus crisis which the World Health Organization now declares is a pandemic. He gave a speech from the Oval Office, and in his closing remarks, he said, “We must put politics aside, stop the partisanship and unify together as one nation and one family.” What gall! In an earlier tweet, he said, “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus [sic] situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

In his speech, Trump said, “We are marshaling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people. This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.” This from a man who, in 2018, fired the entire chain of command for pandemic response that President Obama formed after the 2014 Ebola crisis. According to experts in health and national security, Trump has not filled public health positions across the government, leaving the country ill-prepared to face an outbreak of a deadly infectious disease. Trump pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, including reducing $15 billion in national health spending, and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),  the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A global health crisis “will go from being on no one’s to-do list to being the only thing on their list,” said Bill Steiger, who headed the HHS office of global health affairs during the George W. Bush administration.

The Trump administration squandered valuable time getting prepared for an outbreak in the U.S. For instance, the CDC have been unable to roll out mass-scale testing needed to contain the virus and understand its spread. The Secretary of Health and Human Services even told the Senate that some tests for cities were ready when they were not. (As of last Thursday, 13,624 people had been tested across the country.  By contrast, South Korea has tested hundreds of thousands of people and brought the death rate down.) Low numbers of tests mean low numbers of infections which lead to the incorrect perception that this indicates the risk of getting the coronavirus is low. There was infighting among agencies rather than working together to get hospitals prepared with equipment and money to deal with an influx of patients.

Although the pandemic by itself is unlikely to cause an economic collapse, the U.S. economy has been on thin ice for some time. Growth slowed over the last two years despite higher government spending. While the labor market has expanded, many of the new jobs are service-industry positions offering limited possibilities for savings or health insurance.

A Brookings Institution study in January found that 44 percent of all workers earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour. They are concentrated in a relatively small number of occupations, including retail sales, food and beverage servers, janitors and housekeepers, personal care service workers (including child care workers and patient care assistants), and various administrative jobs.

“Even with sunny job statistics, the nation’s economy is simply not working well for tens of millions of people. Labor market conditions…are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions. We should look at individuals, not national averages, as the unit of analysis, and ask: Are wages adequate? Can people support themselves and their families if they work full time?”

As we know, the answer is “no” for a disturbingly large share of the workforce. The combination of the pandemic and a slowing economy may doom Trump’s chances for reelection. 

Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.