Trump sticks with positive messaging as coronavirus misery piles up

President Donald Trump. | Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images

Even as coronavirus deaths mount and infections make inroads into the White House, President Donald Trump is maintaining his upbeat message about reopening the country and restarting the economy.

Trump has branded the moment a “transition to greatness,” casting himself as a “wartime president” and Americans as warriors in an epic battle against a disease for which there is still no vaccine.

But with the unemployment rate at a level not seen since the Great Depression, the number of Covid-19 deaths at more than 80,000 and polls showing a majority of Americans still wary of heading to shops and restaurants, the president and his administration are trying their best to boost people’s confidence anyway.

Part of the White House’s strategy appears to come from the Trumpian playbook of overstating a potentially bad outcome and then celebrating a less-disastrous result. Throwing out a huge number — like a future 25 percent unemployment rate, or 2 million deaths from the coronavirus — can, in turn, make lower figures seem like a relief.

That was the reaction among White House aides on Friday to the 14.7 percent unemployment rate: happiness that the figure wasn’t as high as it could have been. Aides were also heartened by the statistic that roughly 18 million of the 23.1 million unemployed Americans said they were temporarily laid off, meaning they still had some connection to jobs and companies to which they would hopefully return one day.

Economists largely do not share the president’s rosy view, nor his assurances that the third and fourth quarters of 2020 will automatically transition into an economic rebound.

“I remember working in the White House in 2009 and feeling the world was ending when we lost roughly 700,000 job a month,” said Jesse Rothstein, a former senior economist in the Obama administration who is now a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now, we lost 20 million jobs in one month. There is just no comparison.”

For Trump, the pivot to the economy is a messaging play for his White House legacy and his re-election campaign. If he can cast himself as the wartime president who resurrected the economy from a pandemic, that is a far better political narrative than the one the Democrats are pushing: that Trump underplayed the virus’s threat and oversaw an ad hoc and ill-fated response effort.

The president and the White House are looking for ways to boost economic growth by urging Americans to return to work, as well as considering tax cuts for the next relief package — bound to please Wall Street and goose the stock market, which Trump views as its own form of polling.

Many Republicans close to the White House privately believe the markets will rebound long before the employment numbers do. One Republican close to the administration said the White House is “in denial” about the true scale of the carnage to the jobs market, according to interviews with six senior administration officials and close White House advisers.

Publicly, White House officials are keeping up Trump’s optimistic message of a recovery in the last two quarters of the year, even if it seems unlikely that Americans will want to fully participate in large-scale events like concerts or sports games, or attend celebrations, dine out or even travel.

“We understand why the economy is slowing down. And we expect that we can reverse it,” senior adviser Kevin Hassett said on Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Whereas in the Depression, there were a lot of other things, a lot of policy errors and so on, that made the whole thing drag out.” Also on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned that the unemployment rate could go as high as 25 percent.