As the number of coronavirus cases in the United States swelled Tuesday morning and Wall Street sneered at the Fed's slap-dash interest-rate drop, bafflement overtook very stable genius Donald Trump. "Six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, you never heard of this," Trump said of the coronavirus as he addressed the National Association of Counties. "All of a sudden, it's got the world aflutter."
Geez, who coulda seen it coming? Not Trump. He's the guy who found out just a couple of weeks ago that the flu can be deadly. "I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it," Trump marveled during a coronavirus-related press conference last week, "The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me." Yeah, we get it. You're a clueless navel-gazing narcissist who a month ago was gleefully planning your government-wide post-impeachment purge of nonloyalists.
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Around that same time, Elizabeth Warren was preparing a global response to the emerging pandemic Trump had "never heard of." As Trump issued the opening salvo of his nonloyalist purge with the ouster of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother from the National Security Council, Warren was releasing her plan to prevent and minimize transmission by investing in global health agencies, investing in vaccine development, and preparing hospitals and health departments across the nation for potential outbreaks. Her plan emphasized the importance of science and disseminating factual information while countering misinformation.
“Diseases like coronavirus remind us why we need robust international institutions, strong investments in public health, and a government that is prepared to jump into action at a moment's notice,” Warren wrote in her plan. “When we prepare and effectively collaborate to address common threats that don’t stop at borders, the international community can stop these diseases in their tracks.”
A month later, Trump would be calling this burgeoning public health crisis a "hoax" and rushing to reassure the markets that he had this all under control. Trump surely viewed the Federal Reserve as his ace in the hole. But after it took the rare step Tuesday morning of cutting the interest rate half a percentage point between meetings in order to mitigate economic fallout from the virus, the Dow Jones stabilized briefly and then plummeted another 500 points.
Goodness, just six weeks ago, who could have imagined? Warren not only could have, but she did, and got to work on a plan for that.