Let's be really clear about Donald Trump's chief concern amid a public health crisis that could claim hundreds of thousands of American lives (or more): His reelection bid.
By now, we've all seen Trump's desperate ALL CAPS tweets pushing the notion that any "CURE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF" just isn't worth it. In fact, Trump is anxious to get through the next couple of weeks of lockdown, at which point he appears poised to urge a return to business as usual for the most part. "A lot of people agree with me: Our country's not supposed to be—it's not built to shut down," Trump said Tuesday during a Fox News virtual town hall, adding that officials don't simply "turn the country off" because people are dying from the flu. (Note: Coronavirus is both far more contagious and more deadly than the flu.) Trump said he "gave it two weeks" and then they would reassess if the national lockdown needed more time. "But we have to open [the] country up," Trump added during his appearance with several other Trump officials at the town hall.
Trump never feels urgency about anything unless it has implications for him personally. And no, he's not worried about how many people will die due to his completely callous and inept handling of this crisis. If people have to die in order to reinvigorate the economy and boost his reelection chances, so be it. (Let’s not even get into how obviously stupid, shortsighted, and sociopathic this is.)
The trend lines in the graphs below from Civiqs are the primary drivers of Trump's anxiety about the economy, which is his supposed ace in the hole for getting reelected. In the graph addressing the current state of economy, the number of voters saying the national economy is "very good" peaked at 38% for the first week of January. It’s now dropping to just 26% following the market crash last week. In the same time period, the number of voters saying the national economy is "very bad" spiked from just 7% in early January to 20% now.
And in the following graph on whether the national economy is getting better or worse, just 28% said it was “getting worse” in early January, whereas a full 58% said it was getting worse as of several days ago.
So yeah, if revving up the economy at the expense of an untold number of lives is the sacrifice that must be made to boost his reelection chances, that’s a trade-off Trump is more than happy to make.