Gee, what a surprise: when Donald Trump rages and raves about lifting coronavirus restrictions, he’s thinking more about his own political future than about public health. Internal polling for conservative groups shows increasing numbers of people wanting to reopen businesses, and Team Trump sees it as a way to whip up his base before November.
“Trump, himself, feels pretty good about the polling in his direction,” an unnamed “Republican familiar with the White House’s deliberations” told Politico’s Anita Kumar. “It’s a winner for Trump if it becomes a partisan issue.” So he’s going to do his damnedest to make it a partisan issue.
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Public health experts are saying “not yet.” Last week, the biggest increases in diagnosed COVID-19 infections were in states without stay-at-home orders. But Trump’s instinct isn’t to listen to public health experts, and the data he’s listening to is about politics, not public health.
Here’s what he’s hearing from the people he does listen to. “If you don't see something start to happen … you’re going to see a conservative revolt by our base,” according to the president of the far-right FreedomWorks.
”The facts on the ground increasingly suggest a marked turn toward lower health risks, even in New York,” an unnamed “Republican who talks to Trump” told Kumar. “I strongly urged the president personally to expedite the badly needed reopening of our country.” Note that this “Republican who talks to Trump” and is opining about “the facts on the ground” is not identified as a public health expert. The real facts on the ground tell a different story.
”Trump’s electoral future is on the line, so he’s obviously focused on that challenge,” according to Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor who’s popped up often in recent weeks to give quotes about Trump’s coronavirus response. Got that? Trump’s focused on the challenge of his electoral future—while there are just a few other things he should be focused on first, like the more than 40,000 deaths in the U.S. so far and the ongoing danger, as well as, yes, the economy. But Trump’s worry about the economy could have come in the form of more stimulus to suddenly jobless people struggling to get by, or to small businesses—rather than to big businesses and massive tax breaks to millionaires. That’s not Trump, though, just as responding to coronavirus before it became widespread and started killing people wasn’t Trump.