Who Would Have Thought a Virus Would Tank the Economy and Hopefully Help Bring Down His Orange Majesty??

World history can certainly take unexpected and bizarre turns, and we are living through one such life-changing global event which will certainly go down in the history annals, like the 1918 flu pandemic, 9/11 and the Great Recession, but is distinctly different in many respects from the nonmedical catastrophes. The increasingly draconian local and state governmental restrictions on businesses and other activities, which may well get worse in the coming weeks, are now almost certain to precipitously tip our previously pretty strong economy into a recession, as will be the case in many parts of the world. Partly because of the appalling lack of adequate testing to date in the US, we still have no good handle on how prevalent the virus is and therefore how severe and protracted the pandemic and overload on our medical system will likely be. Therefore it is also much too early to reliably predict how bad this recession will get and for how long, but trillions of dollars have already been wiped out in one of the worst and still ongoing(!!) stock market crashes in history, with no floor yet in sight! Some are predicting a million job losses in just the next month! Although many businesses will bounce back whenever this pandemic subsides, many will undoubtedly not recover, and there will be widespread severe economic distress and pain, beginning immediately. It remains to be seen how effective (and expensive) the already enacted and proposed Federal Reserve measures and federal government subsidies will be. Bottom line: Trump’s long-touted signature accomplishment, the strong economy, much of which was not even his doing, is now circling the drain, all because of a virus! How ironic for such a reputed germaphobe!! It remains to be seen whether this oncoming recession will last through the November election, but even if the economy is recovering, its effects will certainly be fresh on people’s minds, with many still badly affected! 

And who to blame for all of the oncoming misery? The scapegoater-in-chief, who takes blame for NOTHING ever, can obviously no longer claim that this is a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats and liberal media, as he did just a few short weeks ago. He has obliquely blamed the Chinese for this “foreign virus”, but that certainly won’t hold water for most people, and he has pathetically been reduced to saying repeatedly on live TV that it is nobody’s fault! To quote one CNN contributor, “You can’t spin a pandemic”. Nevertheless, I’m sure he will devote tremendous effort to try to come up with a plausible reason to blame the Democrats, Obama and/or others for some of this during the upcoming campaign. But it is the Democrats who should have the winning argument that Trump and his administration have bungled the response to the pandemic from the beginning, at least up to this point. That includes on background his cutting funding for the CDC in previous years as well as further cuts in his proposed 2020 budget, and disbanding the White House office dedicated to planning for pandemics in 2018 (which Trump denied on live TV that he did or knew anything about, although it was done by his own then national security advisor John Bolton). Then they squandered the time they had to prepare for things between when the epidemic in China became known and when it reached here, with Trump repeatedly downplaying and denying (i.e. lying about) the inevitability of global spread, on which he must certainly have been briefed by experts. This was compounded by a series of bad decisions by CDC and/or FDA officials initially denying states and private companies the authority to develop their own test kits for the virus, with the first distributed CDC test kits turning out to be defective(!), all leading to crucial weeks of delay in our ability to adequately test patients and others, which is still not adequately resolved! This certainly resulted in undetected but potentially preventable community spread. All this despite many daily promises of millions of test kits coming “next week” by sycophant-in-chief Pence once the virus task force was formed. And even though he has finally reluctantly come around to the gravity of the whole situation, Trump still outrageously but predictably gave his administration a grade of 10 out of 10 in dealing with the crisis!! Talk about grading on a curve! Even though a recent poll showed a 41% approval rating for his handling of the crisis, presumably mostly reflecting his cult base, who would give him high marks even if he bulldozed the White House, it will hopefully become obvious to a larger majority that his administration has so far massively bungled the planning and response to the pandemic. Granted, there is no guarantee that a Democratic administration would do a significantly better job given the inherent incompetence of the federal bureaucracy, but this is Trump’s ugly baby now, and the Democrats’ to exploit during the campaign if they play their cards right. 

Speaking of which, we witnessed probably the greatest comeback in modern political campaign history with Joe Biden’s resurrection courtesy of South Carolina’s heavily black electorate. In the space of four days starting with the SC primary he went from nearly dead in the water to the presumptive nominee! Although I still have major reservations about his fitness and abilities to go up against Trump, I do think he is more electable than Bernie Sanders. A strong female VP choice will probably boost his chances. A major wild card is the outcome and effects of the Senate investigation into Hunter Biden as well as any dirt that Giuliani et al can put out related to this, however unreliable it may be. Fortunately the election will still mostly come down to a referendum on Trump, whose corruption dwarfs anything that they can try to pin on Biden!

Here’s hoping we all get through this pandemic and its aftermath with the least possible disruption and adversity!