(Well I’m home and trying to make the most of it as the kitchen painter paints the extracted cabinets in the garage and we debate what we’ll do when he needs to reinstall them. That will be a multi-day/week process and our options for moving out for a few days are limited to say the least.)
A little optimism has crept into me with the corona virus’ impact on the world, but specifically the Administration’s response and the stock market’s reactions.
Optimism? Well it’s convoluted, I admit. But bear in mind when you ask Russians when the happiest time was during the Stalin era they would tell you it was during the Second World War. What?!? When they lost at least 26 million people? When their country was nearly destroyed? Their material well being the worst it had been in decades?
Well, yes. The reason is that when there was a midnight knocking on the door it was usually because they needed you and not to arrest you. Everything’s relative.
My logic goes something like this; the incompetency and dishonesty of Trump and his minions is being so well revealed that even some ‘always Trumpers’ are beginning to concur that he’s not all that great. Hope springs eternal.
Take the stock market. It was as recently as last August that the President said, to a New Hampshire campaign rally, “you have no choice but to vote for me” or your 401k will crash along with the stock market.
I personally have met people who cited their 401ks when I was questioning Trump’s policies. Where are those now? I suspect they, the 401k’s, are down about 30% since they were likely invested entirely in stocks because if they were naive enough to attribute the gains to Trump’s policies they were surely numb enough not to be better diversified (not that that helped very much).
Below is a chart of the S&P 500 going back to the very start of the Trump regime. Yes, more than three years after his inauguration, the stock market sits unchanged. If you added inflation to the mix, the ‘real’ value would show a loss. For a man whose sole basis for self-justification is the stock market, congratulations you’re exactly where Obama left it. To those who cite 401k’s as the solace for having Trump in office, I ask, not admonish, a “How you doing now?”
The good news I extract from this is that I sense people are finally getting it, getting his style and distractions. He gives himself a ’10’ for performance in this crisis while gutting the people who were there to deal with a pandemic and then denying it. He denies he called it a hoax. The Democrats should have a field day with ads showing the before and after shots of all this and, surely, some people will be persuaded.
PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor recently pressed the president about why he refused to take responsibility for disbanding the White House office for pandemic preparedness in March 2018.
“When you say to me, I didn’t do it,” Trump scoffed. “I mean, you say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”
In reality, the White House got rid of its global health security team in a 2018 John Bolton-led reshuffle.
And then there was the Nunes kerfuffle. Nunes urged people to go out to eat, out in public, pubs and the like in an inspired denial of both reality and responsibility to say nothing of the advice from NIH’s Fauci and the multitude of other mayors and governors. Trump had this to say, “I haven’t heard that.” When pressed as to how he would respond, he said, “I have to see what he said.”
Coming from many others, you might excuse that away. Trump did say he doesn’t think going out is a good idea, but that there was no order and Oklahoma, Nunes’ state, didn’t have a lot of coronavirus just yet.
This will haunt him. Again, misspeak from some politicians — see Biden — might come with caveats and excuses. Trump’s consistent disinformation strategy of blame, hoax, self-praise, had some fans excusing him away as long as the stock market was up. Call it a bribe. Now that that’s gone, what does he, or the psycophants in the GOP (yes I know I misspelled that) have to offer?
I have to mention to both of you reading this (a sad joke) a letter sent into the NYT by Keith Anderson the other day. Keith, who I once knew pretty well, wrote that government aid to corporations should come with strings attached, like equity warrants giving the government a stake in the firm’s equity and recovery rather than just a cheap loan. Kudos. It’s about time, especially after, as Keith noted, corporations squandered so much cash in the last few years with self-paying buybacks on the back of tax breaks and massive debt issuance. The latter is now a serious problem.
Here’s the point, the bulk of what Trump had, past tense, to offer to dim-wits was the stock market. Oh, and he liked oil, natural gas and coal which sit at multi-year lows, liked tariffs, and we got GDP growth…identical to what we got with the Obama years (the red line on the chart below is the average since 2008) but that’s about to drop, sharply, in the next two quarters. Yeah, I think he deserves the ’10’ he gives himself.
