By the end of December 2019, US President Donald Trump had beaten back the Democratic Party challenge. It was to skewer the President for his collusion with Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, his likely competition for the November elections. We had written in these columns that the big momentum in Trump’s favour then was the steady performance of the US economy.
His anti-immigrant rhetoric combined with unemployment dropping to just 3.5 per cent, a historic 50-year low, gave Trump’s re-election campaign a big boost before the Christmas vacation.
The December 2019 CNN poll said 76 per cent of the voters, up from 67 per cent last year, felt the economy was in good shape, the highest approval rating since 2001.
And it appeared that Donald Trump was cruising to victory. But, not anymore. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve revealed that the US economy had suffered its sharpest decline since the Great Recession – a 4.8 per cent fall – for the January- March quarter.
The collapse of the 1930s, captured so vividly in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by John Steinbeck, put back America by nearly a decade, and the coronavirus pandemic is likely to wreck similar damage.
Even though the shutdown of economy really started in the second half of March, in two weeks household spending crashed 7.6 per cent and business investment fell 8.6 per cent. Bereft of sustained demand, small and medium businesses are folding up, and the latest figures show 30 million Americans jobs have evaporated.
A callous leader
Along with a shuttered economy, Trump is now also battling the image of a callous leader, uncaring of the dead and dying; and a President willing to barter the health of a nation in the interests of his own gamble for a second term. As the number of Covid-19 patients in the US tops a million and deaths exceed 60,000, it is slowly sinking in that perhaps the US started shutting down and keeping people at home too late to prevent community transmission of the virus.
And now Trump is restless to get things opened up once again and the economy running. Perhaps, before time, again dangerously inviting a second bout of the pandemic. His daily reviews with the press are a dose of brazen untruths each day. Sample these: “Last year 37,000 Americans died from the common flu. Nothing is shut down, life and the economy go on... Think about that.”
And on March 9, when asked about WHO data on the virus’s death rate: “I think the 3.4 per cent is false... Personally, I think the number is way under 1 per cent.” But what took the cake was his assertion at a briefing that disinfectants and ultraviolet light were strong remedies for coronavirus.
He even suggested these be ingested for cleansing! Till March, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the US public felt Trump was doing a good job in handling the pandemic. Data released by Emerson College showed that in March, 49 per cent of those polled approved Trump’s responses as against 41 per cent who disapproved. However, in April the approval rating had fallen to 38.9 per cent.
Another depression coming
Significantly, soon after Trump’s outrageous suggestion that Covid-19 patients be treated by injecting bleach and other disinfectants in their body, Reuters/Ipsos did an opinion poll. The results, released on Tuesday, were a shocker. The poll found that as many as 47 per cent of US adults still said they were “very” or “somewhat” likely to follow recommendations Trump makes about the virus. The consolation is there is a 15 per cent-point drop from 62 per cent in March to 47 per cent who said they would follow Trump’s advice.
But, really! The ‘disinfectant’ proposal (which Trump later said he had made in sarcasm) should have sunk him like a stone among a decently educated electorate! Interestingly, Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s lead of 6 points too had not changed in April. While in March, Biden was ahead of Trump in voter support by 53 per cent to 47 per cent, in April Biden’s lead over Trump was 48 per cent to 42 per cent. So Trump still has his swagger; but it is going to be the economy that will be his Waterloo. “We are going to see economic data for the second quarter that’s worse than any data we’ve seen for the economy,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome H.
Powell said in a video news conference. He called it “heartbreaking” to witness millions of job losses, especially in minority communities. Analysts say the second quarter is likely to show a decline of more than 30 percent — a level not seen since the Great Depression — with millions more jobs lost in months to come. Estimates on depths of the recession vary. Bloomberg Economics has projected a 37 per cent annualised contraction, while the most bearish, UniCredit, estimates it at 65 per cent. By the time elections take place in November, the tide against Trump can only grow.