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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for I'm coming at you from my closet because the District of Columbia is still under lockdown. But being in this closet is a reminder that this is still very real because when you go outside, you can forget people are wearing masks, but a lot of people aren't. Some people follow social distancing rules at the grocery store, but a lot of people don't. People are starting to take trips. People are getting together in groups again. You can easily forget that we are in a crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As we inch closer to the end of May, it's clear that the United States will soon reach a benchmark that would have been unthinkable when we first started talking about this coronavirus back in January, 100,000 American lives lost. As far as we know from the data we have, that's close to a third of the planet's death toll. It's a huge number, like World War I big. But you'd never know that from the way the president's responding.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Most recently, he's been threatening to pull the United States out of the WHO. He's been tweeting out memes of doctored videos, writing fan fiction about Obamagate, and without any evidence of its efficacy, pushing hydroxychloroquine, all while paradoxically refusing to wear a mask or gloves. Do you ever wonder how many of those hundred thousand lives we could have saved with different leadership? Do you ever wonder how much of this is Donald Trump's fault?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I asked Ezra Klein if this is Trump's fault. Is the fact that we don't have a plan, a national plan more than 60 days after Trump declared a national emergency. Is that Donald Trump's fault?
--:-- Ezra Klein: Yeah, that's Donald Trump's fault. Aside from at an early time closing the borders to China, somewhat, the administration released guidelines. Donald Trump does not follow those guidelines either in his personal behavior or in what he says.
--:-- Ezra Klein: For instance, those guidelines tell the states that he was tweeting should be liberated to remain closed. They've not fixed a testing problem, not set up a national surveillance and contact tracing program, none of it. You cannot go to whitehouse.gov and find a plan. There isn't one. They actually haven't done it.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Still. States cannot issue debt, so their revenues are collapsing, so they can't spend some of the money they need to spend right now. The federal government can fix that problem. The federal government needs to handle supply coordination, so you don't have states bidding against each other in ruinous bidding wars. Not only are they not doing that, at times the federal government has been bidding against states.
--:-- Ezra Klein: There's this amazing thing where the governor of Maryland, a Republican, Larry Hogan, He actually said to The Washington Post that when he got 500,000 testing kits from South Korea. We flew in a special flight of Korean Air passenger plane that flew into BWI airport, the first one ever. No passengers, but a really valuable payload. And had them protected by state troopers so the Trump administration couldn't take them from him.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And then obviously it's probably good not to try to foment domestic insurrection against governors if you're trying to support them in what they need to do to keep their states safe. Minutes after a Fox News report on the demonstrations, the president began tweeting, liberate Minnesota, liberate Michigan, and liberate Virginia, states with Democratic governors.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Why is there no plan at this point? How does it benefit the president to let states fend for themselves and not have a clear message for the American people? There's so much here. And I am infuriated by this. Like, I want to be honest about where I am as a journalist. I have never covered a abdication of presidential leadership where we are this far into a national crisis.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And there is simply a president playing president on TV and refusing to do the job behind closed doors and keeping, importantly, other people from doing the job behind closed doors. He is not letting the states just do what they need to do. As I mentioned, he's often getting into direct fights with governors.
--:-- Ezra Klein: He said in front of cameras to Vice President Mike Pence, who is running the administration's response. He calls all the governors. I tell him, I mean, I'm a different type of person. I say, Mike, don't call the governor of Washington. You're wasting your time with him. Don't call the woman in Michigan. So, I mean, there you have the president saying that the federal government should not be coordinating with the governors he does not like at all.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And no, what is crazy about the whole situation is it is not in his interests. He is not handling this in a way that is going to be politically good for him. Look, he's holding his base, as he always seems to do, but he's not being able to get any rally around the flag effect because he's been erratic, because he has not projected an air of confidence because he now trying to get people to focus on scandals he making up from the Obama administration
--:-- Ezra Klein: I mean this is not what people in general want right now Is part of the issue I mean you mentioned Washington state Michigan, New York state, all run by Democratic governors. Is part of the issue here that quote unquote, his states, red states, states where he won aren't as hard hit at this point by the pandemic?
--:-- Ezra Klein: This has definitely been true at the beginning. There's no doubt about it. And the worst hit places, I mean, the worst hit place was New York City. And the very dense cities, which in this country are all blue, are at the most intense danger of an uncontrollable outbreak. But if you now look at it, New York City and New Jersey are going down. And it is other parts of the country that are going up. And it is particularly Trumpist parts of the country going up.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And that's one reason I really don't think this is going to be a good strategy for him. Two or three months from now, you might have some areas of the country that are very Trump-friendly that are in total chaos. Do you think he'll pivot if there's a second wave that affects, you know, quote-unquote, his states?
--:-- Ezra Klein: Let me think about how to answer this. I don't think at this point, and this is maybe a controversial thing for me to say, that he is capable of pivoting in the way that we're talking about. There are a couple things where he has a very consistent intuition, like immigration. But there's not anything really where he does a consistent strategic approach.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And the hard thing about coronavirus is it would be an incredibly difficult problem for even the most plan-oriented president. It's very, very, very hard governance work. And that is not work that Trump has ever been willing to do.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Before we were in a pandemic, before we were in a crisis, I interviewed James Carville. And we talked a lot about this upcoming presidential election. and his money was on Biden all the way. You know, people, they're going to vote for him as long as you don't talk him out of it. So it's his to lose. You really think it's his to lose?
--:-- Ezra Klein: I do. And I wonder, you know, Carville came up with this phrase, it's the economy, stupid. The economy isn't doing so well right now. But Donald Trump has a history of breaking political norms and conventions. Could he transcend this mess, do you think? Or is this so bad that he'll actually have to face the music?
--:-- Ezra Klein: I don't think that if the economy remains a disaster through Election Day, Donald Trump is getting reelected. Look, Donald Trump is a political phenom, but not a political genius, is the way I would put it. And there is a mythology among liberals that everything he does politically works out. But it doesn't.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Donald Trump's incredibly impressive act was to win the Republican primary, which has to do with the desire among many Republicans to realign the Republican Party along more ethno-nationalist lines. But Donald Trump won because of the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote. He was not unbelievably popular. We have never had a president in the history of polling that has never broken, on average, 50 percent, certainly not during an economy that has been as good as the one he has often experienced.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So if you sort of adjust Trump, if you imagine what should have been possible for a president presiding over an economy with sub-4 percent unemployment, he should have been higher than 44 percent. Trump got destroyed in the 2018 elections. If you look at what's going on in the polling right now, I just checked this out the other day. At this point in 2012, Mitt Romney, the challenger to an incumbent president, was trailing Barack Obama by about 3.5 points. That is roughly what ended up being the margin of the election.
--:-- Ezra Klein: If you look right now, Joe Biden, the challenger, is leading Donald Trump, the president, by between five and six points. And that's been a pretty steady lead throughout the campaign. that is not where you'd want to be. Now, could Trump win? Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen in November. I don't know what the conditions are going to be.
--:-- Ezra Klein: But if in November we have the level of economic pain that it looks like we're going to have, and remember, Republicans are beginning to talk about cutting off, say, the expanded unemployment insurance. They don't want to give aid to states and cities. So what's right now feels to a lot of people like temporary economic pain is going to turn into something that is beginning to feel very permanent, right? this is the new normal. And the new normal is agonizing.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And Trump is not leading a charge among Republicans to keep that from happening. If he were being savvy on the economy and doing what he needed to do to keep it under support, right, like he decided to support the Jayapal Paycheck Guarantee Act, which is subsidized paychecks, I could see a version of it. But if he just lets this turn into an economic depression, no, he's not going to escape that.
--:-- Ezra Klein: He's already at a bad point, and then it's going to get worse. After the break, I'll ask Ezra if the Democrats could have done more to protect people during this pandemic. Support for today's show comes from Adio.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ezra, it's clear that the president hasn't shown the kind of leadership that the country could have benefited from in this crisis. But I wonder how culpable Congress is here. I mean, Democrats approved of the stimulus and and now we see stimulus money going to places like the L.A. Lakers and Shake Shack and all these minority owned small businesses saying, hey, we didn't get anything we were really hoping for. And you guys stressed that, you know, you'd provide us. How culpable is everyone else in this mess?
--:-- Ezra Klein: The Democrats bear a lot of responsibility for the way the stimulus itself is working. They're part of the group that passes that. Now, I should say for them, they are fighting with Mitch McConnell over it. They would like it to be bigger. They would like it to work differently. But Democrats do not control the Senate and they do not control the White House.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So what they can do is limited. I am not somebody who thinks it is a bad thing that money is going to big businesses. Shake Shack needs money because I don't want people to be laid off from Shake Shack. I don't know too much about the position of the Lakers, but they employ a lot of people and they're part of the LA economy.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And yeah, the Lakers are going to be in terrible shape given that live games are just like, I mean, something we know about where the economy is going is that live events are the most screwed of a screwed economy. So I'm not against the potential of those companies getting money.
--:-- Ezra Klein: The issue is that it can't be either or. The money is insufficiently large. and in particular the money that is going to large businesses because of the way it works where there's a lending structure that happens to the federal reserve that money is going out the door much more smoothly than the money going out to small businesses which is going in a complicated way through banks and the small business administration or and this is also really important the money going to individuals because a lot of state unemployment insurance systems are terrible and not just terrible in the sense that they're badly constructed but in cases like Florida, they're actually constructed so they are hard to use.
--:-- Ezra Klein: As a point of conservative ideology, they've been built so it is difficult for people to get access to them. In addition to that, I think Democrats have made some tactical errors in not insisting, and I do think they should have insisted and should in the future, that many of these things have automatic triggers in them.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So the money should expand depending on what is happening in the economy. The unemployment insurance should renew so long as unemployment is above, let's call it, 5% or 6%. And the fact that they're not doing this, I mean, they have wanted to and Republicans have not, but they actually have to say, Republicans do ultimately bear responsibility as of the governing party for what's going to happen.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Democrats do have some leverage here. And so to the extent that what they're doing is going to help the economy recover, they should at least use it sometimes. And the fact that they are letting these things go forward without automatic stabilizers, that is not good governance.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So I have my criticisms of the Democrats, but they are fighting an uphill battle against a party that, for whatever reason, both would be the one to benefit from a competently administered stimulus, but is currently fighting it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It feels like the economic pain is going to last for large sectors of the economy, for large sectors of the country. And now Republicans' party line seems to be, we got to tamp down the spending and Democrats clearly want to do more. How are these two arguments going to meet somewhere?
--:-- Ezra Klein: I don't know, is the honest truth. I am very confused by the way Republicans see their own political incentives here. I recognize that some of it is ideological. But if unemployment is 17% on election day, Donald Trump is going to get destroyed in the election and Mitch McConnell is going to lose the gavel.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And they know that. I mean, Donald Trump understands that the economy is important. The primary thing he seems to be watching and caring about is the stock market. Now, the stock market is doing a little bit better than other parts of the economy because the Federal Reserve is dumping liquidity into the things that it cares about.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So Trump's like a little distant from, I think, the part of the economy that matters most is re-election, which is not the stock market, to be clear. But nevertheless, I mean, Trump understands that the economy matters. Mitch McConnell understands that the economy matters. So why they are not just begging for more, that's an unusual abdication of political self-interest.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Now, maybe you want to say it's a principled statement on behalf of conservative ideology, and if so, I guess bully for them, although it's going to be terrible for many people in the country. But this is getting worse, not better. The economic pain is metastasizing day by day Where we are going to be in three months is going to be really bad I think it's going to be in many ways worse than people are currently anticipating.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Because right now, there's a lot of stopgap measures both in the economy, but also things feel temporary. Once businesses begin planning forward, once they see we're not going to be in a V-shaped recovery, because we're not, as far as the forecasters I talk to can tell, Once they see we're not going to be a V-shaped recovery, they're going to begin making plans for the future that are much grimmer.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And as that demand drains out of the economy, that becomes forward-looking. Also, by the way, for the stock market. And so there's a lot of pain coming. And it's not hard to see it. And it's not impossible to solve it. By the way, there are Republicans with ideas for this, right? Josh Hawley, a Republican in the Senate, who has an idea much like the co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus in the House, to do high-level subsidization of paychecks directly so you don't have people being turned loose from the economy in the middle of this.
--:-- Ezra Klein: This would help businesses rehire every worker who has been laid off because of the coronavirus. This, I think, has got—it's one of the most important things the United States Senate and Congress can do right now is jobs, jobs, jobs. Let's secure them. Let's get them back. He subsidizes it up to 80 percent, but you could bargain that.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Mitt Romney has a plan that I think is interesting to create tax credits that would lead to big raises for essential workers. I think that's a good idea. And the Utah Republican calls it, quote, patriot pay. It would be a bonus of $12 per hour in May, June and July for a total of $1,920 per month. eligible workers would include health care professionals, grocery store workers, and employees at food processing plants.
--:-- Ezra Klein: But why Republican leadership and the Republican president increasingly seem to have put themselves in the position of obstructing the economic recovery they need for political survival, I don't really understand it. I mean, that divide feels like it's mirrored in the country. I mean, a crisis like this historically might have brought the entire country together.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Perhaps it wasn't surprising to you that under a president like Donald Trump, it didn't. But I wonder, were you at all surprised to see something like wearing masks or staying six feet apart or staying home and away from friends and families so that we can prevent the spread of this disease become sort of partisan and political?
--:-- Ezra Klein: Yes and no. I wrote a book about polarization. Right. And one of the ideas of that book is that virtually anything can get polarized, including things that start out as nonpolitical. To the extent it is surprising, it is that even something as disruptive and tremendous and world-shaking as coronavirus can end up in the same path as everything else.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Right? that nothing is bigger than polarization. On the other hand, the way we're polarizing around these two choices of a reckless reopening and what can sound to people like a prescription for an endless, economically ruinous lockdown, I'm not surprised that if those are the two choices, given that they're both terrible, that people are polarizing around them.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And so what we needed, which is what you've seen in other countries like Germany and South Korea and Taiwan, is a path back to something like normalcy, not full normalcy. That's going to be hard, but a lot more. You can do a lot more. I mean, Taiwan has had something like a dozen new cases of COVID in all of May.
--:-- Ezra Klein: What has happened is that in the absence of a plan people can agree on, they've polarized around the two unsustainable options that they can't agree on and that there can't be agreement on because neither of them is going to work. And so to me, yeah, like there's a tremendous failure of leadership here.
--:-- Ezra Klein: I don't think polarization is so powerful that it is impossible to imagine the country more or less on the same page about this. I think you see it in other polarized countries and I think you see it in states. And by the way, the Republican Party is not all against masks. It is not the case that every Republican governor is acting as Donald Trump is acting. Most of them are not. Governor Mike DeWine in Ohio is doing a good job on coronavirus. Larry Hogan, Baker, lots of them. And their approval ratings, by the way, show this.
--:-- Ezra Klein: There is nothing about conservatism or the Republican Party that would force you into this position. It is Trump and the fact that so long as he is a leader of the Republican Party, a lot of the Republicans are going to want to follow him. And I'm sorry, like, I wish this didn't sound partisan. Like, I have family members who are immunocompromised. I have family members who are in their 70s with comorbidities and make them vulnerable to coronavirus. I want this to be done well. I want the federal government to do its damn job.
--:-- Ezra Klein: That would be good politics, but it would just be good. We need the government to work no matter who's running it. Thank you.
