R&I – FS
Awesome news: The stock market is rocking!
Also: It’s no longer so hard to buy toilet paper or hand sanitizer!
And … um … well … sports are back, mostly! As a diehard Miami Heat fan, I can’t remember the last time I saw something this awesome. At some football stadiums, a limited number of spectators can even watch games in person!
That said, as POLITICO’s unofficial awesomeness correspondent, I regret to report that everything is no longer awesome. As you may have noticed, almost everything kind of sucks.
The U.S. budget deficit tripled this year to $3.3 trillion, by far the highest ever. The U.S. economy shrank at a 31.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, by far the worst ever. The trade deficit is at its highest level in 12 years. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in six years. Unemployment claims, which had never topped 700,000 in a week before March, have topped 700,000 every week since March. Farm bankruptcies are rising, even though government payments to farmers are at an all-time high. Homicides are rising in America’s cities after decades of decline, while a series of police killings of unarmed Black Americans has triggered anguished protests and civil unrest. The West Coast is on fire, and 2020 may turn out to be the hottest year in recorded history. America’s reputation abroad is the worst it’s been since the Pew Research Center began doing international surveys.
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Unfortunately, now that things are no longer amazing—even Louis C.K. was cancelled—and the election is coming soon, it’s hard to avoid the political implications of our national nightmare. After making a thriving America sound like it was on the brink of death in 2016, Trump is now making a bleeding America sound like it’s only got a flesh wound in 2020. He’s arguing that Covid-19 is under control when it’s still killing 1,000 Americans every day, that the economy is an incredible comeback story when it has shed 11.5 million jobs this year—and, rather perversely, that whatever mayhem might be erupting on his watch only illustrates the dangers of Joe Biden’s America.
Usually, when presidents run for reelection, the key question is whether Americans are better off than they were four years earlier. In 1984, 1996 and 2012, the answers under Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Obama were clear yeses; in 1980, America told Jimmy Carter hell no; 1992 and 2004 were closer calls, with George H.W. Bush losing but George W. Bush winning. The electoral landscape of 2020 looks a lot less straightforward, and a lot more frightening.
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Trump rose to power by warning about nonexistent “American carnage,” but now we have real American carnage. One enduring lesson of history, not particularly comforting right now, is that things can always get worse. But one enduring lesson of American history, the lesson of the Louisiana Purchase and the Emancipation Proclamation and Bretton Woods and women’s suffrage and the polio vaccine and the civil rights movement and the iPhone, is that things can get better, too. America has the power to self-correct, to form a more awesome union.
Martin Sole
Article URL : https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/26/2020-is-the-year-trump-was-worried-about-421772