Aid to the unemployed saved us from disaster. Now it’s gone.
For the most part, America under Donald Trump’s leadership has offered an object lesson in how not to handle a pandemic. Delay and denial deprived us of any chance of containing the coronavirus’s early spread; impatience and further denial led to a huge second wave of infections. As I pointed out in a previous column, a great majority of U. S. Covid-19 deaths have taken place since April 17, the day Trump tweeted out his support for demonstrators demanding that states end restrictions on high-risk activities. And in America, uniquely among advanced nations, common-sense precautions like wearing face coverings and avoiding large indoor gatherings have become battlefields in the culture war. Yet in one area — economic policy — America did a surprisingly good job, containing the hardship and collateral damage from the pandemic much more effectively than cynics, myself included, expected. It’s true that employment and G. D. P. plunged, which was inevitable given the need to shutter activities that were spreading the virus. But the employment decline was concentrated in sectors like leisure and entertainment; it didn’t spread to the economy as a whole. And despite huge wage losses, poverty didn’t soar — some estimates suggest that it may even have declined slightly. But notice the past tense. The Republican National Convention may have pretended that the pandemic was over, but the virus doesn’t agree. That effective economic response, on the other hand, is over. Trump, you might say, did one good thing this year — but now he’s stopped doing it. And it was Trump’s own party, responding to his leadership or lack thereof, that killed the only praiseworthy aspect of his coronavirus policy.
