RNC's economy pitch calls for big leaps of faith as COVID-19 persists
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday night's Republican National Convention. Credit: Getty Images / TNS / Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 RNC
President Donald Trump's campaign crew has a special motive for describing the coronavirus pandemic in the past tense. Doing so buttresses their boss's story line that he revived a dead U.S. economy before China spread a viral menace — but now it is over, and the "Trump economy" is bouncing back.
Speakers at the Republican National Convention invoked fantasy this week to prop up various parts of this very strained narrative.
Wednesday marked six months to the day that the president vowed that the number of coronavirus cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero."
Instead U.S. coronavirus death toll approaches 180,000. That didn't keep Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, famous in the past for erroneous predictions, from all but proclaiming the pandemic's end once again.
“It was awful,” Kudlow said, falsely pushing present troubles into the past. “Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the COVID virus.”
Kudlow made his remarks in a video shown at the convention Tuesday. He also said Trump had inherited “a stagnant economy on the front end of recession,” which Kudlow said was "rebuilt in three years.”
However, most economic indicators that preceded the pandemic continued positive trends that had begun under President Barack Obama, who inherited a recession when elected in 2008.
On average, more jobs were added per month in Obama's second term than in Trump's first three years in office, according to an NBC fact-check. Job growth slowed between 2017 and 2019, official figures show.
The gist of Kudlow's statement keeps getting repeated and recycled.
What may help Trump, however, is that whatever happened before he arrived, many Americans surveyed in polls like what they see as his economic record. His approval ratings on the economy surpass those for his overall job performance.
At the Republican convention Monday, Trump himself boasted of successful China trade policies. Frequently folded into the pitch, however, is a chronic falsehood about how Beijing is paying the tariffs the U.S. imposed.
The motive is clear. The tariffs are in fact a tax on U.S. businesses that import products. An assertion of success might suggest he imposed a business tax and that it worked to pull in tens of billions of dollars in federal revenue.
Accepting the full Trump economic narrative also requires believing that Democrat Joe Biden, if elected, would mar the presumed recovery. In his convention speech Tuesday, Trump son Eric claimed that under Biden’s tax plan, “82% of Americans will see their taxes go up significantly.”
In fact, Biden’s plan does not call for any direct tax increase for anyone making less than $400,000, as Roll Call pointed out.
Several other RNC speakers predicted destructive socialism under the Democrats. But everyone knows that the fire Biden drew in the Democratic primaries came from the left. To compensate, the Trump team argues that radicals would "control" him.
Trump warns that electing Biden would crash markets. This sidesteps the fact that the markets are buoyed by huge releases of cash as a stimulus by both the U.S. and the European Union central banks.
In the closing months of his first term, Trump's degree of response to COVID-19 faces a test. If the virus isn't curbed, but permitted to spread as before, renewed state lockdowns across America could do further economic damage.
The most recent numbers from the Congressional Budget Office don't support Trump's miraculous-comeback tale. The CBO projects that from 2020 to 2030, "annual real Gross Domestic Product will be 3.4 percent lower, on average, than it projected in January. The annual unemployment rate, which was projected to average 4.2 percent, is now projected to average 6.1 percent."
That's not a triumphant narrative for Trump, but it is founded in fact— just in case those might matter.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
