Government Affiliated Snark
He has had a very small (4%) approval rating bump due to the rally around the leader effect, something that is always seen in times of crisis, at least initially.
What's notable though is just how small it is, which I can only presume is because of how disasterously he is handling the crisis. By contrast Bush went from 50% approval to 90% after 9/11.
That's the upside. The downside is when he is seen to have publicly failed to contain/solve the crisis, which is coming, which is when his approval ratings will tumble.
That happened to Bush over the Iraq war and 9/11, its going to happen to Trump once the mass deaths directly attributal to his incomptence start racking up.
(snicker)
On topic: more sanctions on Iran. Almost certainly rocket-attack "headache" related.
Sanctions for attacking US forces is valid, although Iran almost certainly attacked because Trump unilaterally ended the Iran Nuclear Deal, to which they were complying. So there's plenty of blame for both leaders acting like children. My concern is the possibility for escalation.
I love Tony Fauci and I've referred to him prior to this as an American hero (but I certainly am biased in favor of NIH immunologists), but this sort of shorthand just isn't correct. When considering regulatory and fiscal policies, you very much do choose the timelines. Those timelines need to be fit with the best available medical science and epidemiology, but determining acceptable economic costs relative to medical costs and how that should impact timelines is exactly what regulatory bodies are in the business of doing. Organizations like the FDA and EPA routinely put prices on lives, put prices on quality years of life, then use that to inform whether a regulatory burden is sensible or not.
The correct framing isn't that the virus determines the timeline, it's that you need to fit your timelines based on best practices related to mitigation of both fiscal and medical damage.
Two things from NBC News.
One, Powell went on live TV and flat-out said this could be recession territory.
Hmm. I wonder how much stronger it would have been if we had the promised 3% GDP growth? Or if manufacturing wasn't contracting? Or if we weren't bailing out farmers because they were going bankrupt at record levels? I am not the expert, but I do disagree from "very strong" coming from someone who lowered rates to zero.We may well be in a recession. But I would point to the difference between this and a normal recession. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy. Quite the contrary. We are starting from a very strong position.
Two, when you read the article Coronavirus challenges states that rejected Medicaid expansion, leaves uninsured with few options, I want you to hold back on the "wow, you really shot yourself in the foot" comments. Instead, I want you to remember that Trump's ACA challenge is in the courts right now, and he wants to make that shit nationwide.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/ital...ial-tally.html
Italy may have an absurdly high mortality rate because 600k+ people are infected and the vast majority is asymtomatic or show very mild symptoms.
Forgive my english, as i'm not a native speaker
hahaha and trump's approval rating is now the highest I've seen. The whole corona thing is blowing up fast, he doesn't have a clue what he's doing and yet he's doing an increasingly good job according to some. I'm flabbergasted.
Rally around the leader effect. Go check out the approval rating for Bush after 9/11. The surprising thing isn't that Trump's approval rating has risen but that the rise has been so tiny. If he was anywhere close to being half-way competent he'd be up +20 points rather than have the small rise he is seeing.
It's going to turn to shit for him though once we start getting thousands of casualties per day, which we'll be seeing in less than 2 weeks.
No. It is just basic human nature. When people are scared and in crisis, they tend to not question their leadership very much. Because nobody really knows what the right thing to do is, they are happy to follow whoever seems pretty confident about their ideas.
That said, this is an extremely small boost to ratings compared to literally every other crisis America has been in. The definition of these phenomena in political polling is called "The Rally 'round the flag effect". It can be absolutely massive, after 9/11 it carried George Bush from 51% all the way to 90% approval.
In comparison, despite the scale of the crisis, Trump's is tiny, and it has barely moved the needle on his approval. While it moved to the top end of the range of his approval ratings, it hasn't moved above it. In other words, if you hated Trump before, you probably still hate him. If you loved him before, you still love him. This isn't suprising, and a clear mark of a President that has been so divisive that he has alienated half of America so badly that he cannot possibly lead them in any crisis.
All hands, brace for impact. The CDC warns it's about to get a lot uglier, and soon.
Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said her agency is seeing early signs that the number of cases in other cities are already beginning to spike. While New York City is home to almost half the cases in the country at the moment, other cities are seeing their case counts rising at alarming rates.
“We're looking at our flu syndromic data, our respiratory illness that presents at emergency departments. Across the country there's a number of areas that are escalating. The numbers in New York are so large that they show up, but we're looking at increases over time and we're really seeing some in a number of places. It would be surprising to me based on what I've seen about how this virus spreads if it were not going to increase in many other parts of the country,” Schuchat said.