Trump Has Rescheduled Easter for May Day

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Now Trump thinks the economy can be fully back in business by May 1. That’s just 21 days from now.

This is of course insane (but then, what about Trump isn’t?). The lesson from the countries that have handled the virus crisis well is to maintain rigorous social distancing and self-quarantine until levels of infection have dropped dramatically. To do otherwise just intensifies both the agony of the disease and the economic agony. Mayday indeed!

No serious person thinks the pandemic will have burned itself out in a month. We will be lucky if the worst is over by summer. In much of the country, notably the Deep South, the pandemic is only now coming on in full force.

Even if the incidence of new cases in New York has begun to peak, the downward slope of disease will include weeks and months of new infections. To release people from self-quarantines too soon would stimulate a second round of infection—and delay economic recovery. That could happen even with the best of public-health measures, as occurred in the flu pandemic of 1918.

It’s appalling if not surprising that Trump is beating this drum. The Wall Street Journal, kind of a serious paper, has been making these preposterous claims for weeks, in its editorials and columns—better to have more deaths and get it over with, since we all die anyway, than to harm financial markets.

I was recently invited to debate the editor of the Journal’s editorial page, Paul Gigot, the guiding spirit behind this macabre reasoning, in an online webinar on how the economy recovers. The sponsor of the event, the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, then advised me that neither of the dates they proposed were convenient for Gigot. Maybe he’s having second thoughts.

In his place, I get to debate the president of the ultra-libertarian Cato Institute, Peter Goettler, on April 14 at 5 p.m. ET. That should be almost as instructive. With only the government keeping the economy on life support, it’s a challenging time to be a libertarian. You can watch here.

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