It happened on the Republican watch.  Finally.  The recession I’d been dreaming of.

At last, Trumpy ran into some bad luck.  It was bound to happen.  The Coronavirus is a serious threat to seniors and Trump’s attempt to frame it as a hoax failed miserably.  Witness the stock market decline of 8,000 points in the past week.  Of course, it helps when messaging if the messenger has credibility.  Trump has none.  His staff has to spend the following day of every press conference cleaning up the lies and other misleading statements.

The best part of it all is it is happening on the Republican watch.  The biggest arguments for supporting Trump have all been wiped out in one week.  The how’s your 401k argument – gone.

I’ve said for years the Presidents get too much credit for market conditions when they are good and too much blame when they are bad.  So normally I would defend that argument except for the fact that Trump has been taking credit every point rise in the Dow Industrials since he took office.  Never-mind the fact that the economy that he inherited was riding a 6-year run of nothing but growth.

Every president has to face some adversity at some point.  Some market condition that is out of his/her control.  What we then observe is how well they handle adversity.  GW Bush had 9/11.  He brought the country together at least, including trying very hard to win the support of moderate Muslims.  Obama had the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent housing crash to deal with.  He instituted QE2, bailed out the auto-industry and restored faith to the markets.  It took over a year but he did it.  Hilarious that the Tea Party was wailing about QE2 but unanimously supported Trump’s bailout of the farmers due to his own tariffs.

Trickle-down is what George Herbert Walker Bush said it was back in 1992.  “Voo-doo economics.”

Faced with a pandemic, Trump had two options, both really bad, but one was less bad.  He could have faced it head-on, explained that we’re in a tough situation for a while and deploy the government services to respond in full.  The downside of this is that the markets aren’t going to like  the news of course, but long term they would like that it’s being dealt with and a recovery period is in sight.

The other option he had (and chose), was to try to minimize the pandemic as another form of the flu, nothing to worry about really, and hope the markets don’t notice.  The problem is, he lies so much his credibility was suspect.  The markets were nervous anyway but when the truth came out, boom, -8,000 points in a week.  The markets just voted “no confidence” that he won’t bungle the whole affair by trying to lie his way out of it.

So Trump finally got his batch of adversity in 2020.  The economy was overdue for a recession.  It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving administration and party ..on their watch.