Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Michelle Cottle: Republicans, It’s Too Late to Back Away From Trump
G.O.P. lawmakers have enabled all of the president’s misadventures up to now. They can’t disavow his response to the coronavirus.
As the coronavirus pandemic creeps deeper into the election cycle, President’s Trump campaign team has a message for Republican lawmakers: Don’t even think about trying to socially distance yourself from the president’s handling of the crisis.
Mr. Trump’s leadership during this national emergency has not wowed the American public — at least not in a good way. The Republican faithful may continue to back him unconditionally, but polls show that a majority of the electorate gives him negative reviews.
And the shakier the president’s numbers look, the more nervous fellow Republicans become. On Monday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose moral compass points always toward keeping his grip on power, cautioned that this year’s battle for the chamber would be “a dogfight” and a “knife fight” — choose your own bloody metaphor. Even with a favorable electoral map, Mr. McConnell & Co. fear that the president’s pandemic performance could hurt them in November. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the base means that his teammates cannot risk looking anything less than 100 percent loyal.
What’s a self-serving Republican to do? [..]
Through it all, few Republicans have managed to muster even a peep of protest. And they have been happy to promote the president’s story that everything is China’s fault — just as they have supported his efforts to turn an apolitical pandemic into a partisan battle between red and blue states.
Senate Republicans have sold their souls to Donald Trump, and it’s absurd for them to pretend otherwise. When they try, they deserve to be smacked: by Democrats, by the media and, yes, by the president himself. Voters will have their say soon enough.
Paul Krugman: Crashing Economy, Rising Stocks: What’s Going On?
What’s bad for America is sometimes good for the market.
The economic news has been terrible. Never mind Wednesday’s G.D.P. report for the first quarter. An economy contracting at an annual rate of almost 5 percent would have been considered very bad in normal times, but this report only captured the first few drops of a torrential downpour. More timely data show an economy falling off a cliff. The Congressional Budget Office is projecting an unemployment rate of 16 percent later this year, and that may well be an underestimate.
Yet stock prices, which fell in the first few weeks of the Covid-19 crisis, have made up much of those losses. They’re currently more or less back to where they were last fall, when all the talk was about how well the economy was doing. What’s going on?
Well, whenever you consider the economic implications of stock prices, you want to remember three rules. First, the stock market is not the economy. Second, the stock market is not the economy. Third, the stock market is not the economy.
That is, the relationship between stock performance — largely driven by the oscillation between greed and fear — and real economic growth has always been somewhere between loose and nonexistent. Back in the 1960s the great economist Paul Samuelson famously quipped that the market had predicted nine of the past five recessions.
But I’d argue that there are deeper reasons for the current stock market-real economy disconnect: Investors are buying stocks in part because they have nowhere else to go. In fact, there’s a sense in which stocks are strong precisely because the economy as a whole is so weak.
Jamelle Bouie: Justin Amash Can Only Cause Trouble
Unless we radically change how we conduct elections, third-party candidates can’t win. But they can certainly affect the outcome — as they did in 1948, 1968, 1992, 2000 and 2016.
Justin Amash is running for … president?
On Tuesday, the congressman from Michigan — a former Republican who backed impeachment charges against President Trump — announced his campaign for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination. If he wins, he’ll be on the November ballot, a prominent third option for Americans who don’t want to re-elect Trump but don’t want to put Joe Biden in office either. [..]
Amash says he believes that there are enough votes for him to win the White House. But while true in the abstract — in theory, there’s nothing to keep a third-party presidential candidate from winning an Electoral College majority — it’s absurd in the context of actually existing American politics. Although third-party candidates have affected the outcome of several presidential elections, no such candidate has ever won and only a handful have ever earned electoral votes.
Our politics are plainly inhospitable to third parties. But the usual answer — that this reflects a failure of will or imagination among voters, or that it’s the result of a constructed “duopoly” — is wrong. The reason for third-party failure is embedded in the structure of our politics. Americans who want more choice at the ballot box — to say nothing of Americans who want a European-style parliamentary democracy — have to change that structure.
Eugene Robinson: Our meat is more important than meatpacking workers, according to Trump
If you work in a meatpacking plant, by order of President Trump, you are officially considered less essential than the steak you’re cutting up. You have to risk being infected with the deadly coronavirus so that those of us who can stay home — and still get paid — may continue to enjoy our hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken wings.
Trump has stubbornly refused to use his executive powers to compel the production of personal protective equipment, such as masks and gowns, for front-line medical workers. He boasts about the chummy “partnerships” he supposedly brokered with corporate bigwigs to acquire ventilators and to launch a still-inadequate testing program. But when executives from meat-processing companies began speaking out about the danger that outbreaks of covid-19 posed to their businesses, our meatloaf-loving president almost immediately invoked the Defense Production Act to force the plants to stay open — but not to guarantee that employees will be kept safe.
Whose lives are put at risk by the order Trump issued on Tuesday? Low-income workers — many of them black or brown, many of them immigrants — who cannot afford to lose their jobs and who now must put their health at risk to stay employed.
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