From Jared Kushner to Trump, the White House is suffering from a very particular disease — and it's not coronavirus

Donald Trump’s White House is in the grip of a disease, but not the one you think.

Let’s call it Trump Immune Deficiency Syndrome: The administration, from its rotting head through the tailfins of the fish is immune to any information or data that doesn’t paint the president as a hero, the economy as booming, and the coronavirus pandemic as basically in the rearview mirror.

Which is a heck of a pitch to make, as Trump’s son-in-law and primo adviser Jared Kushner did on Fox & Friends Wednesday, in a week when new jobless claims data say at least 30.3 million people have lost their jobs in the last six weeks; the US death toll from coronavirus will pass 65,000 as it claims 1,900 people a day for the last week; and the Federal Reserve basically promised to prop up the economy for years, if necessary — implying, at least, that the central bank believes it is necessary indeed.

“Economic activity will likely drop at an unprecedented rate in the second quarter,” Fed chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday. “Both the depth and the duration of the economic downturn are extraordinarily uncertain, and will depend in large part on how quickly the virus is brought under control.”

Let’s review: The layoffs are more than the total employed base of either Texas and California (or of France.) The deaths are more than America lost in battle in either Vietnam or the First World War (and will exceed their sum, at the current pace, by about May 20). The ideological right, having run through “it won’t happen,” and “it’s a common cold,” is reduced to arguing that only old people are dying (false) or that it’s a blue-state problem, which would be news to Michigan or Pennsylvania, states that have lost nearly 20 per cent of their jobs and 6,024 citizens since mid-March.

Of course, then, Kushner says this: “So the government, federal government, rose to the challenge and this is a great success story. I think that's really what needs to be told. I think you'll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country's really rocking again.”

Huh?

With US stock markets recouping about half of their losses from the February peaks, it’s worth reviewing where we were, what the record actually says, and the simple fact that even the pre-coronavirus Trump record was unexceptional at best.

Yes, unemployment was 3.5 per cent, the lowest since the 1960s. But job growth had slowed under Trump. The stock market, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500, was up nearly 50 per cent (it’s now 28 per cent), but that pales next to the 110 per cent gain between the 2009 lows after Barack Obama arrived and this time in 2012.

The growth Kushner touts was 2.3 per cent last year, after 2.9 per cent in 2018 — the same record Obama posted in 2014-15.

This never was “the greatest economy in the history of the world,” no matter how many times the current president insists otherwise.

And while Trump may have been confused by the Senate’s refusal to let Barack Obama put Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court in 2016 — civics is a long-standing weak spot for Trump — a president’s term is, actually, four years long. So this year’s news counts, and it’s awful: Unemployment will likely approach 25 per cent by May’s jobs report, after April comes out around 20 per cent.

Germany’s unemployment rate is expected to rise into the high sixes as it endures its worst recession in decades. South Korea, which had its first coronavirus case on the same day as the US in January, is expected to approach 5 per cent by summer.

Which brings us to other news Trump doesn’t want to hear: His polls are falling apart as the general election campaign heats up.

According to fivethirtyeight.com, Trump’s net approval rating is -10, his small rally-round-the-leader bounce from March wiped out like a coronavirus that encountered Lysol injected into Trump’s lungs. The Real Clear Politics polling average has likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden leading Trump by six points.

It’s worse in swing states — including some Trump can’t afford to let be swing states.

The most recent Fox poll of Pennsylvania shows Biden up 8 — not shocking, since 18.5 per cent of that state’s workers have filed for unemployment through April 11. He’s down 6 to 9 in Michigan, where 21.8 per cent of workers are on unemployment insurance. (Actual unemployment rates are higher than the so-called “insured unemployment” rate, which was 1.4 per cent as recently as mid-March). He’s down by 9 in Arizona. He carried all three in 2016.

Trump’s also down 3 to 5 points in North Carolina, and some polls show him trailing narrowly in Texas, the biggest electoral-vote state in his coalition. Most have him narrowly trailing in Florida. One even has him behind by a point in Ohio — a stronghold of white, blue-collar voters he carried by easily in 2016, but where 860,000 workers are newly jobless.

Little wonder he’s raging, even threatening — by one report he denies — to sue campaign manager Brad Parscale. Even if Trump is right about a third-quarter comeback, unemployment is likely to be double the 4.7 per cent he inherited on Election Day. If he’s lucky.

Unlike coronavirus, even masks like the one Vice President Mike Pence didn’t wear at the Mayo Clinic on Wednesday can’t protect Trump from reality. He only thinks he’s immune.