Analysis: The cherry-picked presidency
“When I turn on the news, I see, ‘cases, cases, cases,’"Trumpduring an event on July 14. “They don’t talk about deaths being cut down to a level that — actually, ‘tenfold,’ they use. I got that from one of the very respected media outlets — ‘Tenfold.
’ Cut tenfold. Yes, but they don’t talk about that; they talk about cases." That purported “tenfold” cut was never the case; the peak daily average number of deaths was 2,247, about five times the low. But it was still the case that it was more politically useful for Trump to talk about deaths than the massive surge in new cases.It is the nature of this illness that deaths lag infections. So the average number of deaths each day continued to rise even as the rate of new cases slowed over the next month. On Saturday, with the number of deaths at a plateau and cases dropping, the president shifted his focus. “Nearly 85 percent of jurisdictions all across our country are reporting a very steep decline in cases, and that’s despite the fact that we have the number one testing program anywhere in the world,” Trump said from his private club in Bedminster, N.J. “This week, cases nationwide have declined by 6 percent,” he added; “the test positivity rate has fallen to just 6.5 percent, a 71 percent reduction from April and a 15 percent reduction from mid-July.” Cases are the important factor now, gang. And the number of cases in mid-July, far from being unimportant, offer an excellent point of contrast: Things are far better now than they were then.By now, we’re used to this sort of inconsistency from Trump, his habit of hyping whatever he feels like hyping. It’s the real estate broker in him, walking into an apartment and figuring out what to accentuate and what to downplay to get that lease signed. In the private sector, the result of that sort of hustle is a customer locked into a legal contract. As president, the result isYet it keeps happening. It keeps being the case that Trump cherry-picks the information he wants to highlight, no matter how inconsistent the result. There is, in fact, no tactic more central to Trump’s career in politics than his willingness to cherry-pick the things he thinks deserves focus on a daily or hourly basis.At that briefing on Sunday, for example, Trump highlighted several economic numbers to argue that Americans were “currently witnessing the fastest economic recovery in American history.” Those numbers? Retail spending, auto production and stock markets.Not employment, which still lags February’s numbers by nearly 13 million jobs. Not the unemployment rate, which is 6.7 points higher than it was then. For the first three years of his presidency, these were the numbers Trump used repeatedly as evidence that the economy was the strongest it had ever been, thanks to him. Now he talks about auto production. He has, at times, talked about how the country hasThen there’s the flip side of the question. Trump talks about retail sales — but what about
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