National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks that President Donald Trump is flailing badly in his efforts to reassure the stock market with his frantic tweets about the coronavirus pandemic.
Looking at Trump's efforts to downplay the virus's impact on the American economy, Dougherty argues that the president seems to believe he can simply wish bad news away with his Twitter account.
"He seems to be trying to tweet the market back to life," Dougherty comments. "I don’t think Trump’s sweet talk is going to work, and it may be having the opposite effect of what he intends. In part, the market is giving a judgment -- maybe a hasty one — on Trump’s ability to address a public-health crisis. If he takes the market seriously, he should respond with more than a few tweets."
Indeed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday collapsed by well over 1,000 points, and at one point trading had to be halted as part of the market's emergency circuit breaker system.
Dougherty also dings Trump for comparing coronavirus to the flu, as he did on Monday morning to reassure his followers that the disease likely wouldn't kill them.
"The comparison to flu is a dangerous one because flu doesn’t spread exponentially, because we have decades of experience treating it, and because the worst cases of flu are not as severe as this virus," he writes.
