President Donald Trump is trying to project confidence that the economy will quickly rebound in the second half of the year -- but even many Republicans are worried that he's setting himself up for yet another failure.
Politico reports that the Trump White House on Friday felt "relief" that the economy shed a record 20 million jobs in just one month, as they feared the number was going to be even worse.
However, the publication writes that "many Republicans close to the White House privately believe the markets will rebound long before the employment numbers do," and one GOP source tells Politico that Trump is "in denial" about the true depth of the economic carnage that's occurring under his watch.
Jesse Rothstein, a former Obama administration economist and current professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Politico that it is insane for anyone to feel relieved about losing so many jobs in a single month.
"I remember working in the White House in 2009 and feeling the world was ending when we lost roughly 700,000 job a month," he says. "Now, we lost 20 million jobs in one month. There is just no comparison."
