Writing in the Washington Post this Friday, columnist Greg Sargent points out that the new economic report "paints a picture of truly extraordinary economic carnage," with a stunning loss of 20 million jobs in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic -- the highest since the Great Depression.
"Which means the presidential race will be not just about who can better return the country to normalcy amid the virus’s continuing rampage," Sargent writes. "It will also be about who can better rebuild the economy and protect millions of Americans suffering through the worst economic calamity in nearly a century."
But the Trump campaign is gearing up with a narrative to confront this realty, and according to Sargent, at the core of the narrative is one of Trump’s biggest and most insulting lies yet -- that he create the good economy before the coronavirus, and he'll create it again.
"Trump, of course, regularly claims he inherited a smoldering landscape of economic wreckage and turned it into a spectacular, glittering success," Sargent writes. "But it may now become harder to get away with this nonsense. Presidents tend to be seen through the prism of current conditions, and it’s plausible voters could come to see Trump’s status quo as an epic horror show in comparison with the end of the Obama years."
Read his full op-ed over at The Washington Post.
