Is this the most damaging chart of The Trump Administration?

May 2: On This Day In 2020

Having failed to fill the churches on Easter, Trump was by now desperate to reopen the country. Unfortunately, as the WaPo reported OTDI 2020, the White House’s Situation Room was projecting a best case scenario for the pandemic of up to 240,000 deaths from Covid. That seemed scarily high to Trump’s crew, so they simply ignored it.

Instead, Trump embraced the projections of small team led by Kevin Hassett. Hasset was a respected former head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, but he had no background in the field of infections diseases. Hassett’s group forecasted a dramatic dropoff in deaths due to a complete disappearance of the virus within the following few weeks, by mid-May 2020.

Hassett’s methodology provoked public scorn and ridicule from his fellow economists, including from at least one Nobel Prize winner. They argued the team misapplied basic mathematical principles.

So what’s the problem? The leaders of other comparable countries, operating under more realistic projections, developed much more effective plans to protect their people and enable their economies to continue forward. But, in general, if policymakers feel something isn’t going to remain a problem, they don’t worry about solutions.

In the U.S., this chart proved even more dangerous than Trump’s Hurricane Dorian hand-drawn Sharpiegate chart (mark your calendar for the OTDI of Sept 4).

Btw: The White House expected total deaths to max out at 134,000. Well, hey, they ended up being off by only a million or so; actual U.S. death counts are now approaching 1.2 million.

Dive Deeper

• WaPo covers “Trump’s desperate attempts to reopen America”

• Slate has the details on the flawed model which the White House used

• WaPo created this video about Trump’s Covid flip-flops               

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Summary: This Trump quote says it all