Rest easy, people. We’ve got the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups watching out for us.
Cannot believe you’ve never heard of them. It’s sort of like an Easter present. Donald Trump says GAERIG are going to advise him on when it’s safe to reopen the economy. Biggest question in the nation. So attention must be paid.
They’re mostly business leaders. From the head of Goldman Sachs to the head of Chick-fil-A. To the professional wrestling czar who Trump, in his announcement, called “the great Vince McMahon.” We are mentioning McMahon, a big Trump donor whose wife runs a pro-Trump super PAC, because the governor of Florida recently named World Wrestling Entertainment an “essential” business that was going to be allowed to continue staging matches during the economic lockdown.
But about GAERIG. We’re talking nearly 200 people – at least one of whom told The New York Times that there was no White House contact or advance notice of the announcement.
This hasn’t been a great week for Trump. Do you remember that election in Wisconsin? The Democratic governor tried to postpone it, due to the pandemic. The Republican Legislature wouldn’t let him. The result was a series of epic lines at the polling places.
Trump said it was all about:
A) Bad weather.
B) Coronavirus.
C) Him.
Yeah yeah yeah. “In Wisconsin what happened is I, through social media, put out a very strong endorsement of a Republican conservative judge who’s an excellent brilliant judge … and I hear what happened is his poll numbers went through the roof,” Trump explained.
Democrats, our president concluded, were so frightened of the power of Trump’s endorsement that they tried to shut down the election rather than risk inevitable disaster.
We will not dwell on details like the fact that there were no poll numbers. The important thing is that the results were finally released Monday and … the liberal judge won. By a bunch.
Truly, Trump has been flopping around lately like a beached flounder. Remember when he decided it was the governors, not him, who should deliver the bad news to citizens that they had to shelter in place?
Then he decided that the rule didn’t apply when it came to delivering good news about restarting the economy.
Finally, after a massive backlash from governors, Trump gave in and agreed that they could do the reopenings – presumably with a lot of advice from GAERIG. He then turned his attention to the pandemic, and decided the most useful thing he could do for world health was to, um, torpedo the World Health Organization.
Yeah, Trump announced he was freezing American funds for the WHO because he thinks it’s too pro-China: “One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations. They were very much opposed to what we did. Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China, saving untold numbers of lives. Thousands and thousands of people would have died.”
I know, you’ve heard that story a lot. Whenever anybody points out how slow Trump was to recognize the danger of the coronavirus, or start gearing up on research and testing, he always reminds the world of the stupendous job he did keeping out infected travelers from the East.
I know you know it didn’t work like that. Trump restricted travel from China after the WHO warned about the virus there, and after other nations had already put restrictions in place.
OK, let’s look at the bright side. We’ve got GAERIG! And 70 million Americans are about to get those stimulus funds. Each check bearing Donald Trump’s name. Right there near the $1,200.
The man is terrible at governing, but he’s a genius at branding.
The New York Times