Trump Sabotaged America’s Recovery Even Before COVID-19 Began

The president’s pre-pandemic fiscal recklessness will slow the nation’s rebound.

Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back,” President Donald Trump said last week as governors nationwide began relaxing the restrictions prompted by Covid-19. Trump has been the nation’s most ardent advocate for restarting the economy, even as most states have so far failed to meet his own administration’s metrics for a safe reopening. And little wonder: Trump is desperate to regain even a vestige of the pre-pandemic economy’s strength in time for the election this fall.

But for all his cheerleading, Trump is unlikely to get the kind of robust rebound he’s hoping for—in large part due to sabotage inflicted by his own policies. Thanks to his administration’s early and ongoing failures to address the coronavirus outbreak, much of the nation still lacks the testing and contact tracing infrastructure necessary to control the virus’s inevitable resurgence. Mixed messaging from federal and state officials and patchwork guidance from location to location have also heightened the anxiety for Americans, most of whom remain reluctant to leave their homes.

Another handicap will be the fragility of the American economy, brought upon by the Trump’s pre-pandemic fiscal recklessness. When the president assumed office in an emerging recovery from the Great Recession, he had a golden opportunity to shore up the nation’s fiscal reserves and invest in its economic resilience. Instead, he pushed through one of the largest corporate tax cuts in history, padding the bank balances of billionaires while miring the rest of the nation in eye-watering levels of debt. As a consequence, America entered the Covid-19 pandemic already financially crippled. Now, in the face of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is ill-positioned to aid its citizens, let alone rebuild for the future.

The 2017 tax bill that Trump signed into law permanently slashed the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent—the largest one-time corporate rate reduction ever—and cut individual tax rates as well. Its projected price tag was a whopping $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

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