Opinion: Most Americans Don’t Want To ‘Reopen’ The Economy The Way Trump Is Moving Us Toward Doing

Americans don’t trust President Donald Trump when it comes to what he says about the coronavirus crisis. 

And why should they? Day after day, he lies to us. Week after week, he makes grandiose promises (“Anybody that wants a test can get a test, that’s what the bottom line is”) then backs away from them and pretends like he never made them later (“I think it’s ridiculous”).

The problem is, Trump is leading, or rather, “leading,” whether we want him to or not. And unfortunately, his plans to “reopen the economy” go against science — and what the vast majority of Americans want to actually see happen at this moment.

The citizenry, it turns out, would much rather see a cautious approach than one that seems to be motivated by the president’s own reelection fears. 

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When asked in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll published on Sunday about what worries them more, 58 percent of Americans said that they were concerned the government was moving too quickly to loosen social distancing restrictions. Only 32 percent said the opposite, that they worried the government would take too long to ease up on those measures.

Indeed, 81 percent of Americans believe the economy will go back to normal after a few months or in the next year. Only 15 percent are of the mind that things could return to the way they were after just a few weeks from now.

The same poll also found 52 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. And only 36 percent trust what he has to say about the disease or its spread.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m of the mind that, when a crisis occurs, the American people deserve a leader they can trust to lead them on it. Trump, with his constant lies and manipulation of facts in order to push his narrative, has demonstrated that he’d rather try to blame others, spending countless minutes and even hours doing so, than address the problem at hand.

Chris Walker

Chris Walker is a freelance journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin, who focuses on news, politics, and analysis of world events. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, since 2005 Chris has reported on workers’ rights protests in Wisconsin, opined on four separate presidential elections and written on a number of other political subjects for a variety of national online publications.