President Trump said Tuesday he hopes to get the U.S. economy, ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, "up and just raring to go" by April 12. But "in most cases, it's state leaders — not the federal government — who are responsible for both imposing and lifting the stay-at-home orders and other restrictions intended to stop the contagion," The Associated Press notes. And their bipartisan, near-universal rejection of Trump's timeline "suggests Trump's talk of an early reboot is unlikely to gain traction." So why is Trump overpromising with an improbable Easter economic resurrection? Here, three theories:
1. Trump thinks it's good politics: It's increasingly clear "the gap between Trump's optimism and impatience and the caution and gravity of other figures in the crisis is exactly the point, in political terms," John F. Harris argues at Politico. Trump "is eager to own the only good thing about a crisis that has paralyzed the country and left millions of people in housebound despair: The reality that life will at some point slowly lurch back to normal. He is determined to make other people — specifically, governors, and public health officials — own everything else, including the reality that massive shutdowns will continue long after the Christian holy day on April 12."
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