Trump's rosy COVID-19 predictions were reportedly fed by faulty White House economic modeling

Larry Kudrow, Kevin Hassett, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Trump

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

published 4 May 2020

President Trump said at a Fox News town hall on Sunday night that 80,000 to 90,000 Americans might die from COVID-19, an increase from his longtime ceiling of 60,000 deaths and his more optimistic early predictions. By Sunday night, the U.S. had reported 67,682 COVID-19 deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Trump, who has publicly vacillated between focusing on the cost in lives and cost in dollars, also said "we have to reopen our country," and do it "safely but as quickly as possible."

Earlier Sunday, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, told Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace, "Our projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000 American lives lost, and that's with full mitigation" and social-distancing. When those projections were unveiled in late March, "Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so," The Washington Post reports, citing interviews 82 officials, outside advisers, and experts.

So "a small team led by Kevin Hassett — a former chairman of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases — quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations," the Post reports. This model was widely interpreted inside the White House as predicting a lower death count, and "it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government's pandemic response." The Post continues:

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It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term. For Trump — whose decision-making has been guided largely by his re-election prospects — the analysis, coupled with Hassett's grim predictions of economic calamity, provided justification to pivot to where he preferred to be: cheering an economic revival rather than managing a catastrophic health crisis. [The Washington Post]

"By the end of April — with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War — it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true," the Post reports. "The president's course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools." Read more at The Washington Post.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.