Trump will claim coronavirus success but first must define it

For President Trump to win a second term in the White House, strategists in both parties agree voters must have the perception he successfully managed the coronavirus outbreak and its economic fallout. But that first means a pitched battle with supporters of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to define success.

The White House press has more than once asked Trump and his subordinates why he deserves reelection given the COVID-19 death toll. One reporter pointed out that coronavirus deaths had exceeded the 58,000 fatalities the United States suffered during the Vietnam War. Later, as that figure approached 100,000, another asked press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to identify "the number of dead Americans" the electorate should "tolerate" as it heads to the polls in November.

It's a morbid question, and the White House often argues it is also an unfair one. How the Trump administration stacks up against various models and their embedded assumptions, it contends, is different from an apples-to-apples comparison to how other Western democracies, or even Democratic governors who have generally received favorable coverage, have handled the pandemic. But it is one it will have to answer with something other than Trump's early assurances that the virus would somehow just disappear. ("You have to understand, I'm a cheerleader for this country," the president explained.)

The same goes for the economy. Trump isn't going to be able to run for reelection on the 3.5% unemployment rate, which includes record-low rates for black and Hispanic workers, that he'd planned to make central to his pitch for his second term. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett has publicly acknowledged the administration will be lucky if unemployment is merely in the high single digits by Election Day. Democrats will argue that by any reasonable baseline, the U.S. lost at least 36 million jobs under Trump's watch.

"If he tries to look backward, Biden will credibly be able to say, 'We gave you that. Unemployment was below 5% and tracking downward when you were elected,'" said a Republican strategist. "Or he can say, 'We led one recovery, and I can lead it again.'"

That's why Trump is going to use a different baseline: the low point of the lockdown-induced economic contraction. Compared to that, job creation and economic growth could look impressive by the fall. Some Democrats acknowledge this is a plausible scenario. "We are about to see the best economic data we've seen in the history of this country," Jason Furman, a former leading economic adviser to President Barack Obama, predicted in April, according to Politico.

It's also going to be difficult, Republicans say, for Democrats to run credibly against the coronavirus's economic wreckage if they continue to support extended lockdowns. At the same time, Trump was an early adopter of reopening. Still, the Biden camp is sure to repeat Ronald Reagan's 1980 question asking voters if they are better off than they were four years ago, not four months ago.

The coronavirus questions may be more problematic than the economic ones, since many voters have already concluded that the earliest phase of the federal response was lacking and that the president lost senior citizens on this issue, at least temporarily, by April. Here, Trump will point to his actions, such as curbing travel from China while Biden was warning against xenophobia and his allies' track record in the states. This includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a 2020 battleground where the death toll has been so much lower than what critics projected that they are left questioning the integrity of the data.

"The governor has done probably about as well as anybody in the country in balancing those two questions," said Florida-based Republican strategist Jamie Miller. "The methodical way in which he went about it, in both closing and reopening. He didn't make knee-jerk decisions. He has not made knee-jerk reactions. He made methodical decisions that have saved a lot of people's lives."

A big question is whether Trump will still be able to tout that kind of progress and claim it as vindication for his own eagerness to reopen shortly after most hospital systems were not overrun or whether the public health situation deteriorates because of a second wave of people getting exposed as stay-at-home orders come to an end across the country.

"Eighty-five percent of the population that comes down with COVID-19 will deal with it with bed rest, liquids, and tender loving care," said former Food and Drug Administration official Peter Pitts. But Trump will be judged heavily on the fate of the other 15%.