The paranoid style goes viral
By 
The Labor Department said Friday that the economy shed more than 20.5 million jobs in April, sending the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent — devastation unseen since the Great Depression.
The report underscores the speed and depth of the labor market’s collapse as the coronavirus pandemic took a devastating toll. In February, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, a half-century low. And even since the survey was taken, millions of people have filed claims for jobless benefits.
The April job losses alone far exceed the 8.7 million in the last recession, when unemployment peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. The only comparable period came when the rate reached about 25 percent in 1933, before the government began publishing official statistics.
If anything, the report understates the damage. The government’s definition of unemployment typically requires people to be actively looking for work. And the unemployment rate doesn’t reflect the millions still working who have had their hours slashed or their pay cut.
A few comments:
(1) As a nation we still haven’t really internalized how bad this is and how bad it’s going to get. There isn’t going to be any meaningful “reopening” of the economy, because as Scott has pointed out, people aren’t going to risk their lives for a Red Robin burger (OK some morons will but not enough to make it worth it for most such places to actually open for regular business again). Or to the extent there’s any reopening, there’s going to be a re-closing as soon as cases spike badly again, which will be about two weeks later.
(2) If the GOP suffers a wave election defeat in November, this is only going to intensify the insanity of the Trump base/cult. The pandemic provides a perfect excuse to rationalize away the results, of course, but it’s more than that: the pandemic will absolutely be interpreted in conspiratorial terms, by everyone from the Internet crazy machine (“Bill Gates and George Soros paid the Chinese to create it”) to respectable [sic] conservative media types, who will accuse Democrats of having exacerbated the crisis to exploit it, because the Left would rather kill a million Americans than see Donald Trump re-elected etc. Long story short: even a crushing defeat isn’t going to purge the GOP of the Trumpian madness — indeed it will make it even worse. (All this illustrates how what the GOP has been in the process of becoming over the course of the past few decades. Trumpism is merely a culmination of that, rather than a rupture).
(3) I still think there’s a non-trivial chance that Trump quits before January 20th, and even before November 3rd. Things like this jobs report are interpreted by him not as evidence that tens of millions of his fellow citizens are suffering, but as literally nothing but bad publicity for him personally, which he considers to be the very worst thing in the world. And it’s all SO UNFAIR: he has done the greatest job of any president ever, and he gets BAD NUMBERS? No one has ever suffered like he has. Seriously if he quit this afternoon I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised (Again I don’t think this will actually happen, but it definitely could happen, as in I’d take 20 to 1 odds on it happening before his term is up).