None of that is going to matter. Government can force businesses to shut down but they can’t force them to open. One more month of this and fully half the businesses that were forced to close will never reopen. Of the ones that do a third of them will go under in a year or less. This closure policy is going to devastate this nation for years to come.
And the businesses will have assets that they will sell off to settle their debts, and store fronts and factory floors will lie vacant, and new entrepreneurs will arise, and start new businesses, using the sold-off assets they purchased cheap, and negotiating terms for the stores and factory floors favorable to them, because the landlords, whether the original or the receivers, don’t want their real estate to sit around generating no income. And they’ll get financing from the banks and speculators that have capital to invest. This is the natural cycle of things, as surely as autumns leaves litter the forest floor and turn into mulch and eventually dirt to nourish new growth. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.
And as far as Trump’s reelection prospects go, I wouldn’t worry. So long as he is actively engaged in mitigating the damage caused by this epidemic, and helping the country cope with all means at his disposal, he’s a shoe-in. Not least because one of the two grumpy old men is going to be his opposition. Which one? At this point, what difference does it make.
Or it could be Tulsi. Trump doesn’t have cleavage and is not a combat veteran, but so long as he doesn’t make a grab for the former, or make a nasty crack about the latter, he’ll be more than a match for her, because she really doesn’t have the intellectual prowess necessary to beat him. Her main agenda, stopping endless wars, actually dovetails with what he’s doing.
But the main thing is, he’s got to be out, proactively trying to right the ship of state. Nixon did something similar in 1969, and he did some really asinine things, such as imposing price controls and implementing affirmative action in civil service, but the public loved it, and he won reelection in a landslide in ‘72 against a pathetic pinko. That’s when things went sideways.
So the thing for him to do is be very hands-on and on top of things, listen to healthcare experts and follow their advice, and “by his fruits shall ye know him.” And also campaign like a mother-f@#$er as soon as the pandemic ends.
It takes a few months to open a brand new restaurant and hire workers. Meanwhile you are hiring workers to do the renovations. The recovery will start right away, after the panic is over.