Donald Trump’s latest phony threat falls flat

| 8:00 pm EDT April 10, 2020
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Donald Trump’s ongoing threat to prematurely reopen the economy is yet another reminder that we need to vote him out. But it’s not a real threat. He can’t “reopen” anything, because he didn’t shut anything down. It’s entirely in the hands of governors. Don’t cower over his fake threats.

Plenty of governors are idiots, so there is something to worry about here. We need to be focused on the battles that will end up playing out at the state level. We’re already seeing Florida’s criminally negligent Governor Ron DeSantis threatening to reopen schools, citing the false claim that kids can’t catch the coronavirus. For that matter, some Republican Governors never did shut their states down.

These state level battles are important. Let’s not allow Donald Trump to distract us from it by floating the notion that he can reopen the economy by pulling a lever on his desk. Trump isn’t the one who closed the cities, the states, the schools, the restaurants, the stores, or the sports leagues. He won’t be the one who decides when they reopen.