CEOs, a Failed Economist, and Jared Kushner: Behind Trump’s Coronavirus Easter Deadline

Earlier this week, Donald Trump announced during a virtual town hall with Fox News that he would “love to have the country opened up“ by Easter Sunday, which falls on April 12 this year. The notion of sending people back to work and normal life weeks if not months earlier than experts have recommended has horrified public health officials, but as the White House so elegantly put it on Monday, “We’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs,” i.e. some people are going to have to die so the economy can live. (This death-panel scenario obviously neglects to consider the fact that possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans dying will have an extremely negative impact on the economy.) And while Trump has long been known to make decisions based on data, facts, and logic, a new report reveals that, in a shocking turn of events, his April deadline was basically pulled out of the administration’s collective ass.

Per Bloomberg:

Trump’s impatience to get everyone back to work set in almost immediately after he urged everyone to stay home—touched off as he watched a sermon delivered by a prominent evangelical preacher to an empty megachurch. It gained momentum as Trump listened to advice from conservative economists who warned of near-apocalyptic financial damage, a view reinforced by a free-fall in markets. And it coalesced around a single day, among the most sacred in the Christian calendar—Easter Sunday, April 12—for reasons more symbolic than scientific after a key meeting headed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner just four days after the stay-at-home advice.

According to reporters, on March 15, Trump watched a livestream of a church service by evangelical pastor Jentezen Franklin, who bemoaned the fact that there were “just a bunch of empty seats.” The next day, First Lady Melania Trump announced that the White House Easter Egg Roll had been called off for the first time in over a century—a move that obviously upset the extremely pious Donald Trump, who apparently communicates with God through extramarital affairs, multimillion dollar scams, and defrauding charities. And, of course, almost immediately after he told people to stay home and take the virus seriously, the business community, which Trump cares more about pleasing than keeping Americans alive, started calling:

Trump joined a conference call…on March 20 with thousands of small business owners who raised concern about how they had limited capacity to ride out the closures forced by the response to the coronavirus. That same day, White House advisers Kushner, economist Kevin Hassett, and some of the public health officials gathered to begin discussing how to reopen the economy. As the group discussed how to reopen the economy, the idea was floated to pick a day and work backward. It was then that Easter was first brought up as a possible target date, though officials also discussed the possibility of only lifting restrictions on certain geographic areas or demographic groups. Hassett, who had departed the White House but was brought back to help advise on the coronavirus recovery effort, warned that Easter could be too late in terms of damage to the economy.