Donald Trump tries to understand how many Americans he needs to sacrifice to keep the economy going

The journalists of BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you reliable and relevant reports on the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, Become a member and subscribe to our newsletter, Epidemic today.

At the White House briefing on Monday evening on COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, President Donald Trump announced that he was seriously considering ending national mitigation efforts and reopen American businesses.

“We are not going to let the cure be worse than the problem,” said Trump, echoing the slogan he wrote in a capital tweet Sunday night. The president told reporters that he was not sure if life would return to normal, but said it could be “much earlier than three or four months”.

The whole concept of death is terrible, the President said. But there is a huge difference between one percent and four or five.

And at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday, Trump said he would like the country to reopen at Easter on April 12. The decision to reactivate the country will be taken at the end of a 15 day period who were currently after eight days.

By joining the president, a growing choir of TVs, business leaders, tech investors, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and right-wing influencers in the US have decided to convince the American people that the eventual death of the coronavirus is a small price to pay for the economic health.

This utility calculation was no clearer than Texas Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick on Fox News Tucker Carlson tonight Monday evening after the Trumps White House briefing. Patrick suggested that Americans over the age of 70 would be happy to die for the good of the country’s economy.

Those of us over the age of 70 take good care of us. But don’t sacrifice the country, Patrick said. No one contacted me and said, “As an elderly person, are you ready to try your life in exchange for the conservation of America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?” And if that is the exchange, I totally agree.

Patrick was not the only prominent Republican to use Carlsons show to vote for Trumps Lord of the flies coronavirus plan. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy told the Carlsons audience that the collapse of the economy was more dangerous than COVID-19, which infected 396,249 people worldwide on Tuesday and killed 17,252 while Patrick and Kennedy were talking about, the United States had to deadliest day since the start of the epidemic, with more than 100 deaths over a 24-hour period.

Look, for a small segment of our population, it’s true: coronavirus can kill you. For a small segment. But do you know what else can kill you? Poverty. Hunger. Losing the entire economy, Kennedy said during the same episode of Tucker Carlson tonight. And we have to stop thinking about the next election and try to think a little more about the next generation and what will be left of them, which will be nothing if we let this economy collapse.

On Tuesday morning, after Fox reconditioned Trumps, that the remedy is no worse than the problem, the president tweeted to pressure Congress and assure supporters that the elderly would be protected even though he did not explained how.

Our people want to go back to work. They will practice social distance and everything, and the elderly will be watched with protection and love, the president tweeted. We can do two things together. THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM! Congress MUST ACT NOW. We will come back strong!

The president also retweeted conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who promoted a Haaretz article titled ‘Trump is right about the coronavirus. WHO is wrong, “says Israeli expert. In his tweet, Coulter downplayed the death rate from COVID-19.

The wave of economy first and public safety messages doesn’t just happen on the President’s Twitter feed and his favorite news channel. Right-wing influencers and the new class of coronavirus influencers, typically men who work in the tech or finance industries and use graphs and medium publications to play amateur epidemiologists, have also fallen in line with the President.

It’s a difficult tweet to write: the best plan to protect vulnerable seniors is to bring everyone over the age of 70 and over, except for those with essential skills like doctors and the military and some elected officials , and create security zones at military bases to protect them from Covid-19, tech investor Shervin Pishevar tweeted and then deleted on Monday. Pishevar is best known for denying having been sexually harassed at an Uber party in 2014 because, as another person said at the party, he “had a pony leash in one hand and a glass in the other”.

If I am given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a great depression, I will die happily, right-wing radio host and federalist contributor Jesse Kelly tweeted.

The federalist, a right-wing news site, and its editors spoke particularly about the end of mitigation measures for the good of the economy. The site has published of them different articles claiming that depression would be worse than stopping the coronavirus.

It seems difficult to wonder whether the nation would not be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die, Jonathan Ashbach said on Tuesday. However, honestly confronting reality is not insane, and even refusing to consider if the current response constitutes an evil even greater than that which it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.

Like a viral tweet say, so we do the cart problem but the most important thing is to save the cart.

While it is true that many Americans are not at life-threatening risk from the coronavirus, it is also true that many do. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in a Tweeter, scolded the pressure for the Americans to return to work while COVID-19 is still raging.

“Dangerous and irresponsible,” he writes.

After Trump’s Fox News town hall on Tuesday, the hashtag #NotDyingForWallStreet trend started on Twitter. “24 years ago, I volunteered to give my life to this country if necessary to defend the Constitution,” wrote one user. “I will be damned if I am chosen as a human sacrifice by a man who spits on the Constitution daily to satisfy the god of American greed.”

Vincent Racaniello, professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University and podcast host This week in virology, told BuzzFeed News that he did not know if the cart could be saved.

If this wave gets enough movement behind it and the president tells everyone to go back to work, many states are unlikely to do so, he said. So we will have a fragmented country. … then we will have a massive wave of deaths.

Several governors are already charting a different course. “When people die and people don’t feel safe, the economy is not going to come back. We have to #FlattenTheCurve so that when the wave comes it won’t be as big as it would have been and we are prepared for this, “Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine tweeted Tuesday.

Tuesday at the Governor of New York briefing on the coronavirus Andrew Cuomo, the Governor pushed back against the Trumps plan: no American will say to speed up the economy at the expense of human life, because no American will say how much a life is worth. The job must be to save lives. “

Weren’t going to accept the premise that human life is disposable, Cuomo said. “And they weren’t going to put a figure on human life. The first thing to do is save lives, period, whatever it costs.”