2020.0823.0009...

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Forget the Trump tweets. This is the Trump action that might actually kill us.

The new rules, first and foremost, are not merely anti-science, but anti-measurement. That is, the rollback’s primary initial impact is to keep Americans in the dark about a climate-damaging pollutant. “How could we as an advanced society not want to measure these emissions?” asks Michael Greenstone, director of the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “This is such a concerted effort to stick our heads in the ground.”

Maybe so. But it would be of a piece with Trump’s musings about slowing coronavirus testing so Americans don’t learn how many cases there are; his administration’s decision to cease publishing economic forecasts so Americans can’t assess the problems facing the economy; and its actions to stop collecting or publishing inconvenient data on all sorts of other troubles.

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The U.S. has two economies. How much longer will the losing side stand for that?

There are two American economies right now: a buoyant recovery resting atop a possible depression. There’s the economy of higher-income, mostly college-educated white-collar workers: people who can still work from home (as I can), who can order delivery for nearly every need or desire, and whose finances have been barely dented by the recession, if at all. For these households, the recession is largely over.

In fact, by late June, high-wage employment had already fully recovered all the ground lost since the pandemic began, as my colleague Heather Long recently pointed out, citing data from Brown University economics professor and Opportunity Insights co-director John Friedman. Then there’s the other economy.

That’s the economy of lower-wage, predominantly non-college-degreed, blue- (or pink-) collar workers. These are people once employed in restaurants, bars, hotels, salons, gyms and retail stores, who generally must show up in person, but whose customers are now afraid to do so. Their employers have been knocked out of business, many permanently.

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A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery

AFTER HE is nominated at a pared-down Republican convention next week, President Trump will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again.

Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.

One is that the nation, his presidency and, above all, Mr. Trump himself are innocent victims of covid-19. In fact, his own negligence, ignorance and malpractice turned what would have been a daunting challenge for any president into a national disaster.

The other is that there was anything to admire in his record before the virus struck. It is true that the economic growth initiated under President Barack Obama had continued, at about the same modest rate. Mr. Trump achieved this growth by ratcheting up America’s deficit and long-term debt to record levels, with a tax cut that showered benefits on the wealthy.