Link to share with the 'aspirational' diehard Trump fans in your life

By Jim Tankersly @ NYTimes/Business, April 13

[...] Walter Isenberg is the sort of business owner President Trump has in mind when he talks about the need to start lifting coronavirus lockdowns and reopen the American economy. Mr. Isenberg’s hotel and restaurant group in Denver has seen its revenues drop from $3 million a day last year to $40,000 a day now.

But Mr. Isenberg has no expectation that his company, Sage Hospitality Group, will see the quick economic “boom” that Mr. Trump has predicted, even after state officials allow his properties to begin hosting customers again. “It’s just going to be a very long and slow recovery until such time as there is a therapeutic solution or a vaccine,” Mr. Isenberg, who has furloughed more than 5,000 of his 6,000 employees, said in an interview. “I’m not a scientist, but I just don’t see the psyche of people — I don’t see people coming out of this and rushing out to start traveling and having big conventions.”

The president is in a rush to lift quarantines and stay-at-home restrictions that have brought an 11-year economic expansion to an abrupt end and knocked millions of people out of work. Mr. Trump has predicted that once the economy restarts, it will rocket itself out of a deep recession and lead to an economic boom “perhaps like never before.”

Companies affected by the shutdowns say restarting the economy will not be that easy. So do a wide variety of economic and survey data, which suggest that the economy will recover slowly even after the government begins to ease limits on public gatherings and allow certain shuttered restaurants and shops to reopen.

The evidence suggests it is not just stay-at-home orders and other government restrictions that have chilled economic activity in the United States over the past month: It is also a behavioral response from workers and consumers scared of contracting the virus.

Data shows that unemployment claims rose and restaurant reservations vanished even before the lockdown orders hit, as nervous consumers retreated into their homes. And they show consumers are unlikely to return to airports, restaurants and sporting venues en masse any time soon [....]