10 4.5.
Above: Steven Ferdman/Getty Images; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse; Kathy Willens/Associated Press. Opening page: Screen grab from Fox Business.Screenland
Photo illustration by Mike McQuadebe joked about, and joke we did, looking
out at an empty street, with an empty bar
stool between us.
It was Friday, March 13. Parents in
my neighborhood still felt it was safe for
their children to use the playground. One
hundred and eighty-nine Italians died
of Covid-19 the previous day, but only
seven Chinese; the number of deaths in
the U.S. was still under 50. The situation
felt something like the Iran standoff or
a school shooting: troubling, but man-
ageable, and even if it wasn’t managed,
life as we knew it would more or less
go on. Restaurants were still allowed to
seat customers. The mechanics in the
bike shop down the street had not yet
donned masks and gloves or posted a
sign requesting that no customer set foot
inside the store. The coff ee shop had not
yet closed its doors indefi nitely.
Meanwhile, after boasting of ‘‘record
highs’’ in January, President Trump had
stopped tweeting about the stock mar-
ket. His silence coincided with a 20 per-
cent decline in the Dow Jones industrial
average, the index Trump has so often
cited as the measure of his own success.
The week before, Larry Kudlow, who
leads Trump’s National Economic Coun-
cil, told long-term investors to ‘‘think
seriously about buying these dips,’’
because the coronavirus ‘‘is relatively
contained.’’ The word ‘‘contained,’’ awful
as it appears in retrospect, was at the
time an ordinary ministerial distortion,something to please the boss. But stare at
that ‘‘relatively,’’ and you’ll glimpse what
Kudlow was saying under his breath:
Caveat emptor.
By the time we fi nished our gelatos
and said our goodbyes, Trump was strid-
ing out into the Rose Garden to make it
clear he intended to roll up his sleeves.
The coronavirus, which only four days
earlier he compared to ‘‘the common
fl u,’’ was now a ‘‘national emergency,
two very big words.’’ His concern came
several weeks later than some had hoped,
but appeared to be genuine, or at least
genuine enough to appease the Dow,
which shot up to close at 23,186 — over
1,000 points higher than that morning, but
nearly 7,000 points lower than the 30,‘The White
House sent
along to me
a, uh, signed
chart of the
skyrocketing
Dow.’