How Trump's coronavirus diagnosis will impact the 2020 election
Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers and Rick Newman discuss how Trump's positive COVID-19 diagnosis with impact the 2020 election.
Video Transcript
KRISTIN MYERS: As we've been talking about today, the president and his wife both testing positive for coronavirus. So what could this mean for the upcoming election? Well, let's bring on Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman for more on this. Hey, Rick.
RICK NEWMAN: Hey.
KRISTIN MYERS: So what does it mean for the 2020 election now that we've got this positive diagnosis?
RICK NEWMAN: There are many scenarios, and we should keep in mind that this whole thing may not have unfolded yet. It's very possible other people in the Trump orbit and also some members of the Senate could end up contracting COVID. But for now there, I think there are a number of scenarios. There might be one positive scenario for President Trump here. Most of the others are negative. The positive scenario, perhaps two scenarios, is that Trump-- he's healthy by election day and he gets some sort of sympathy vote that he wouldn't otherwise have gotten for being sick, or that he recovers quickly and he's able to get back out on the campaign trail and pump his fists in the air and tell everybody he beat COVID and America can beat COVID too.
So that is the narrow way in which this might benefit Trump. I think all the other scenarios are pretty bad for President Trump. The first problem is that for at least 10 days, the period of quarantine, he's not going to be out campaigning. He may try to do some kind of remote events from the White House, but even that might not work if he's actually sick. And that's if he recovers quickly, you know, during the shortest possible time period. He could be out longer.
The other obvious negative for Trump is the fact that he himself got COVID-19 after the many months he has spent diminishing the seriousness of this illness and the need to take precautions. It just underscores the failure-- I mean, really the abject failure-- of his own policies on this. And it means COVID is going to be the main thing in the campaign all the way up until election day. And of course, Trump has been trying desperately to change the story. That wasn't really working before he got COVID-19, and it certainly isn't going to work now.
