This week in Trumponomics

The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in over 1 million deaths worldwide and has become a way of differentiating political leaders across the globe. Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman joins The Final Round to discuss Trump reaction to the coronavirus as well as give this week’s Trumpometer reading.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "The Final Round." Well, it's time for our Trumpometer score. President Trump and Joe Biden squaring off in their final debate ahead of Election Day last night. Now it wasn't as combative as the first, but the two certainly did disagree on a number of topics, one of them being how the Trump administration has handled the coronavirus pandemic.

And Rick, we were just talking in the last block just about the surge in number of cases that we've seen over the last several days as several states are recording their highest numbers ever. This, of course, playing into President Trump's grade this week. But how did the president fare, I guess, with that in mind and also the fact that we haven't really made much progress on the stimulus talks?

RICK NEWMAN: We're rounding the corner, Seana. Trump said it's going away. It'll be gone soon. This is the new phrase from Trump-- rounding the corner. We clearly are not rounding the corner, unless we're actually rounding four corners and going all the way back to where we started in February, March, and April, when this virus raged out of control, because the same thing is happening again.

And as we've been reporting and so many others have, it looks like we're going to-- we are close to a new record in terms of infections per day. And this is probably just going to get worse for reasons everybody knows at this point. We had Dr. Adalja just explaining, people are going inside. Temperatures are coming down. This virus is getting worse, and it could end up getting worse than it's ever been in the country. And this is what Trump characterizes as rounding the corner.

So it's astonishing to me-- what are we, eight months into this? You know, Trump began by dismissing the coronavirus. He's still dismissing the coronavirus. And he just seems that he never made the connection between the need to get the coronavirus under control in order to restart the economy. So, you know, we're just going sideways in the economy right now. Some things are working. The housing market's doing great, if you have the money.

But we're still down 11 million job. And, you know, the pace of initial unemployment claims is still at least four times higher than it was before the coronavirus. So we're just a few days before the election at this point, and Trump is still trying to persuade people that the coronavirus is not a big deal. What else can I say except failing?

SEANA SMITH: Certainly is failing. And I don't think it would shock anyone when you take a look at those numbers and for all of the reasons that you just laid out. But, Rick, it was interesting, because when we-- when we watched the debate last night, certainly, it was very, very different from what we saw in the first debate. I think President Trump's demeanor was-- it was a-- a huge difference in what we saw a couple of weeks ago.

But the big question, though, is whether or not it moved the needle, whether or not he was able to convince voters that he is the pick here in just over a week away. Because we know he's been falling in the polls. The polls have been favoring Biden now for quite some time. And he can't really seem to get those voters who are on the edge back into, I guess, supporting him once again.

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah. I-- I'd be surprised if the debate changed anything. I mean, going into it, just about all the analysts were saying, debates usually don't make a difference. They only make a difference if something dramatic happens that clearly favors one candidate over the other. That didn't happen. Biden had some flubs-- you know, the fact-checking this morning including-- included a few whoppers from Biden, as lo-- as well as many from Trump.

But, you know, we just got the ratings in for last night's debate, and they were considerably lower than they were for the first debate. So far fewer people watched the second one than the first one. I-- everybody kno-- everybody can understand why, because that first one was so uncomfortable. But it's too bad in a way, because the second debate, the one last night was actually pretty good. I mean, there was actually a lot of discussion of policy issues. You can-- and you could really learn a little bit, anyway, on how the candidates differ. But, I mean, look, we've got so many people who have already voted. Almost everybody who's going to vote has made up their mind by now. So this debate last night probably did little to affect any of that.

- Rick, I'm curious what you make of this exchange on energy and climate. And Republicans seem to think that that was, you know, positive for President Trump, the fact that Joe Biden sort of indicated the-- the need to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. But, you know, for those of us who've been talking about it, it sounded like something we've heard from these oil companies before. I mean, how do you think that played particularly in some of these key swing states like Pennsylvania?

RICK NEWMAN: I think Biden regrets his phraseology a little bit. And in fact, he was spinning it a little differently after the debate, his campaign was, and then again today, saying, so the takeaway was that people think Biden wants to ban the oil industry or that he wants to end the oil industry. Now that's not what he said. He said he wants to transition away from oil. But, you know, they're-- I mean, you can easily see how, to some people, transition away and ban sounds close to the same thing.

So Biden had-- the Biden campaign today has been saying, he doesn't want to ban anything except fracking on federal land-- that's a certain type of drilling-- but that he-- what he wants to do is, you know, get into renewables, move away from carbon energy. I mean, so that's the part we know about Biden. I think it's the phrasing that he used last night which made it sound like maybe he's going to be a little harsher on the industry then he might otherwise be.

This does matter, because there are energy jobs in Pennsylvania and in Ohio which are both possibly close swing states. And then, obviously, in Texas, probably not a swing state, but this is a state where Biden's more competitive than Hillary Clinton was in 2016. So with regard to Pennsylvania in parti-- in particular, I guess there's a chance this could be a little bit of a tipping-point issue. Again, a lot of peo-- you know, almost everybody has made up their minds, so possibly not at this late game, but it matters to people in those states.