David Leonhardt: How Trump is making the coronavirus crisis worse

At a private New York meeting in October of 1940, William Knudsen made a desperate plea to the automobile industry’s top executives. Knudsen himself had been the president of General Motors until a few months earlier. But he had stepped down to help oversee military production at President Franklin Roosevelt’s request. The position paid $1 a year.Knudsen told the executives that U.S. military officials surveying the Nazis’ bombing of England had concluded that the country with