United we stand, even without the president

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Dana Milbank says, the nation’s leaders are coming together without Donald Trump.

I sure hope this coronavirus crisis comes to an end soon. I sure hope the millions of people thrown out of work get their jobs back soon.

I sure hope the major league baseball season opens, not to mention our schools and restaurants.

Oh, excuse me. I’m terribly sorry. I used that dirty word: hope.

It’s become the new n-word for left-wing Democrats ever since Donald Trump said he is hoping to get the economy back to normal again by April 12.

The president gave everyone in America a day to look forward to — Easter Sunday — but Democrats and half the liberal media acted like he had committed another impeachable offense.

Easter Sunday!? No way! What’s he thinking?

He’s not a scientist! Did he check with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the other doctors on his coronavirus task force?

What happened to practicing social distancing and sheltering in place?

What about testing millions for the virus? What about the high infection rate in New York City?

Despite the knee-jerk hysteria of the media and the selfish and cynical behavior of the Democrats in Congress, the president did exactly what a leader is supposed to do in a crisis: He bucked up the country’s morale, looked on the bright side, set a national goal to shoot for.

Imagine if Trump had taken the gloomy route. How would his critics have reacted if he said something like, “Man, there’s no hope.”

American people would be jumping off their roofs by now. We’d be putting suicide nets on our buildings. We’d have rioting in the streets.

Instead, he took the right position and acted like a leader.

He got top scientists and Vice President Mike Pence to help him.

He explained what he was going to do, then he did it. Every day he’s had to put up with the Democrats’ sniping and a liberal media that hates him and questions everything he does.

To repair the damage to the economy from the coronavirus pandemic as fast as possible, Trump and his financial guys put together a massive $2 trillion stimulus package that will help big corporations, small businesses and working people. Maybe it won’t be enough. Maybe when we get to April 12, we’ll have to push back the reboot of the crashed economy for another week or two.

Maybe we’ll be able to let life return to normal in some places but we’ll have to continue the shutdowns in New York City or elsewhere.

Maybe the coronavirus pandemic will turn out to be not as widespread or as deadly as we were first led to believe.

Nobody knows how it’ll turn out. Not Dr. Fauci. Not Gov. Andrew Cuomo or The New York Times.

But Trump says he hopes to “open up the country” by April 12. The brilliant doctors say,

“We don’t know yet . ... Let’s see what the data tells us.”

Doctors look at things a lot differently than a president does. As he has said, if he listened only to the doctors, he’d have to close up the country for a year.

Trump has to balance what the doctors tell him with his own optimism and common sense, which tell him we have the brains, money and will power to defeat the virus and revive the economy at the same time.

So April 12 is a reasonable goal for the country to shoot for. It might take longer to return to normal, but so what?

The important thing is that the president gave us hope, not despair.