1. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa: Commander of confusion: Trump sows uncertainty and seeks to cast blame in coronavirus crisis

In the three weeks since declaring the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, President Trump has delivered a dizzying array of rhetorical contortions, sowed confusion and repeatedly sought to cast blame on others.

History has never known a crisis response as strong as his own, Trump says — yet the self-described wartime president claims he is merely backup. He has faulted governors for acting too slowly and, as he did Thursday, has accused overwhelmed state and hospital officials of complaining too much and of hoarding supplies.

America is winning its war with the coronavirus, the president says — yet the death toll rises still, and in the best-case scenario more Americans will die than in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The economy is the strongest ever and will rebound in no time, he says — yet stock markets have cratered and in the past two weeks a record 10 million people filed for unemployment insurance.

As Trump has sought to remake his public image from that of a skeptic of the pandemic’s danger to a savior forestalling catastrophe and protecting hundreds of thousands of people from a vicious contagion, he also has distorted the truth, making edits and creating illusions at many turns. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/commander-of-confusion-trump-sows-uncertainty-and-seeks-to-cast-blame-in-coronavirus-crisis/2020/04/02/fc2db084-7431-11ea-85cb-8670579b863d_story.html

2. John Stoehr: The GOP's Separatist Movement Exposed

One thousand Americans died Wednesday. One thousand more could die today. Six and a half million filed for unemployment insurance benefits in one week, on top of 3.3 million last week. Yet leading Republicans, like Senator Ron Johnson, are urging people to go back to work. Yet leading Republicans, like Senator Tom Cotton, are calling for revenge on China. All the while, Trump appears poised to divvy up the spoils of last week’s passage of the $2 trillion economic stimulus so friendly states like Florida get all the help they need while unfriendly states like New York get jack.

The legislation, called the CARES Act, sets aside half a trillion dollars in corporate loans. (That’s on top of $4 trillion in unlimited “quantitative easing” and direct borrowing by and from the Fed.) A provision requires the president to designate an inspector general to oversee accountability of the fund. But in a signing statement, the president said he will do no such thing. After all, acquittal means a president is no longer constitutionally bound to take care that the law is faithfully executed. Well, a GOP president, anyway. Separate but not equal means Democrats go to the wall.

The GOP is acting like a separatist movement.

The rich get richer. The rest get whatever’s coming to them.

Unemployment numbers are worse than they were in the Great Depression. Americans might die from the novel coronavirus in greater numbers than all the men who died fighting in World War II. In normal times, white Americans might not have noticed the Republican Party’s separatist movement. Normal times are history now. https://stoehr.substack.com/p/the-gops-separatist-movement-exposed

3. Will Bunch: In Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, Republicans will literally kill you to win an election

What we are witnessing here in real-time is one insidious GOP pathology — a years long assault on the voting rights  that underpin American democracy — morphing into something much, much sicker. On Tuesday morning, voters in Milwaukee — many wearing masks, struggling to keep a distance of six feet — lined up around the block at the city’s just five polling places (down from a normal 180, because of so few volunteers in a time of coronavirus) to wait possibly hours, and also increase their risk of infection, to vote. For Republicans in Wisconsin’s statehouse and its courts, this incredible hardship in voting was a feature, not a bug.

And what exactly is so damned important that Republicans are willing to, in an only loosely metaphorical sense, shoot a man or two in the middle of Milwaukee’s 5th Street and get away with it? It’s not the supposed marquee election, the Democratic presidential primary (possibly the last contested one of 2020) between Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders. No, the big concern is over a low-profile special election between a Republican and a Democrat to fill a vacancy on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It’s exactly the GOP’s dominance in this type of low-profile election — ignored by much of the public even as billionaire pro-business donors pump in huge wads of cash — that’s enabled their war on American democracy.

It’s complicated, and Republicans want to keep it that way and keep average folks clueless about the tricks they use to thwart the will of the majority of the people who live in a state like Wisconsin. In reality, the whole criminal enterprise is a massive Jenga structure that will collapse in dozens of shattered pieces if you can just pull out one of them, which is why the GOP is literally fighting to the death to keep voters from doing that in Tuesday’s election. https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/wisconsin-holds-2020-primary-coronavirus-republican-voter-suppression-20200407.html

4. Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller: The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

The United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/

5. Adam Serwer: We Can Finally See the Real Source of Washington Gridlock

McConnell, who had demanded to know “how we’re going to pay for” the $831 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, enthusiastically supported the $2 trillion CARES Act. Graham, who had complained that $800 billion was far too much spending in 2009, said last month’s bill would “help save the country.” Grassley bragged about having “beefed up” funding for small businesses and unemployment insurance. Alexander declared, “We are here not as Democrats and Republicans, but we are here to work together to do whatever we can to address COVID-19.” The soaring spirit of civic responsibility that was altogether absent during the Great Recession suddenly reasserted itself, even as the overriding concern about excess government spending disappeared.

The distinction between 2009 and 2020 cannot be explained by the fact that this economic slowdown was a necessary part of combatting the coronavirus. Although those affected today are hurting through no fault of their own, the same was true of millions of Americans in the Great Recession. For that matter, most Republicans—including McConnell, Graham, Grassley, and Alexander—had voted for the 2008 bank bailout prior to voting against the stimulus. In other words, they voted to help those most responsible for the Great Recession, then voted to stiff those Americans whose lives and livelihoods had been destroyed by the bankers’ greed and regulators’ ineptitude, and who would suffer through a sluggish recovery as a result.

The complete Republican reversal on the need for the federal government to address an economic crisis is not merely hypocrisy, although it is also that. Ideological divides between the left and right did not evaporate during the negotiations—in fact, they fell along familiar lines. Democrats wanted more generous provisions for unemployment insurance and aid to families, and Republicans wanted more money for big business and fewer strings attached to it. But those differences did not prevent Congress from legislating. Washington gridlock does not stem from ideological differences about the size or role of government, although those conflicts inevitably shape legislation. It stems from the ideological conviction, held by much of the Republican Party, that the Democratic Party is inherently illegitimate and has no right to govern. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/republican-party-discovers-virtues-stimulus/609244/

6. Alison Durkee: Americans Can’t Sign Up for Health Insurance During a Global Pandemic, Trump Decides

The coronavirus outbreak and ensuing economic fallout is resulting in widespread financial hardship, as entire industries come to a standstill, workers get laid off, and the stock market tanks. As more and more Americans contract the coronavirus, another major source of financial anxiety for many will be health care costs, as serious cases of COVID-19 could result in massive hospital and physician bills. For those who are going into the global pandemic uninsured, however, the Trump administration is offering little relief. Politico reports that President Donald Trump and senior officials rejected plans this week to reopen the federal health care exchange at Healthcare.gov for a special enrollment period in response to the coronavirus, despite the idea being previously under consideration.

The Trump administration’s refusal to allow more Americans to easily sign up for ACA insurance isn't the GOP’s only attack on the health care program in the midst of the global pandemic, as Republican-led states and the Trump administration have resolved to keep moving forward with their lawsuit to kill the ACA despite the coronavirus. “It’s always been a question of legality, not health care policy,” Samantha Fisher, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Attorney General, argued to the Daily Beast. Trump himself has repeatedly decried the ACA amid his coronavirus response, saying at a recent press briefing that he wants to “get rid of the bad healthcare and put in a great healthcare.” “What we’d like to do is totally kill it,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall. The Supreme Court’s decision on the lawsuit is likely to come as the U.S. still grapples with and recovers from COVID-19: Arguments are set to take place in the fall, with a decision coming as soon as spring 2021, potentially before a vaccine for the coronavirus is readily available. If the court overturns the law and kicks millions off of their health care plan—the country’s health care problem in the wake of COVID-19 could soon get exponentially worse. “The only thing worse than a public health pandemic is a public health pandemic without health care,” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told the Daily Beast. “It's like watching the Chernobyl disaster and deciding to bulldoze the fallout shelters.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trump-rejects-aca-special-enrollment-period-coronavirus

7. Chris Smith: “He’s Walking the Line”: Inside Andrew Cuomo’s Psychological Game With Trump

The phone conversations themselves are usually unremarkable in tone. Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Donald Trump talk about what medical supplies are urgently needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic in New York. The chat seems productive. They hang up. And then Trump tweets a potshot, saying Cuomo needs to “do more.” Or the president suggests that New York is somehow profiteering, sending hospital masks “out the back door.” Or he goes into the White House briefing room, as he did on Wednesday, and snipes that Cuomo “shouldn’t be complaining because we gave him a lot of ventilators…The problem is with some people, no matter what you give, it’s never enough. It’s never enough.”

Cuomo has tangled with plenty of venal or bullying politicians before. What’s different this time around is that he’s contending with an amoral player who outranks him. Part of what makes Trump unpredictable is that he has never had any core values, other than ego gratification. Cuomo, by contrast—as tough and cynical as he can be—has a soul. In the governor’s life-or-death dealings with the president, that could turn out to be Cuomo’s most powerful asset. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-andrew-cuomos-psychological-game-with-trump

8. Susan B. Glasser: The Coronavirus Is the World’s Only Superpower

When you are done being angry about all the crazy, nasty, inconsistent, and untrue things that Donald Trump says each day about the coronavirus and other matters, remember that the flood of words is cover for an Administration that in some ways barely exists relative to its predecessors, especially when it comes to crucial areas of domestic, economic, and international security—or even straightforward crisis management. Turnover at the upper levels of Trump’s White House stands at eighty-three per cent, according to a Brookings Institution tracker. In his Cabinet, Trump has had far more turnover than Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and both George Bushes. The capacity of the federal government to respond to this catastrophe—even if Trump had been so inclined—has never been weaker. The virus was not of Trump’s making, but his government’s incoherent, disorganized response to it was utterly predictable.

Watching the Trump carnival from afar, the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt summed up the week’s events, and those of the many painful weeks to come: “This is the first great crisis of the post-American world,” he wrote on Twitter. “The UN Security Council is nowhere to be seen, G20 is in the hands of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the White House has trumpeted America First and Everyone Alone for years. Only the virus is globalized.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-coronavirus-is-the-worlds-only-superpower

9. Jennifer Senior: This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis

Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats. Their assessments have been controversial. The American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics expressly forbids its members from diagnosing a public figure from afar.

Enough is enough. As I’ve argued before, an in-person analysis of Donald J. Trump would not reveal any hidden depths — his internal sonar could barely fathom the bottom of a sink — and these are exceptional, urgent times. Back in October, George T. Conway III, the conservative lawyer and husband of Kellyanne, wrote a long, devastating essay for The Atlantic, noting that Trump has all the hallmarks of narcissistic personality disorder. That disorder was dangerous enough during times of prosperity, jeopardizing the moral and institutional foundations of our country.

But now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. The president’s pathology is endangering not just institutions, but lives.

Starting with the basics: Narcissistic personalities like Trump harbor skyscraping delusions about their own capabilities. They exaggerate their accomplishments, focus obsessively on projecting power, and wish desperately to win. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html

10. Michelle Goldberg: Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness

Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.

According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)

Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.

Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/jared-kushner-coronavirus.html

11. Jonathan Chait: The GOP’s Refusal to Oversee Trump’s Emergency Power Is an Invitation to Corruption

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a new select committee to oversee the disbursement of $2 trillion in economic rescue funds. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff has proposed a committee-level investigation into reports of political favoritism in the distribution of medical gear and other emergency supplies. President Trump preemptively announced his position on these probes. Unsurprisingly, he dismisses either committee and rejects any legitimate role for oversight at all.

“This is not the time for politics, endless partisan investigations — here we go again — have already done extraordinary damage to our country in recent years,” he announced preemptively, before any reporter could even ask. “You see what happens. It’s a witch hunt after witch hunt after witch hunt.”

Having lowered the bar to the ground and stomped it repeatedly, Trump has rendered his wholesale rejection of oversight into a nonissue. But measured against history, his stance is extraordinary. He is attempting to destroy a vital part of how government should, and used to, operate. And he has brought the entire Republican Party along with him to this dangerous position. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-coronavirus-congress-pelosi-oversight-witch-hunt.html

12. Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker: How Trump’s attempts to win the daily news cycle feed a chaotic coronavirus response

The novel coronavirus has decimated the economy, turned hospitals into battlefields and upended the daily lives of every American. But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered.

Facing a global pandemic, Trump still seems to lurch from moment to moment, with his methods and messages each day disconnected from — and in some cases contradictory to — the ones just prior. The pattern reveals a commander in chief unsure of how to defeat the “silent enemy,” as he has labeled it.

Instead, Trump has focused on his self-image — claiming credit wherever he believes it is owed, attempting to project strength and decisiveness, settling scores with critics, boasting about the ratings of his televised news conferences and striving to win the cable news and social media wars.

“You have the president of the United States emceeing these reality TV shows,” said David Lapan, a former Trump administration official now working at the Bipartisan Policy Center. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-daily-reality-show-coronavirus-response/2020/04/04/97932e34-75c5-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

13. Max Boot: The worst president. Ever.

Until now, I have generally been reluctant to label Donald Trump the worst president in U.S. history. As a historian, I know how important it is to allow the passage of time to gain a sense of perspective. Some presidents who seemed awful to contemporaries (Harry S. Truman) or simply lackluster (Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush) look much better in retrospect. Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, don’t look as good as they once did.

So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times — not of all time. That left open the possibility that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen enough to take away the qualifier “in modern times.” With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history.

This fiasco is so monumental that it makes our recent failed presidents — George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — Mount Rushmore material by comparison. Trump’s Friday night announcement that he’s firing the intelligence community inspector general who exposed his attempted extortion of Ukraine shows that he combines the ineptitude of a George W. Bush or a Carter with the corruption of Richard Nixon.

Trump is characteristically working hardest at blaming others — China, the media, governors, President Barack Obama, the Democratic impeachment managers, everyone but his golf caddie — for his blunders. His mantra is: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” It remains to be seen whether voters will buy his excuses. But whatever happens in November, Trump cannot escape the pitiless judgment of history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/05/worst-president-ever/

14. Giuliani, a familiar voice in Trump’s ear, promotes experimental coronavirus treatments

Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was in the center of the impeachment storm earlier this year as an unpaid private attorney for President Trump, has cast himself in a new role: as personal science adviser to a president eager to find ways to short circuit the coronavirus epidemic.

In one-on-one phone calls with Trump, Giuliani said, he has been touting the use of an anti-malarial drug cocktail that has shown some early promise in treating covid-19, but whose effectiveness has not yet been proved. He said he now spends his days on the phone with doctors, coronavirus patients and hospital executives promoting the treatment, which Trump has also publicly lauded. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/giuliani-a-familiar-voice-in-trumps-ear-promotes-experimental-coronavirus-treatments/2020/04/05/d4b3b56a-7438-11ea-85cb-8670579b863d_story.html

15. Maureen Dowd: He Went to Jared

The president seems oblivious to the fact that his own clown car of an administration bungled the priceless lead time we had to get ready for the pandemic.

With the death toll in this country soaring past 7,000, Trump is focused on the same thing he is always focused on: himself. He proudly told reporters Wednesday, “Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook? I just found out I was No. 1 on Facebook. I thought that was very nice for whatever it means.” Our doom, perhaps?

Trump’s most defining qualities have been on display in this fight: He has been mercurial, vindictive, deceptive, narcissistic, blame-shifting and nepotistic.

At the Thursday briefing, the president brought out another wealthy, uninformed man-child who loves to play boss: Jared Kushner. Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Surely Trump did not think giving Kushner a lead role would inspire confidence. This is the very same adviser who told his father-in-law early on that the virus was being overplayed by the press and also urged him to tout a Google website guiding people to testing sites that turned out to be, um, still under construction.

Now he is leading a group, mocked within the government as “the Slim Suit crowd,” that is providing one more layer of confusion — and inane consultant argot — to the laggardly, disorganized response. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-trump-jared-kushner.html

16. Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner: Fight the Pandemic, Save the Economy: Lessons from the 1918 Flu

The patterns we identify in the data suggest that timely and aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) can limit the most disruptive economic effects of an influenza pandemic. The epidemiology literature finds that early public health interventions reduce peak mortality rates—flattening the curve—and lower cumulative mortality rates. Because pandemics are highly disruptive to the local economy, these efforts can mitigate the abrupt disruptions to economic activity that result from such shocks. As a result, the swift implementation of NPIs can also contribute to “flattening the economic curve,” reinforcing the effects of more traditional economic policy interventions.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that our results have parallels in the COVID-19 outbreak. Governments that implemented NPIs swiftly, such as those in Taiwan and Singapore, have not only limited infection growth; they also appear to have mitigated the worst economic disruption caused by the pandemic. For example, economist Danny Quah notes that Singapore's management of COVID-19 has avoided major disruptions to economic activity without leading to a sharp increase in infections through the use of forceful, early interventions. Therefore, well-calibrated, early, and forceful NPIs should not be seen as having major economic costs in a pandemic.

Altogether, our evidence implies that it’s the pandemic and the associated spike in mortality that constitute the shock to the economy. To the extent that NPIs are a means to attack the root of the problem, mortality, they can also save the economy. https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020/03/fight-the-pandemic-save-the-economy-lessons-from-the-1918-flu.html

17. Jonathan Chait: Why Trump Is Overruling Scientists to Pursue His Pet Coronavirus Drug

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who gained the favor of Joseph Stalin by promoting pseudoscientific theories that purported to apply Marxist-Leninist theory to biology. Lysenko’s insight was to dismiss the burgeoning field of genetics as a capitalist lie, and to posit a socialist alternative theory of biology that refused to accept that plants were bound by any such thing as “genes.” Orange trees would flourish in Siberia, he promised Stalin. Catering both to the regime’s state ideology and its yearning for prosperity — he promised his methods would yield orange trees in Siberia — Lysenko established his crackpot theories as official Soviet science, and purged scientists who refused to endorse them. Stalin directed Soviet farmers to follow Lysenko’s bizarre theories, contributing to mass starvation.

There are eerie echoes of Lysenkoism in President Trump’s obsession with promoting hydroxychloroquine, a medication used to treat malaria, as a cure for the coronavirus. The parallel is not exact: Hydroxychloroquine has shown some anecdotal promise as a coronavirus therapy. It might emerge as a treatment, and conceivably even the major treatment, for the coronavirus. What gives Trump’s hydroxychloroquine obsessions its creepy Lysenkoist tinge is that the fervor is altogether disconnected from science.

Trump has repeatedly touted the medication, at times with a fervency that makes him sound like a marketer hired to promote the drug. “Hydroxychloroquine. Try it. If you like,” he suggested from the podium Saturday. In perhaps the most surreal moment of his pitch, he announced that he might personally try the medication, even though he does not have the coronavirus: “I think people should — if it were me — in fact, I might do it anyway. I may take it. Okay? I may take it. And I’ll have to ask my doctors about that, but I may take it.”

What it augurs more broadly about Trump’s disdain for public-health expertise is even darker. Over the last two days, Trump has visibly balked at social-distancing guidelines and renewed his impatience to reopen the economy soon. His demand to produce a silver-bullet wonder drug right away seems both to grow out of his dissatisfaction with public-health authorities and is feeding into his skepticism of them. Lysenko’s pseudoscience killed millions of people. How many Americans will perish from Trump’s? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-fauci-navarro-giuliani-scientists-coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html

18. Bess Levin: Meet the Ignorant Cranks Behind Trump’s Big Hydroxychloroquine Push

On Sunday night, during his 928,365th televised coronavirus briefing, Donald Trump made an extremely hard sell for the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effectiveness against COVID-19 is still virtually unknown. “What do you have to lose?” the president asked of taking a drug for which there is very little data, as though he was talking about trying a new flavor of Laffy Taffy or experimenting with two-ply versus four-ply toilet paper. “I really think they should take it,” he said of ill patients. “But it’s their choice. And it's their doctor's choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you’d like.”

In the case of hydroxychloroquine, the president has latched onto the counsel of a group of individuals who are no more qualified to opine on the matter than Melania “The tennis pavilion must go on!” Trump. One of those individuals is White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, who you might remember from such hits as sending emails under a fake name in support of his tariff policies; the claim that an impaired manufacturing sector leads to “an increase in abortion, spousal abuse, divorce, and infertility”; and being hired by Jared Kushner after the first son-in-law found him on Amazon. Despite the fact that the drug has not been shown to work against the COVID-19 in any significant clinical trials, and that previous reports from China and France did not include control groups, Navarro loooooves himself some hydroxychloroquine, a position he made clear by flipping out on Dr. Anthony Fauci over the weekend for having the temerity to suggest the medicine was not ready for primetime.

According to Axios, in a meeting over the weekend, Navarro—who, to be clear, has zero public health experience—dropped a stack of folders in front of the group and started talking about studies he’s seen showing the “clear therapeutic efficacy” of the drug that, in the real world, don’t actually exist. Fauci, who did go to medical school, reportedly pointed this out, saying that at this point there is only anecdotal evidence that the drug works. He then added that much more data is needed, which Navarro seemingly heard as, “Your mother’s a whore, Pete.”

And there you have it, folks. Not really sure what else there is to say here except that we need to keep Dr. Fauci in a protective bubble from which both anyone who might have the virus and people like Rudy, Dr. Oz, and Navarro are forced to stay 60 feet back. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-hydroxychloroquine-push

19. David Wallace-Wells: There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis

For a month, American journalists and public-health experts have praised the coronavirus response of South Korea and Singapore above all others. On Tuesday, Singapore will close its schools and most businesses to guard against an out-of-control outbreak; South Korea just extended its social-distancing policy. In the early months of this pandemic, the most developed parts of Asia have visibly outperformed the rest of the world — a differential that has produced a string of viral charts showing the benefits of mask-wearing and universal testing. But in recent days, Hong Kong and Taiwan, noting a rise of new cases arriving via international visitors, have shut their borders. Cases are spiking in Japan, and a second wave of infections is feared in China, as well. Which means that, all told, many of the nations desperate Americans have spent the last few months praising as exemplary models of public health management do not actually have the virus under control — or at least not to the degree it appeared a few weeks ago, or to the degree you might be hoping for if you expected a (relatively) quick end to quarantine measures and economic shutdown followed by a (relatively) rapid snapback to “normal” life and economic recovery.

If the countries held up as models for how we should proceed can’t figure it out, what does it mean for the U.S., which is saddled with broken institutions and has already bungled and delayed its response at nearly every stage? Here in New York, we are about to enter our third week of sheltering in place; in San Francisco and Seattle, the social-distancing orders have been in effect even longer. Yet there is no clarity to be found from the federal or state or local level for how long these measures will last. And there is no public or concrete plan for, and little visible discussion about, what it would mean to sunset them: how and at what point and in what ways we will try to exit this temporary-but-indefinite wartimelike national bunkering almost all 330 million of us now find ourselves in. What, exactly, is the endgame here? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/there-is-no-plan-for-the-end-of-the-coronavirus-crisis.html

20. Jonathan Chait: The Next Coronavirus Bill Is Democrats’ Last Chance to Ensure a Fair Election

As House Democrats set to work on the next round of economic relief legislation, they face a more urgent choice than they seem to realize. If they send that bill to President Trump without measures guaranteeing voting rights during the pandemic, they are signing a death warrant for the 2020 election.

A vision of the future sits before us in Wisconsin. The coronavirus has devastated in-person voting. Due to a shortage of poll volunteers willing to risk their lives, 175 of Milwaukee’s 180 voting locations will be closed. Voting clerks have run short of envelopes needed to process the surge in absentee ballots, thousands of voters have yet to receive the ballot they requested, and even many voters who can obtain an absentee ballot will be excluded by rules requiring witness signatures (which are difficult to obtain during a quarantine) and voter ID (which is impossible to find.)

The state’s Republicans have adamantly opposed either delaying the election or expanding mail voting options. “Hundreds of thousands of workers are going to their jobs every day, serving in essential roles in our society. There’s no question that an election is just as important as getting takeout food,” insisted the state legislature’s Republican leaders. The comparison is fatuous. People get food because they need it to survive. They are far less likely to venture out to a polling location, where they are forced to wait in absurdly long lines at the risk of their health for a symbolic affirmation of civic duty that gives them no concrete benefit. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-bill-election-vote-suppression-wisconsin-mail.html

21. David Frum: This Is Trump’s Fault

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the pre-crisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.

For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/609532/

22. Eric Lutz: Trump’s War On Oversight Claims Another Victim

Donald Trump continued his raid on government watchdogs Tuesday, abruptly removing the inspector general who had been tasked with overseeing the $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package signed into law late last month. The move, which came days after the president fired Michael Atkinson over his role in the impeachment proceedings, raises significant concerns about the sweeping relief bill—and signals an escalation in Trump’s assault on inspectors general, oversight officials that his allies have convinced him are part of a “deep state” effort to undermine him.

In shaking up the panel tasked with providing oversight on how $2 trillion in Congressionally-approved rescue funds is being spent, Trump has exacerbated concerns many Democrats had about the mammoth legislation. Senate Democrats had objected to an initial Republican relief proposal on the grounds that it provided little oversight, condemning it as a “slush fund” for Trump. They eventually secured measures they believed would provide accountability, but Trump—in signing the package—said he wouldn’t comply. Removing Fine appears to be confirmation of the fears that Trump will refuse to adhere to transparency measures. “Frankly, if the House of Representatives does not condition all further COVID aid on the restriction of the president’s removal authority, they will have made a mistake,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former Department of Homeland Security official under George W. Bush, told the Washington Post. “They should realize that the president is no longer operating in any semblance of good faith and he is more dangerous to the fabric of American democracy than the virus.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trumps-war-on-oversight-claims-another-victim