Here is a hard truth for my political reporter friends: If you are not being harshly critical of Trump you are doing it wrong. His performance, beyond debate, warrants harsh criticism. And sustained criticism is just about the only thing that will change his behavior.
So do your job. And that includes not showing his campaign rallies masquerading as press conferences live.
People are dying because of his screw-ups. What are you, the press, doing to stop it? And yes, it’s your job.
It will go lower.
Brian Beutler/Crooked:
THIS IS OUR ULTIMATE TEST
It is a matter of universal consensus among experts, journalists, career officials, and people of good faith generally that Trump botched the response in tragic fashion. His desire to dramatically recalibrate public expectations of what constitutes success reflects an awareness of his own failures and a desperation to deceive people about them, all to minimize political harm to himself.
Mass deception is second nature to Trump. It is essentially impossible to imagine him acknowledging early errors, committing himself to fixing them, adopting best practices going forward, and campaigning for re-election on the second-half of his coronavirus response. He will instead ask Americans to judge his leadership from a baseline where nobody in the United States—no governors, no mayors, no hospital chiefs, no superintendents—did anything to mitigate the catastrophe while he fiddled, and two million Americans died. By this warped standard, setting the bar low enough to span a mass grave, he will argue that he saved millions of lives—that America should be grateful to him—and obedient Republicans at all levels of the party will parrot his ghoulish line. He boasts about the television ratings of his nightly propaganda briefings, which he uses to erase the history of the past two months and blame others for his failures, so that if the death toll exceeds his “goal” it will only be because some under-resourced Democratic governors failed him.
The test here is not just whether he can game allied and broken institutions to present this falsified history as truth, or a matter of legitimate debate. It’s whether he can exploit a mass forgetting of the very thing that made the idea of a Trump presidency so unacceptable in the first place, now that one of the great warnings has come to pass.
The concept that Trump might get crushed in November needs to be part of the discussion.
CNBC:
White House is not planning for a 4th coronavirus relief bill despite Democrats’ push, officials say
- The White House is not currently planning for a fourth coronavirus relief bill, two administration officials told CNBC.
- Democrats are outlining their priorities for more legislation to respond to the pandemic after the approval of a $2 trillion stimulus package.
- One official cautions that no staffer can rule out a fourth plan, and that the president will ultimately decide whether to move forward with another measure.
- Trump called on Tuesday for a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
NY Times:
Kushner Puts Himself in Middle of White House’s Chaotic Coronavirus Response
Some officials said Mr. Kushner had mainly added another layer of confusion to that response, while taking credit for changes already in progress and failing to deliver on promised improvements. He promoted a nationwide screening website and a widespread network of drive-through testing sites. Neither materialized. He claimed to have helped narrow the rift between his father-in-law and General Motors in a presidential blowup over ventilator production, one administration official said, but the White House is still struggling to procure enough ventilators and other medical equipment.
Perhaps most critical, neither Mr. Kushner nor anyone else can control a president who offers the public radically different messages depending on the day or even the hour, complicating the White House’s effort to get ahead of the crisis. One moment Mr. Trump is talking about reopening the country by Easter, the next he is warning of more than 100,000 deaths. In the afternoon, he threatens to quarantine tens of millions of people in the northeast, then in the evening he backs down…
The culture clash between public and private sectors has been jarring. The senior official described the Kushner team as a “frat party” that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government. To government officials, the outsiders demonstrated a lax attitude to policy discussions, at one point using the website FreeConferenceCall.com to arrange high-level meetings. Others have used personal email accounts in delicate policy exchanges.
Here is the latest and best on masks for the public.
No it’s not simple. Yes, it’s complicated. Tara Haelle/Forbes in a well researched piece:
Should Everyone Wear A Mask In Public? Maybe—But It’s Complicated
I wrote my previous article on masks on Feb. 29, which, in CoronaTime was approximately a millennium ago. It would be another week and a half before the WHO would even declare COVID-19 a pandemic. Both the science and the pandemic itself have shifted and are continuing to shift. That article’s information was true at the time, and most of it remains true now. It addressed one main question: should you wear a mask to protect yourself from infection?
…
But there’s a more important question to address right now—one which was not addressed in my previous article, which is the hot question right now, and which, even if I had addressed it before, would be outdated now given the new evidence and circumstances of today. In fact, as an update on March 1 noted in that article, “it remains an open scientific question whether (and which) droplet-based respiratory viruses are transmitted this way. So far, all documented for COVID cases has involved droplets.”
The big question is: Should everyone wear a mask to protect other people from infection? It’s an important question, a question that could not be adequately answered a month ago (I’ll get to why), a question that’s being and appropriately considered and debated now, and a question all of us desperately want an answer to.
The best answer for the moment: Quite possibly, yes, universal mask wearing might decrease asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission of the disease. The evidence isn’t strong, solid, or crystal clear (it rarely is), but it might be better to err on the side of trying it. It won’t surprise me if the CDC shortly comes out with a mask recommendation to reduce community spread.
Ed Yong/Atlantic:
Everyone Thinks They’re Right About Masks
How the coronavirus travels through the air has become one of the most divisive debates in this pandemic.
If the virus is traveling through the air, then it seems intuitive that masks would block it. But the evidence for this is all over the place, especially for surgical masks, which are more common than N95 respirators, and which don’t form a tight seal with the face. Several past studies have found that face masks could reduce the risk of flu-like infections, slow flu transmission in households, and even reduce the spread of SARS, especially when combined with hand-washing and gloves. Other studies have been more equivocal, finding that masks provide no benefit, small benefits, or benefits only in conjunction with measures like hand-washing. “Airflow follows the path of least resistance, and if it won’t enter through the mesh, it can come in from the side,” Bourouiba said. “There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that [surgical masks] are protective against the smallest droplets.”
There’s still a good case for masks, though, even if they can’t stop viruses from getting in: They can stop viruses from getting out. “I’ve been slightly dismissive of masks, but I was looking at them in the wrong way,” Harvard’s Bill Hanage told me. “You’re not wearing them to stop yourself getting infected, but to stop someone else getting infected.” This might be especially important for SARS-CoV-2, which can spread without immediately causing symptoms. If people are infectious before they fall sick, then everyone should wear face masks “when going out in public, in one additional societal effort to slow the spread of the virus down,” says Thomas Inglesby of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security.
BuzzFeed:
What You Need To Know About The Great Face Mask Debate
Whether more people should wear masks has become one of the fiercest debates of the coronavirus pandemic. New data about how the virus spreads may be tipping the scales.
As Americans wait for more guidance from the federal government, we’ll tackle three questions currently at the heart of the fast-changing mask debate: Who can spread the virus? Can the virus be airborne? What’s the difference between the types of masks? But first, some overall context:
The debate over mask use — happening inside the Trump administration, academia, and hospitals whose workers are caring for COVID-19 patients — is getting increasingly heated. Public health experts have been pushing back against the narrow federal guidelines stating that face masks should only be worn by health care workers, people caring for the ill, or those who are actively displaying symptoms.
What it means for the general public is still confusing and ethically murky. There is a lethal shortage of medical masks — both the rigid, snug-fitting N95 respirators and the looser-fitting surgical masks — for health care workers, and there will be even fewer if the general public buys them en masse. And as people turn to making homemade masks from craft kits or old T-shirts, it’s still unclear how much these even help prevent the spread of the disease or prevent the wearer from contracting it.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Fox News watchers still think the media hyped coronavirus
The Pew numbers — which are from a March 10 to 16 poll of U.S. adults — finds stark differences in views of the pandemic among primary watchers of Fox, CNN and MSNBC. For instance, far fewer Fox viewers correctly believe the virus originated in nature, and somewhat fewer accurately state that a vaccine will be available in a year or more.
But for our purposes here, this finding is striking:
The Fox News group stands out on another media evaluation question: whether the media have exaggerated the risks of the coronavirus outbreak. Roughly eight-in-ten (79 percent) of those whose main source is Fox News say the media slightly or greatly exaggerated the risk of the pandemic, with only 15 percent saying they got the risks about right.
That’s striking: Nearly eight in 10 in the Fox group say the media has exaggerated coronavirus risks. By contrast, only 35 percent in the MSNBC group say this, while 54 percent in the CNN group do — which is high, but not nearly comparable with the Fox group.
Jonathan Chait/New York:
Republicans: ‘Nobody Expected’ the Coronavirus Pandemic. So Joe Biden Is Nobody?
One example of a major Democrat who took this seriously would be Joe Biden, who, as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, is arguably the major Democrat. Biden wrote an op-ed on January 27 warning that Trump had left the country unprepared to handle the coronavirus outbreak, and proposing steps to counter it. One of his main advisers, Ron Klain, wrote an op-ed making similar points five days before that.
The primary defense made of Trump is to compare his laggard response against the straw-man alternative in which the only alternative was to close down everything three months ago. “Now we’re going to act as if politicians were negligent for failing to try to lock down the entire economy in early January?” writes Harsanyi mockingly. Obviously, there were numerous steps available short of a total lockdown. Indeed, the massive lockdown was only necessary because Trump failed to take any advance steps, like mobilizing an effective testing system, stockpiling masks and ventilators, and reconstituting some kind of structure to replace the pandemic response team he dismantled in 2018.
The “nobody could have known” defense memory-holes the fact that Democrats and Republicans were fiercely debating whether the government should be doing more in the very recent history. Trump’s stance, which he repeated constantly, was that the coronavirus had been contained, was likely to fizzle out, and would not be very harmful. The whole Republican position for weeks was that Democrats and the media were “doing everything they can to instill fear in people,” as Trump put it.