Things are bad but getting better in some areas, not so much in others. 6 million more people out of work. Areas outside of NYC getting slammed. And then there’s the politics.
NY Times:
Trump Keeps Talking. Some Republicans Don’t Like What They’re Hearing.
Aides and allies increasingly believe the president’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, and are urging him to let his medical experts take center stage.
The consternation reflects a new sense of urgency over Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts as Joseph R. Biden Jr. emerges as his likely Democratic challenger. Three new polls this week show Mr. Biden leading the president, and the Trump campaign’s internal surveys show he has mostly lost the initial bump he received early in the crisis, according to three people briefed on the numbers. Public polls show he badly trails the nation’s governors and his own medical experts in terms of whom Americans trust most for guidance.
“I told him your opponent is no longer Joe Biden — it’s this virus,” Mr. Graham said.
One of Mr. Trump’s top political advisers, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to anger the president, was even blunter, arguing that the White House was handing Mr. Biden ammunition each night by sending the president out to the cameras.
Sahil Kapur/NBC:
Trump approval dips as Americans question his handling of coronavirus crisis
After rising to some of the highest levels of his presidency, Donald Trump's approval ratings have leveled off in recent surveys.
After seeing a late-March spike as the pandemic ravaged the United States, his approval ratings have fallen back to the mid-40 percent range, where they were before the death toll and jobless claims exploded. The figure dovetails surveys showing the president narrowly trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, who this week became the apparent Democratic nominee to face him in November.
The latest numbers suggest the surge in job approval ratings that presidents tend to enjoy during a crisis was modest and short-lived for Trump. New polls this week by Quinnipiac, Reuters and CNN all find disapproval of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus rising to a majority of Americans.
It’s a reversal of fortune for a president who benefits from a committed minority of supporters but has never quite managed to win over a majority of the country. And it comes after his spike in approval had significantly lagged U.S. governors and world leaders, as well as previous American presidents during a crisis or a war.
Of course, if you follow me, this is no surprise to you.
WaPo:
A leading model now estimates tens of thousands fewer covid-19 deaths by summer
Good news — that carries asterisks
“Models are as good as the assumptions you put into them, and as we get more data, then you put it in and that might change,” he said. That point was soon reinforced, with the IHME estimate shifting upward soon after the White House briefing.
Late Tuesday night, however, the IHME estimate shifted in the other direction. While the model last week projected nearly 94,000 deaths by late summer, its new estimate puts the toll by August at 60,400 — a decline of 26 percent from the model’s previous estimate.
Kurt Bardella/USA Today:
Oversight erased, Supreme Court hijacked: Trump turns the presidency into a dictatorship
Trump has stripped away the levers of independent oversight until there's nothing left. Our democracy is in the midst of a three-alarm fire.
The irony here is that Republicans once cautioned about this exact thing before Trump infected them and they abandoned every principle they once proclaimed to stand for. There was a time when oversight over massive government spending was the centerpiece of the Republican oversight agenda. My former boss and House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa actually declared that “This money, at the American people’s expense, going through the hands of political leaders, in in fact corrupting the process.” He literally called the Obama administration “the most corrupt government in history.” Where are those Republicans now?
Biden leads by 11 (!) in the CNN poll.
Elie Mystal The Nation (March):
Trump Won’t Steal the Election, but Your Governor Might
There are lots of ways to prevent people from voting besides canceling the election, and the coronavirus provides the perfect excuse.
In fact, even if Trump or coronavirus concerns somehow prevail upon Congress to move the date, the worst that can happen is that the election will be temporarily postponed, not canceled. The election still has to happen before January 20, 2021. That’s because the Constitution requires that the current president’s term end by that date. We have to have a new, duly elected administration, even if it’s Trump’s second administration, by 1/20/21. We have to elect a new Congress. There is no constitutional mechanism for having a “provisional” government. Either we have an election before January 20, or we don’t have a government—we have a military dictatorship.
Unless Trump has the military on board for a full-on coup d’état, he simply doesn’t have the legislative or constitutional authority to escape from his reckoning with the American people.
We are going to have an election. Unfortunately, just because we have an election doesn’t mean everybody will be allowed to vote in that election. If an election happens but nobody is around to vote because they’re all quarantined, does it still count? The biggest danger to our democracy is not that our election will be postponed but that access to that election will be restricted only to the people who are likely to vote for Donald Trump.
John F Harris/Politico:
Bernie’s Legacy Hangs in the Balance
Will his ideas outlive his candidacy? A lot will depend on how he and his supporters handle the next few months.
The first factor is how effectively Sanders navigates the complexities of 2020 politics. In a grudging mood, Sanders could signal to his supporters that former Vice President Joe Biden isn’t that bad, compared with the alternative of Donald Trump. It would be quite a different thing to argue that a Biden presidency would be affirmatively good—a step, even if more tentative than Sanders would wish, toward advancing a transformative progressive agenda.
But robust words of support would flow from the tongue more convincingly if Sanders actually believes them. An essential part of Sanders’ appeal to supporters is that he doesn’t traffic in conventional political bull. Appraisals of his remarkable-but-losing campaign will hinge in part on finding a credible spot on the spectrum between phony and spoilsport.
Sanders’ long-term reputation, however, will hinge even more on something he can’t dictate: What happens to the young activists whom he energized with his cranky manner and democratic socialist agenda?
George McGovern, another movement politician, was routed in his effort to become president in 1972 but people immersed in that campaign—from Gary Hart to Bill and Hillary Clinton—were dominant figures in American politics for the next 45 years.
“A lot will depend on what he does now,” Hart said in an interview from self-isolation in his mountainside home in Colorado.
Dave A Hopkins/Honest Graft:
Sanders Was a Big Step Forward for Leftism—But Where Does It Go From Here?
Sanders also introduced new or long-absent policy positions into the realm of public debate. Whether or not student debt forgiveness, a federal jobs guarantee, or six months of paid family leave are ever implemented in the United States, the necessary first step toward enactment is for a candidate to build a campaign around them. A political journalistic class that does not naturally welcome discussions of economic inequality and fairness has been compelled by Sanders's campaigns to acknowledge these subjects to a much greater degree than it did in preceding decades.
But Sanders also exposed some of the continued political weakness of American leftism even in a moment of relative triumph, so it's worth considering what else would need to happen for his candidacies to become the start of a larger revolution (as it were). Simply pointing at the age distribution of Sanders's support and claiming that the left wing can just wait to inherit the Democratic Party from its more moderate elders isn't very convincing. At any given historical moment, lefties can be prone to assuming that the enthusiasm of youthful activists for their cause is a sign that popular victory is just around the generational corner, but it's worth considering how many baby boomers who were marching in the streets in the 1960s and 1970s aged to become supporters of Joe Biden—or, for that matter, of Donald Trump.
While Sanders did much to promote the idea that left-wing politics could be productively advanced within the institutional framework of the Democratic Party, he did not entirely resolve—and, in some ways, even exacerbated—the tension between corners of the activist left and the party as it now exists. Sanders's refusal to officially become a Democrat himself, combined with his rhetorical attacks on the "Democratic establishment," meant that he couldn't speak of the party as a "we" rather than a "they," which contrasted with other leaders (such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) whose policy views overlap with Sanders but who present themselves as heirs to the left's lineage within the Democratic Party rather than outside it.
Here’s an issue that plays out so many ways: a crook is a crook and doesn’t have your best interests at heart. From Denver ABC 7:
Longtime JBS meat plant worker dies of coronavirus; first death related to Greeley facility
Daughter blames failures by JBS executives to protect workers
These are the Trump allies. They are no better than he is.