At The Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman and Will Sommer look at Rep. John Ratcliffe, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence:
Ratcliffe’s official, verified campaign Twitter account follows several accounts on the political fringe, including a 9/11 truther account with just one follower besides himself and four promoting the outlandish QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that the world is run by a cabal of Democratic pedophile-cannibals—and has been ruled a potential source of domestic terrorism by the FBI. [...]
Veteran intelligence officials expressed alarm that the Senate may soon confirm a Trump loyalist atop the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies. “Ratcliffe would be the least qualified person to run the intelligence community, ever, and that includes Ric Grenell,” said former CIA and National Counterterrorism Center analyst Aki Peritz, referring to the acting director of national intelligence. “The hardest job for any intelligence officer is to speak truth to power. Based on Ratcliffe’s past performance, it’s doubtful he can resist the urge to politicize intelligence on behalf of Donald Trump.”
At Rolling Stone, Tim Miller profiles new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who has already proven to fit right in with the most dishonest administration in history:
UNLIKE MOST OF HER PREDECESSORS as White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany didn’t come to the job with a background as a reporter or a career press secretary. She never had a prominent role in a political campaign or in government. Instead she is the first of a new type of press secretary, one that if current trends are any indication we will have to get used to. She blazed the path to the podium on the back of her experience as an internet troll turned cable news pundit. (Fun fact: McEnany was rejected by Fox before getting scooped up by CNN’s Jeff Zucker who was looking for a new “character in a drama” — his words — who was willing to defend Donald Trump on the network. And what a character she has become).
In this way, and others, her elevation mirrors that of her boss.
Ryan Cooper at The Week says it looks like most officials are pursuing herd immunity when it comes to the coronavirus, and the Trump administration is just fine with the number of people that strategy endangers:
Officials could be pursuing a different strategy to defeat the virus: herd immunity. If roughly two-thirds of the population contracts the virus (and if the resulting antibodies are both universal and long-lasting, which is not at all clear), then statistically the virus will not find enough new victims to perpetuate itself, and will eventually die out. The New York Times reports that even as Trump urges states to re-open, his own analysts behind the scenes are predicting 200,000 daily new cases and 3,000 deaths per day by the end of June — which is what someone pursing a herd immunity strategy would do. The problem is that, as scientists Carl T. Bergstrom and Natalie Dean explain in the Times, it will take months for the statistics to shake out, and the eventual infection rate will rise well past two-thirds — likely about 80-90 percent. With a U.S. population of about 330 million and the most recent estimates of infection fatality rate of about 1 percent, that means something like 2.6 to 3 million Americans dying.
On a final note, don’t miss The Washington Post’s editorial calling for more aid to the states:
WE ARE asking an extraordinary amount from state and local governments in the next stage of the pandemic. The onus is on them to scale up testing and contact tracing. Governors will make the crucial decisions over when and how to reopen their states. And state and local governments have primary jurisdiction over managing some of the most devastating fallouts of the pandemic — including school closures, which will have lasting impacts on a generation of students.
That’s why congressional Democrats are right to be pressing for additional aid to states and localities in the next round of coronavirus legislation.