Having spent February ignoring the bounty Russians placed on American troops, as well as ignoring warning signs about a pandemic now raging in the South and Southwest, Trump is going to reap what he has sown in June.
Axios:
Florida is "not going back" on reopening, governor says
Where it stands: Florida's current phase of reopening does not put a limit on how many visitors can be in stores or gyms and allows bars to serve half as many guests as they normally would, although the state has suspended on-premises consumption of alcohol at bars. Social distancing is encouraged at all businesses.
- Daily fatalities reported in the state have declined since last Thursday, per the state's health department. Florida recorded its highest daily increase in coronavirus infections last Friday.
- The state has reported over 3,500 deaths, more than 14,500 hospitalizations and over 152,00 confirmed cases.
Doesn’t matter what he says now. You’ll do what the virus forces you to do.
Carl Bergstrom/twitter:
People often complain that I'm looking at cases instead of some other metric: hospitalizations, deaths, contestants on the Bachelor who test antibody positive, whatever.
"Positive cases are determined by testing."
"You can't compare April to June."
"Deaths are what matter."
I look at cases for two primary reasons.
1) They are a leading indicator. Deaths lag cases by 2-3 weeks, at which point it's too late.
2) Cases are the causal drivers of new cases. Cases now are the best predictor of cases in a week.
It's true that changes in testing make it difficult to directly compare case numbers between early April and late June.
But that's not what I'm interested in. I don't all that much care whether we're above the peak of the initial spike. What I care about is where we are going.
James Fallows/Atlantic:
The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything
Imagine if the National Transportation Safety Board investigated America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
It is a challenge that the United States did not meet. During the past two months, I have had lengthy conversations with some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials—all of them people with firsthand knowledge of what our response to the coronavirus pandemic should have been, could have been, and actually was. The government officials had served or are still serving in the uniformed military, on the White House staff, or in other executive departments, and in various intelligence agencies. Some spoke on condition of anonymity, given their official roles. As I continued these conversations, the people I talked with had noticeably different moods. First, in March and April, they were astonished and puzzled about what had happened. Eventually, in May and June, they were enraged. “The president kept a cruise ship from landing in California, because he didn’t want ‘his numbers’ to go up,” a former senior government official told me. He was referring to Donald Trump’s comment, in early March, that he didn’t want infected passengers on the cruise ship Grand Princess to come ashore, because “I like the numbers being where they are.” Trump didn’t try to write this comment off as a “joke,” his go-to defense when his remarks cause outrage, including his June 20 comment in Tulsa that he’d told medical officials to “slow the testing down, please” in order to keep the reported-case level low. But the evidence shows that he has been deadly earnest about denying the threat of COVID-19, and delaying action against it.
Bill Scher/Real Clear Politics:
To Win, Trump Needs the Greatest Comeback of All Time
If the polls are real, should Trump really be all that worried? After all, it’s only late June. A lot can happen in four months, right?
Let me put it this way: In the history of presidential election polling, no elected incumbent president has ever come back from as big a hole as Trump is now in.
Only two elected incumbents have ever come back at all.
WaPo:
Biden says Trump ‘failed’ Americans in his response to coronavirus
In the hours after the interview aired, questions swirled within his inner circle about whether his heart was truly in it when it comes to seeking reelection.
Trump has time to rebound, and the political environment could improve for him. But interviews with more than a half-dozen people close to the president depicted a reelection effort badly in need of direction — and an unfocused candidate who repeatedly undermines himself.
“Under the current trajectory, President Trump is on the precipice of one of the worst electoral defeats in modern presidential elections and the worst historically for an incumbent president,” said former Trump political adviser Sam Nunberg, who remains a supporter.
Nunberg pointed to national polls released by CNBC and New York Times/Siena over the past week showing Trump receiving below 40 percent against Biden.
If Trump's numbers erode to 35 percentage points over the next two weeks, Nunberg added, “He’s going to be facing realistically a 400-plus electoral vote loss and the president would need to strongly reconsider whether he wants to continue to run as the Republican presidential nominee.”
Politico:
Voters in deep-red Oklahoma weigh Medicaid expansion as virus cases climb
A ballot measure on Tuesday, if successful, could also set back Trump's efforts to block grant Medicaid.
If voters approve a ballot measure on Tuesday, Oklahoma would become the first state to broadly expand government-backed health insurance to many of its poorest residents since the beginning of a pandemic that has stripped many people of coverage. At the same time, that could scuttle the Trump administration’s efforts to make Oklahoma a test case for its plan to transform the entitlement program into a block grant.
Politico:
A Sun Belt time bomb threatens Trump’s reelection
Rising Covid-19 caseloads in Florida, Arizona and Texas raise fresh doubts about the president's reelection prospects.
It’s hard to overstate the gravity of the situation for Trump: Lose any one of the three states, and his reelection is all but doomed.
Liberal outside groups and the Biden campaign have launched digital and TV ads in Florida, Arizona and Texas hitting Trump for allowing a second wave of coronavirus. The developments have buttressed Biden’s main argument against Trump: that he’s incapable of bringing stability or healing in a time of crisis.
Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden, said Trump’s actions have only exacerbated Republicans’ vulnerabilities in the three states. Polls indicate Florida is Biden’s best pickup opportunity, followed by Arizona and then Texas, a bigger reach.
“The reality is, when it comes to this president’s handling of the pandemic and the subsequent economic disaster that’s befallen our country — which was totally predictable coming out of the pandemic and his handling of it — Trump’s failed leadership has been exposed in a profound way,” Dunn told POLITICO. She added that it “makes him abnormally vulnerable in states that have not traditionally been as competitive as they are now.”
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump allies are sounding the alarm. But their warnings won’t help him.
One key attack line the Trump campaign has settled on, Politico notes, is to portray Biden as “beholden to liberals who want to do away with law and order.”
As my colleague Paul Waldman argues, this won’t work, because Biden prevailed in a primary that positioned him as the moderate alternative to left-leaning candidates.
But there’s an additional layer of absurdity here. These attacks on Biden’s supposed inability to restore law and order are also meant to portray him as too weak to control radical elements in the Democratic Party, irrespective of his personal ideological convictions.