David Lauter/LA Times with a CA based story that might have national implications:
Trump’s base starting to erode, new poll shows
Biden leads Trump in California by 39 percentage points, 67% to 28%, the poll found. That’s 9 points larger than the margin by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump statewide in 2016 — a record at the time. And the share of Californians who approve of Trump’s performance in office, which has held steady in the mid-to-low 30% range for nearly his entire tenure, has now ticked downward to just 29%.
...
Aides to both candidates believe the biggest factor in Trump’s decline is voters’ fear of the coronavirus and belief that the administration has botched its handling of the pandemic. The poll provides further evidence of that.
Internal poll. But 👀.
Tim Miller/The Bulwark:
Trump’s Unreality Forcefield
A new interview makes clear that the president is unwilling or unable to understand the threat of the pandemic.
During the Obama years, Republican politicians and conservative pundits obsessed over President Obama’s unwillingness to say three magic words: radical Islamic terrorism. It was a phrase that launched a million think pieces and cable segments and hackneyed applause lines from presidential hopefuls.
As Donald Trump came to reveal, for many Republicans these magic words were little more than a stand-in for their desire to hear “Brown People Bad.” But in polite company a more sophisticated argument was proffered. The logic was that a president cannot defeat a foe that he is unable to recognize. And if the president won’t say that our foe is radical Islam then he doesn’t really know who the foe is or what the scale of the threat is and thus will be unable to defeat it.
In the case of Obama and radical Islamic terrorism, that argument was largely hogwash. Obama did know the foe but he had separate concerns—concerns that, given his successor, we now know many of us on the right should’ve taken much more seriously—about the demonization of Islam.
But here’s the thing: The logic of the argument was sound, if inapt, and it very much applies to President Trump’s handling of COVID-19, in ways that were on full display yesterday, in his tweets and in a long-awaited interview with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan that was released in full.
They all show that President Trump is fundamentally incapable of recognizing the true nature of what he calls the “invisible enemy.”
Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:
Who, in 2020, is a “Good Republican”?
David French, the Lincoln Project, and the Trump-critical conservative’s dilemma
George Will, the Lincoln Project, and the rest of the “burn it down” caucus have an idea how to change their recently former (and possibly future) party: make it lose elections.
Most politicians and political operatives want power. If Republicans lose — badly, and if necessary, repeatedly — they’ll come to see Trumpism as an electoral liability, not asset, and elevate candidates who reject it.
Loyal partisans, such as Washington Examiner editor Jay Caruso, accuse the burn-it-downers of enabling progressive policies. But as Lincoln Project advisor Tom Nichols argues, they know electing Democrats means they’ll get policies they don’t like. Nevertheless, they believe core principles of American Constitutional democracy — we are a nation of laws, not of men; we’re bonded by ideals, not blood and soil; the legislature legitimately checks and balances the executive — outweigh any particular policy, and will sacrifice the latter to defend the former. ...
Opposing not just Trump, but the Republican Party (as long as it remains Trumpist) requires more sacrifice from conservatives who prioritize social issues than those who focus on foreign policy. But that leaves a crucial question hanging: where’s your line?
Ed Yong/The Atlantic:
How the Pandemic Defeated America
A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic…
This was predictable. A president who is fixated on an ineffectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vectors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a first resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xenophobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea.
And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining COVID‑19. Although the disease first arrived in the U.S. in mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.
Hard to summarize, must read from Ed Yong.
The Economist:
The geometry of the pandemic in America
Even modest changes in behaviour can cause huge rises in coronavirus infections
The explanation for the pattern of American infections lies in something of central importance to the spread of a virus: geometric progression, such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. If one person infects two, two infect four and so on. Unless the rate of infection is driven down by reducing contacts, any geometric increase quickly balloons: 256, 512, 1,024. This is the lesson of the inventor of chess, who in legend asked, as a reward, for one grain of rice on the first square and twice as many on each successive square. There was not enough rice in India to pay his reward. That is one explanation for America’s explosively rising caseload. With almost 4m infections, the country is on square 23.
Some notable pieces on religion and politics and race:
Politico:
Trump’s assault on mail voting threatens his reelection bid
The president's comments have made his base distrustful of mail voting ahead of an election that may hinge on turnout by mail.
Donald Trump’s all-out war on mail voting is backfiring in battleground states.
New private polling shared first with POLITICO showed that Republicans have become overwhelmingly concerned about mail balloting, which Trump has claimed without evidence, will lead to widespread voter fraud. A potentially decisive slice of Trump’s battleground-state base — 15 percent of Trump voters in Florida, 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 10 percent in Michigan — said that getting a ballot in the mail would make them less likely to vote in November.