Phase II of Donald Trump's plan to inflict maximal coronavirus carnage on the country is commencing, and now's the perfect time to cut off public access to any tiny shreds of reality they might glean from the White House's beleaguered coronavirus task force. Thus, the White House plans to "wind down the operation in coming weeks," according to The New York Times.
The impetus for such a cessation is clearly twofold: 1.) the pandemic continues to ravage the nation with no end in sight at precisely the moment when Trump is insisting on reopening the country, an inconvenient truth the White House is surely desperate to hide; and 2.) Trump's performances at the daily briefings proved disastrous for his approval ratings, so halting them both relieves him of the irresistible temptation to appear while ending the possibility that any substantive material might make its way to the public in his absence. After all, if Trump can't use the briefings to feed his insatiable hunger for attention and self-aggrandizement, why even have them?
As the crisis starts to recede a bit in New York, the pandemic is currently nestling into the very areas of the country that are beginning to ease their social distancing measures. We know this because although the daily death toll is decreasing in New York, the country as a whole has continued to clear 1,000 deaths per day for more than a month straight. One model circulating in the administration put forth the possibility that the daily death toll could spike to 3,000 per day by month's end as many states start to ease their social distancing measures.
The White House may never formally announce the task force's demise because, frankly, how could one possibly explain ending it smack dab in the middle of the nation's deadliest public health crisis in a century? Better to just let it sail off into the night sky in hopes that, with time, no one will even remember it ever existed. Whatever the task force's limits—and they were profuse—occasional moments of truth did manage to escape from them, usually via the medical experts like Drs. Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx. Now, the public will no longer have any centralized hub around which to organize a national response, however inadequate it was. Nothing. Nada. Zip. At least publicly.
The Times reports that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner will likely continue to operate his "shadow task force." You are forgiven if you didn't know any such group existed—it was filled with volunteers who had no expertise in the task at hand and has achieved effectively zero successes.
Anyway, the White House is finally just surrendering any intention whatsoever of trying to combat the coronavirus. Time to just let it run rampant as Trump leads the country to slaughter.