I guess Trump is going to run on a “Hey, 100,000 died, grandmas don’t count as people, and it’s a second Great Recession, but you can’t prove anyone could have done better, especially Clinton or Obama” platform. Good luck with that.
Hey, there’s Rona in the West Wing. Several key staffers are positive. 11 Secret Service members have it. Guess they regret not wearing masks in the WH.
So Steve Hahn in addition to staff for Trump, Pence and Ivanka.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
As the Crisis Worsens, Donald Trump Dithers
The president still shows no sense of urgency in dealing with the pandemic, and Senate Republicans are along for the ride.
The one thing Trump may have going for him is that most voters probably find it difficult to believe that the president isn’t working hard to solve either the public-health crisis or the economic disaster. But with the effects so obvious, that may not last for long.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Republicans now want us to embrace mass death
The message from President Trump and Republicans on the novel coronavirus has gone through multiple phases, each as misleading and/or bizarre as the last. First they told us the virus would barely touch us. Then they said it was serious but Trump’s management would quickly make it disappear. Then they said it could have been worse, and anyway it isn’t Trump’s fault.
Now they’re arriving at what may be the most appalling message of all:
Sure, hundreds of thousands of Americans may die. But suck it up, America: We’ve got to get the economy going.
WaPo:
Trump tightens grip on coronavirus information as he pushes to restart the economy
President Trump in recent weeks has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy and the rekindling of an economy that has been devastated by public health restrictions aimed at mitigating the outbreak.
Several Republican governors are following Trump’s lead as an effort takes shape to control the narrative about a pandemic that has continued to rage throughout a quickly reopening country. With polls showing most consumers still afraid to venture out of their homes, the Trump administration has intensified its efforts to soothe some of those fears through a messaging campaign that relies on tightly controlling information about a virus that has proven stubbornly difficult to contain.
The above is a policy that will not end well.
WaPo:
Who is Judy Mikovits in ‘Plandemic,’ the coronavirus conspiracy video just banned from social media?
When Judy Mikovits co-wrote a 2009 research paper that linked the mysterious condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome to a retrovirus that came from mice, thousands of sick patients hoping for relief rallied behind her. The scientific riddle was solved, they thought.
Less than two years later, those hopes were dashed when follow-up studies failed to replicate the findings and the respected journal “Science” retracted the paper. Researchers posited that the study’s inaccurate conclusions were the result of contamination of the lab samples, and the theory that a virus might be the source of the still-mysterious condition died.
But Mikovits’s conviction that her theory was correct, and her belief that the top scientific minds in the United States conspired to ruin her career, never faded.
She has now accused the scientific establishment of conspiracy again. In a film called “Plandemic,” and in a recently published book that topped the Amazon bestsellers chart this week, she makes a bizarre and false claim: that the doctors and experts shaping public policy in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic have silenced dissenting voices and misled the public for sinister reasons.
SMH (Australia):
'Genocide by default': America prepares for a brutal coronavirus slow burn
The US has successfully "flattened the curve" in the sense that it has avoided overwhelming its hospital system. But deaths remain stubbornly high: an average of 1780 people have died in the US from COVID-19 each day over the past week. That's down only slightly from the weekly average of 2154 when Trump released his re-opening guidelines.
In this regard, the US stands out from other hard-hit countries such as Italy and Spain which have relaxed their restrictions only after recording a significant reduction in cases and deaths over consecutive weeks.
"We haven't seen nationally really sustained declines that we expected, and we may not see it," Scott Gottlieb, Trump's former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said this week. "We still have a lot of infection."
David French/The Dispatch:
A Vigilante Killing in Georgia
The right to make a ‘citizen’s arrest’ isn’t a license to kill.
We will learn much more about this case before it’s over, and perhaps we’ll learn of exculpatory evidence not yet available in the public record. There is now a third district attorney in the case, and he’s punting the matter to a grand jury. That’s preferable to dropping the matter entirely, but probable cause exists to arrest the McMichaels, now. There is compelling evidence of their guilt.
ABC News:
Pompeo changes tune on Chinese lab's role in virus outbreak, as intel officials cast doubt
After telling ABC News there was "enormous evidence," he now says maybe not.
But in interviews Thursday, Pompeo shifted again, telling a conservative talk radio host, "There's evidence that it came from somewhere in the vicinity of the lab, but that could be wrong."
"We've seen evidence that it came from the lab. That may not be the case," he said in a second talk radio interview.