4.30 Trump: “I am not f**king losing to Joe Biden,”
4.28 Cuomo on Axios on HBO: “When we heard in December that China had a virus problem, and China said basically, ‘It was under control, don’t worry,’ we should’ve worried. . . . When China says, ‘Don’t worry, I have a fire in my backyard,’ you don’t hang up the phone and go back to sleep, right? You get out of your house and you walk two houses over to make sure I have the fire under control. Where was every other country walking out of their home to make sure China had it under control . . . I wish someone stood up and blew the bugle. And if no one was going to blow the bugle, I would feel much better if I was a bugle blower last December and January. … I would feel better sitting here today saying, ‘I blew the bugle about Wuhan province in January.’ I can’t say that.”
4.24 Cuomo: “We would need a federal law to allow states to declare bankruptcy. So go pass a law allowing states to declare bankruptcy and see if the president signs that bill. You want to send a signal to the markets that our nation is in real trouble? You want to send an international message that the nation is in turmoil? Then (sign that bill). It would be the first time in our nation’s history that this happened. I dare you to do it and see how many states take you up on it. I know I wouldn’t. If you have the courage of conviction, then pass that bill if you’re not just playing politics.”
4.23 McConnell: “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route. It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available. My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.”
4.23 Trump: “Suppose that we hit the body with tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that it hasn’t been checked and you’re going to test it. Suppose you can bring the light inside the body. Then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
4.22 Fauci: “We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that because of the degree of transmissibility that it has, the global nature. What happens with that will depend on how we’re able to contain it when it occurs. . . .I plead with the American public … although I know one has the need to leapfrog over things, don’t do that. This is a successful formula. The problem is if we don’t do that there is a likelihood that we will have a rebound. The one way to not reopen the economy is to have a rebound that we cannot take care of.”
4.17 The Times: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and President Trump had a heated public exchange over federal aid to New York on Friday, using their favored communication channels: Mr. Cuomo’s daily briefing and Mr. Trump’s Twitter account. Mr. Cuomo said at his briefing in Albany that New York could not fully reopen its economy without more widespread testing, which would require both supplies and an operational capacity that the health system did not currently have.
“Don’t give them this massive undertaking that has never been done before and then not give them any resources to do it,” Cuomo said at the briefing. “Don’t ask the states to do this. … It’s up to the governors, up to the governors, up to the governors. OK. Is there any funding so I can do these things that you want us to do? No. That is passing the buck without passing the bucks.”
Even before Mr. Cuomo had finished speaking, President Trump, who was apparently watching him, tweeted that the governor “should spend more time ‘doing’ and less time ‘complaining. Get out there and get the job done. Stop talking! We built you thousands of hospital beds that you didn’t need or use, gave large numbers of Ventilators that you should have had, and helped you with testing that you should be doing.” The president said that Mr. Cuomo had never thanked the federal government for its assistance.
Mr. Cuomo swatted down the criticism. “First of all, if he’s sitting home watching TV, maybe he should get up and go to work, right?” Mr. Cuomo said. “Second, let’s keep emotion and politics out of this, and personal ego if we can. Because this is about the people.”
Mr. Cuomo acknowledged that Mr. Trump had moved quickly to mobilize the resources to build a 2,500-bed field hospital in the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. He disputed the idea that the hospital had not been used, saying that 800 patients had been sent there.
The number of beds set up in the facility came from federal projections, Mr. Cuomo said, including the White House’s coronavirus task force.
Mr. Cuomo harnessed the power of his ever-present slide show to display a graphic of federal projections that showed even in a best-case scenario, the virus would kill at least 100,000 Americans. “They’re your projections, Mr. President,” Mr. Cuomo said. “If we were foolish for listening to you, then shame on us.”
“If you don’t agree with your projection, fire the head of the CDC, fire the White House coronavirus task force people because they did the projections,” said Cuomo, who moments later showed a memo that he said was written by Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who initially warned about the coronavirus outbreak in January, projecting it would infect millions of people. “Fire them all, that’s what I say. Fire them. You know the show the president did … You’re fired.”
Mr. Cuomo said that he had already repeatedly thanked the federal government for its assistance. ”I don’t know what I’m supposed to do — send a bouquet of flowers?” he asked. “Thank you again, Mr. President, for the Javits. Thank you for the U.S. Navy ship Comfort, which is just doing your job as president. It’s not really thank you like you wrote a check yourself, but thank you.”
Mr. Cuomo noted that the federal government was giving a $25 billion bailout to the airline industry and demanded the same treatment for states that are fighting the virus. “Why don’t you show as much consideration to states as you did to your big businesses and to your airlines?” he said.
Mr. Trump got in a last word, tweeting that Mr. Cuomo had “ridiculously” requested 40,000 ventilators when the state has so far needed far fewer. “State should have had them in stockpile!”
4.15 Kamala Harris: We have a president who has lied, who has minimized, who has tried to shift the blame instead of doing what real leadership does in a moment of crisis — which is embrace truth, speak truth no matter how difficult it may be to speak or hear, in a way that is intended to lift up the condition of the people and lift their spirits. But Donald Trump is incapable of any of that. So if there was any question of whether he, in a time of crisis, could be a leader, I think the question has been answered. And that answer is no.
4.13 Trump: “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. The governors know that.”
4.13 More than 10,000 New Yorkers have now been lost to the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo — though he said that the “worst is over” if the state stays the course.
4.13 Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast: I wish one of these geniuses pushing Donnie Two Scoops to reopen the economy on May 1 would ask him this one simple question. Do you want to be the president who, while seeking re-election, fucked up football season?
4.13 Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone: But as a communicator, in particular, Cuomo has risen to the occasion, proving especially adept at walking viewers through the nuances of the daily barrage of bad news, offering realistic glimmers of hope but never magical thinking. He’s shared personal anecdotes about his family, including his younger brother, Chris, the CNN anchor, who has tested positive for the coronavirus, and displayed a surprising degree of warmth and humor for someone who acknowledged in his own memoir that the Albany media referred to him, alternately, as the Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader. “Andrew has always had these two sides,” says Michael Shnayerson, author of The Contender, a 2015 biography of Cuomo. “One is charming and comes out in a time of crisis — he was brilliant during Superstorm Sandy, racing around the city late at night, checking each hot spot and earning the acclaim of people on either side of the aisle — but this is also a governor known for being brutal with underlings and ruthless with his rivals.”
4.13 Jane Mayer in The New Yorker: “[Republican consultant Stuart] Stevens believes that the conservatives who have acceded to Trump will pay a more lasting price. “Trump was the moral test, and the Republican Party failed,” Stevens said. “It’s an utter disaster for the long-term fate of the Party. The Party has become an obsession with power without purpose.” Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart conservative who has become a leading Trump critic, describes McConnell as “a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump.” Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. “Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,” Kristol said. McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories. McConnell has also brought along the Party’s financial backers. “There’s been too much focus on the base, and not enough on business leaders, big donors, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page,” Kristol said, adding, “The Trump base would be there anyway, but the élites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead McConnell has kept the trains running.”
4.12 Anthony Fauci on CNN’s “State Of The Union”: “As I’ve said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it’s not. But it is what it is. We are where we are right now.” Host Jake Tapper asked whether lives could have been saved if social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders had been announced earlier. “It’s very difficult to go back and say that. I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. Obviously, if we had right from the beginning shut everything down it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.” Reportedly Fauci recommended that Trump issue guidelines as early as Feb. 2.
4.12 AP: By the time President Donald Trump first spoke publicly about the coronavirus, it may already have been too late. Interviewed at Davos, a gathering of global elites in the Swiss Alps, the president on Jan. 22 played down the threat posed by the respiratory virus from China, which had just reached American shores in the form of a solitary patient in Washington state. “We have it totally under control,” Trump said on CNBC. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” In the 11 weeks since that interview, the coronavirus has reached every corner of the globe. It has infected more than 500,000 Americans and killed at least 20,000. It has rewritten the rules of society, isolated people in their homes, closed schools, devastated the economy and put millions out of work. When Trump spoke in Switzerland, weeks’ worth of warning signs already had been raised. In the ensuing month, before the president first addressed the crisis from the White House, key steps to prepare the nation for the coming pandemic were not taken. Life-saving medical equipment was not stockpiled. Travel largely continued unabated. Vital public health data from China was not provided or was deemed untrustworthy. A White House riven by rivalries and turnover was slow to act. Urgent warnings were ignored by a president consumed by his impeachment trial and intent on protecting a robust economy that he viewed as central to his reelection chances.
4.12 The New York Times: Dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
- The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
- Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
- The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
- Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
- By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles. He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.
4.11 Michael Specter on Anthony Fauci in The New Yorker: “He once explained to me that he has developed a method for dealing with political leaders in times of crisis: “I go to my favorite book of philosophy, ‘The Godfather,’ and say, ‘It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.'” He continued, “You just have a job to do. Even when somebody’s acting ridiculous, you can’t chide them for it. You’ve got to deal with them. Because if you don’t deal with them, then you’re out of the picture.” …He learned the value of candor early. “Some wise person who used to be in the White House, in the Nixon Administration, told me a very interesting dictum to live by,” he told me in 2016 … “He said, ‘When you go into the White House, you should be prepared that that is the last time you will ever go in. Because if you go in saying, I’m going to tell somebody something they want to hear, then you’ve shot yourself in the foot.’ Now everybody knows I’m going to tell them exactly what’s the truth.” …When dealing with politicians, he told me, he relies on the pseudo-Latin expression Illegitimi non carborundum: Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
4.11 Axios:
America is facing what feels like a Darwinian moment where the strong in business, wealth and health are more likely to survive, while many others will sadly wither.
- Many of the people who are disproportionately hurt by the virus have the least control over or say in the system.
Why it matters: The pandemic is exposing — and deepening — many of the nation’s great divides. Sadly, it’s predominantly the old — and the previously or already ill — who are getting hit the hardest.
- As we told you in last week’s Deep Dive, it’s exposed long-standing health care inequities and communities of color and low-income families are bearing the brunt.
- All week, we saw a stream of new data showing a shockingly disproportionate toll among African Americans.
But the imbalance transcends demographics:
- Those without health insurance are less likely to get tested or seek treatment, increasing their mortality rate.
- Those with weak governors or mayors, slow to react or stubborn to face reality, will suffer and die from belated social distancing and stay-at-home mandates.
- Those with strong health and immune systems are likelier to survive. Here, as in Italy, it is likely those who develop the strong antibody that defeats the virus will be first back to work and to return to normal life.
The Darwinian dynamic feels especially acute for business. Millions of companies and jobs will be wiped away, with mainly the strong — or well connected — able to hang on.
- Those companies with strong connections and lobbyists will get bailouts to stay alive.
- Those smaller businesses with good connections to bankswill be first in line for government money to stay afloat.
- Those with strong balance sheets — and not inflated paper value or hype — will thrive and attract more emergency capital from investors.
- Those mom and pop shops with good local businesses but thin margins will struggle mightily and many will go under without substantial aid delivered quickly. The hourly workers who make them possible will suffer, too.
- Those workers who can easily transition to remote work will be fine. Those in blue collar jobs that can only be done in person are not only more vulnerable to the virus but also losing their jobs and insurance.
The bottom line: As with so much in American life, the coronavirus draws out the sharp divides between the nation’s haves, and have nots, as who you are, who you know and where you live can make the difference in everything, including life and death.
4.11 Gov. Cuomo, quoting Churchill: “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning.”
4.11 Axios: Social distancing is workign:
Leading coronavirus modeling has recently lowered its projection for the number of American deaths, a sign that social distancing is working.
- Yes, but: If we stop social distancing too early, or don’t take the right precautions to prevent future outbreaks, the number of projected deaths could jump right back up.
- Go deeper: “Coronavirus: ‘Deadly resurgence’ if curbs lifted too early, WHO warns.” (via BBC)
4.10 Dana Milbank in the Post: What you see today is your government, drowning — a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done, that couldn’t produce enough ventilators for the sick or even enough face masks and gowns for health-care workers. Now it is time to drown this disastrous philosophy in the bathtub — and with it the poisonous attitude that the government is a harmful “beast” that must be “starved.” It is not an exaggeration to say that this ideology caused the current debacle with a deliberate strategy to sabotage government. Overall, entitlement programs continued to grow, and the Pentagon’s many friends protected its budget. And Trump has abandoned responsible budgeting. But in one area, the tea party types, with their sequesters, debt-limit standoffs and other austerity schemes, did all too well. Between 2011 and 2018, nondefense discretionary spending fell by 12 percent — and, with it, the government’s already iffy ability to prevent and ameliorate public health emergencies unraveled.
4.10 Pico Iyer in the Post: “All of us are most concerned about those without homes or resources and the ill. But for those of us lucky enough to be safe, so far, and maybe to have jobs to return to, or roofs over our head, I think it offers us a perfect chance to think about what really sustains us.” A crisis like this, can provide a moment of clarity on what really ails us. “My sense is that many of us have been living out of balance in recent years, with much more data than we have time to make sense of, with much more distraction than can ever make us happy, and with so much clutter in our heads or in our calendars that we can’t lay our hands on what is most essential.”
4.8 Sanders withdraws. “I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign which I could not win and which would interfere with the important work required by all of us in this difficult hour.”
4.7 John Prine dies at 73.
4.7 Trump: “The cases really didn’t build up for a while, but you have to understand, I’m a cheerleader for this country. I don’t want to create havoc and shock and everything else. But ultimately, when I was saying that, I’m also closing it down. I obviously was concerned about it.”
4.6 Trump insults Jonathan Karl. “You are a third-rate reporter and what you just said is a disgrace, okay? You will never make it.”
4.6 New York Times: News organizations invest heavily to build belief in their brands. That’s why CNN calls itself “The Most Trusted Name in News.” But at a moment when celebrities and social media figures seem to be connecting with Americans better than faceless brands, two brothers who share corny jokes and coronavirus fears are turning the “Cuomo” name into its own source of trust. “You get trust from authenticity and relatability and vulnerability,” CNN’s Jeff Zucker told me. “That’s what the brothers Cuomo are giving us right now.”
4.5 Queen Elizabeth II: Together we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it. I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge, and those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any, that the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humored resolve, and of fellow feeling still characterize this country. The pride in who we are is not a part of our past, it defines our present and our future. . . .While we have faced challenges before, this one is different. This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavor. Using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us. We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.
4.5 Surgeon General Jerome Adams On Meet the Press: “The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, it’s going to be our 9/11 moment, it’s going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives. And we really need to understand that if we want to flatten that curve and get through to the other side, everyone needs to do their part. . . .Ninety percent of Americans are doing their part, even in the states where they haven’t had a shelter-in-place. But If you can’t give us 30 days, governors, give us a week, give us what you can so that we don’t overwhelm our health care systems over this next week, and then let’s reassess.. . . We are always telling people we would rather prevent disease than treat disease. I tell people we aren’t going to treat or supply our way out of this problem, there is no magic bullet or magic cure. It’s good old-fashioned public health and prevention.”
4.4. The Washington Post: By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary. Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation. It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus. The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.
4.4 Henry Kissinger in the Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. must protect its citizens from disease while starting the urgent work of planning for a new epoch. . . .Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. …The U.S. administration has done a solid job in avoiding immediate catastrophe. The ultimate test will be whether the virus’s spread can be arrested and then reversed in a manner and at a scale that maintains public confidence in Americans’ ability to govern themselves. . . .The crisis effort, however vast and necessary, must not crowd out the urgent task of launching a parallel enterprise for the transition to the post-coronavirus order. . . .Leaders are dealing with the crisis on a largely national basis, but the virus’s society-dissolving effects do not recognize borders. While the assault on human health will — hopefully — be temporary, the political and economic upheaval it has unleashed could last for generations.A global retreat … will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. …We went on from the Battle of the Bulge [1944-45] into a world of growing prosperity and enhanced human dignity. Now, we live an epochal period. The historic challenge for leaders is to manage the crisis while building the future. Failure could set the world on fire.”
4.4 Axios: 47% of the foreign-born population that arrived in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 had a bachelor’s degree or higher. We’ve reported this before, but reminding you: Immigration from Latin America has been declining for more than a decade. Until 2008, Mexico was the greatest source of new immigrants in the U.S. Now, China and India are the largest “source countries.” In fact, in the past several years, more Mexicans living in the U.S. went back than came north across the border. Why it’s happening: Plummeting fertility rates in Mexico starting two decades ago shrunk the number of young job-seekers who would have headed north to the U.S.
4.3 Max Boot in the Washington Post: “He made the right choice, and the Navy will back him up.” So wrote retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former carrier strike group commander and former supreme allied commander of NATO, about Capt. Brett Crozier, the skipper who had sent out an SOS about the spread of the coronavirus on his ship, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. Stavridis’s article appeared on Wednesday in Bloomberg Opinion. The next day, Crozier was relieved of duty by acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly. The U.S. government was fatally ill-prepared for the spread of a pandemic that has killed more Americans over the past month than died in Iraq over the past 17 years. The military could have done more to help but, like other government agencies, it was slow to act. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has come under fire for failing to cancel business as usual even as the virus spreads through the ranks. Esper joined President Trump on Wednesday in announcing an enhanced counter-drug effort when all possible resources should be focused on fighting covid-19. Even the Pentagon’s high-profile deployment of a hospital ship to New York has backfired: Local leaders are irate that the 1,000-bed ship has reportedly accepted only 20 patients. But the only official in the entire government who has been publicly disciplined to date for mishandling the coronavirus is a Navy officer who acted to save his crew from an outbreak. This makes no sense save in the upside-down moral universe inhabited by the Trump administration.
4.3 ‘Captain Crozier!’: Sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt gave Navy Capt. Brett Crozier a raucous farewell April 3, hours after he was dismissed over a coronavirus letter.
4.3 Michelle Goldberg in the Times: “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
4.2 James Kwak in Baseline Scenario: The vague parallels between COVID-19 and September 11 have been drawn a million times already. Then the heroes were first responders who risked their lives to save people. They were also underpaid, but at least many of them knowingly took jobs that involved risk. The people on the front lines today are doctors and nurses, of course, but also millions of low-wage workers (including many in hospitals) who have been drafted into this war and are kept there by poverty and economic insecurity. Is this the society we want?
4.2 More than 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week — a record — as political and public health leaders put the economy in a deep freeze