3.31 Howard Stern on Sirius XM: “Do I pull my hair out of my head when I see my buddy Donald Trump standing there talking about how can people not look at his ratings and his ratings are higher than ‘The Bachelor?The reason his ratings are higher is “because people are scared shitless. It’s because we’re in crisis and we’re tuning in to see what the president has to say. We’re looking for leadership, motherfuckers! . . . .I can honestly tell you that Donald doesn’t give one shit about public service. But I’m not angry with Donald. Donald is who Donald is, and he’s not going to change.”
3.31 Mitch McConnell: “[The coronavirus] came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment.” 3.31 Trump, at the press conference. “I want to give people a feeling of hope. I could be very negative. I could say ‘wait a minute, those numbers are terrible. This is going to be horrible. Well, this is really easy to be negative about, but I want to give people hope, too. You know, I’m a cheerleader for the country.” Jim Acosta of CNN: “So you knew it was going to be this severe when you were saying this was under control?” Trump: “I thought it could be. I knew everything. I knew it could be horrible, and I knew it could be maybe good. Don’t forget, at that time, people didn’t know that much about it, even the experts. We were talking about it. We didn’t know where it was going. We saw China but that was it. Maybe it would have stopped at China.”
3.31 At his daily briefing, Trump told the country to prepare for bad news. Sharing harrowing data about how many Americans they expect to die of the novel coronavirus, Trump warned that we should expect an estimated 100,000 to 240,000 deaths over the next few months. And that’s the best-case scenario, if Americans stay in their homes and avoid interactions as much as possible. “They’re very sobering, when you see 100,000 people — and that’s a minimum number,” Trump said. “This could be a hell of a bad two weeks and maybe even three weeks. This is going to be three weeks like we haven’t seen before.” Fox News’s John Roberts put that in perspective: So far, nearly 4,000 Americans have died. That means more than 90,000 people could die of the virus over the next few months or maybe weeks. At least.
“There is no magic bullet,” Deborah Birx, head of the White House coronavirus task force, emphasized. “There’s no magic vaccine. It’s behaviors.”
3.31 The New York Times: “If crises tend to amplify and accentuate the most essential tics and instincts of elected leaders, Mr. Cuomo’s reputation for inveterate micromanagement and swaggering protectiveness appears to be serving him well in his televised ubiquity. In public sessions, Mr. Cuomo has long evoked a father who greets his daughter’s prom date with a vise-grip handshake and an overlong stare — then chaperones the dance anyway, just in case. Now, he has a virus to eye warily. Those appraising Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic tend to sort themselves into three camps: admirers, new and old, disinclined to miss his daily appearances; longtime skeptics conceding grudging recognition for his triumphs of tone; and other opponents, particularly among progressive activists in New York City, warning that he is still not to be trusted. All three groups allow that they did not expect to encounter a Cuomo boom cycle this year. A Siena College poll of New Yorkers, released on Monday, found Mr. Cuomo with a 71 percent favorability rating, his best showing in seven years and a 27-point spike from February. Eighty-seven percent of respondents approved of his performance in the crisis. “Imagine if you told me a few years ago,” tweeted Amy Spitalnick, a former aide to Mayor Bill de Blasio who tussled often with the governor’s operation while at City Hall, “that I’d look forward to watching a Cuomo press conference every day.” In an interview, Ms. Spitalnick suggested that if Mr. Cuomo had not exactly changed, the circumstances had. “He’s still the guy from Queens,” she said, contrasting him with Mr. Trump, another native of the borough. “He’s being straightforward and direct about what New York needs. The other guy from Queens is not providing that.”
3.30 Andrew Cuomo: “The science people, the government professionals have to stand up and look the President in the eye and say this is not a political exercise. This is not press relations. It’s not optics. The tsunami is coming.”
3.30 Mike Francesca on WFAN: “Get the stuff made! Get the stuff where it needs to go and get the boots on the ground. Treat this like the crisis it is. And how can you have a scoreboard that says 2,000 people have died, and tell us it’s OK if another 198,000 die, that’s a good job. How is that a good job in our country? It’s a good job if nobody else dies. Not if another 198,000 people die. So now 200,000 people are disposable?”
3.30 Dana Milbank in the Post: “Trump reasoned that, because 2.2 million Americans could die without any attempt at controlling the virus, “if we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 — it’s a horrible number — maybe even less, but to 100,000, so, we have between 100,000 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job.”
3.27 Tom Perrotta, quoted in the Washington Post: “I look out my window, and it’s a beautiful day, and the water comes out of the faucet when I turn it on, and my car works. The infrastructure of the world is intact, but there is this feeling of dread and grief that makes it feel entirely different than what it did a month ago. I wake up and as soon as I go downstairs and come in contact with any information, this heaviness just comes over me that I carry through the whole day.”
3.26 After Trump told governors that his administration was ready to be the “backup” for states in crisis, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee spoke up and said to the president, “We don’t need a backup. We need a Tom Brady.”
3.26 Jen Chaney in New York magazine: The presentation of each press briefing is efficient and tailored to the socially distanced moment. Cuomo and everyone else on the dais sit six feet apart, as do the journalists in the room. The air of the whole operation says: “Do what I say, as well as what I do.” When he isn’t wearing a suit, he’s in a button-down shirt or tailored polo with the New York State seal emblazoned on it. If Americans need a dad right now, Cuomo is dressing like a father in Great Neck who just got back from Home Depot and announced that he’s going to fix the damn dishwasher himself.
3.26 Peter Wehner in The Atlantic: The qualities we most need in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom, and reassurance; a command of the facts and the ability to communicate them well; and the capacity to think about the medium and long term while carefully weighing competing options and conflicting needs. We need a leader who can persuade the public to act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can focus like a laser beam on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who will listen to—and, when necessary, defer to—experts who know far more than he does. We need a president who can draw the nation together rather than drive it apart, who excels at the intricate work of governing, and who works well with elected officials at every level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is not just sound, but exceptional. There are some 325 million people in America, and it’s hard to think of more than a handful who are more lacking in these qualities than Donald Trump. But we need to consider something else, which is that the coronavirus pandemic may lead to a rapid and even more worrisome psychological and emotional deterioration in the commander in chief. This is not a certainty, but it’s a possibility we need to be prepared for.
3.26 Just under 3.3. million people filed for unemployment last week.
3.26 NYC Hospitals are becoming overwhelmend. A doctor at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens: “It’s apocalyptic.”
3.25 Nate Silver on 538: Andrew Cuomo is now more likely to be the Democratic nominee than Bernie Sanders, according to PredictIt.
3.25 Thomas B. Edsall in the Times: “Another political analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, argues that the “most powerful simple way to understand the electorate” is as composed of “white Christians (half), white seculars (a quarter) and voters of color (a quarter).” Citing data from Pew, he noted that white Christians favored Trump 67 to 27, while white seculars favored Clinton 63-28 and voters of color favored Clinton 75-20. In more recent polling, he said, sorting by religion provides more insight than by education:
White non-college secular men support the generic Democrat by 17 points, while white college Evangelical women support Trump by 47 points, a 64 point gap going in the opposite direction from what education and gender would predict.
In addition, he continued, “identifying yourself as Christian in America today means that you are identifying yourself with a particular set of values that systematically set you apart from those who do not.”
The substitution, he wrote,
of “non-college” for “Christian” in elite discourse is consequential and damaging to progressive prospects. Pretty much everyone loosely agrees that Republicans want America the way they think it was and are revolting against cosmopolitan modernization, including even science. But naming white non-college voters as the Republican base suggests that the source of Republican grievance is lack of education, which organizes the conversation that follows about everything else. Imagine instead, the conversation that would follow from identifying the source of Republican grievance as religious.
Religion, he continued, “is real with values and motivated institutions, while non-college is barely more than an analytical category. Christians call themselves Christians, non-college folks don’t call themselves uneducated. Christian is an identity, non-college is a label.”
3.25 Senate agrees on $2 trillion rescue package.
3.24 Trump says“I would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter. I think it’s possible, why not?”
3.23 Nearly 100 million Americans are living under stay-at-home orders as coronavirus spreads
3.23 Sen. Rand Paul just confirmed that he went about his daily business as a U.S. senator for a week while there was a possibility he had coronavirus. Turns out, he did test positive — meaning that Paul brought the virus right into the halls the U.S. Capitol.
3.22 Anthony Fauci in an interview with Science on Sunday: “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.”
3.23 James Hohmann in the Post: “I’m a wartime president,” Donald Trump reiterated on Sunday night. “This is a war.” But even as he sought the deference historically afforded to leaders at the start of a military conflict, President Trump made clear that he does not want to accept any responsibility for either strategic blunders or tactical failures in the battle against the novel coronavirus. . . .“For those worried and afraid, please know as long as I am your president you can feel confident that you have a leader who will always fight for you, and I will not stop until we win,” he said. “This will be a great victory. … And it’s going to be a victory that, in my opinion, will happen much sooner than originally expected.” Trump then repeatedly sought to pass the buck, primarily to Democratic governors. “The governors, locally, are going to be in command,” he explained. “We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job.”
3.22 Robert Samuelson in the Post: “As CNBC’s Steve Liesman has pointed out, there’s an inherent contradiction — or tension, if you will — between what we want from economic policy (stronger economic growth to avert another depression) and what we want from health policy (slower economic growth, or no growth at all, to reflect a population “sheltering in place”). It may be that the contradiction is less stark than I’ve indicated. “It’s a false choice,” says David Wilcox, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. His point: The economy can’t be strong unless it is purged of the toxic coronavirus. Good health policy and good economic policy are identical. Still, the twin goals tug, at least temporarily, in opposite directions. What results — it has been building for years — is a crisis of democracy or, more precisely, a crisis of the liberal democratic states established since World War II. This democratic crisis subsumes all the crises I’ve mentioned above — health care, economics and politics — and raises the profound question of whether we can govern in the common interest. Or are we condemned to a system that defines the common interest as the collective desires of many different subgroups, with each subgroup pursuing its own interest and no one group looking out for the larger common good? That is a scary assessment, but it fits the facts and suggests that we are stumbling into an unhappy future.
3.22 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman in the Times: “Mr. Trump is no stranger to crisis. He has spent a lifetime grappling with bankruptcy, fending off creditors, evading tax collectors, defending lawsuits, deflecting regulators, spinning reporters and dueling with estranged wives, usually coming out ahead, at least as he defines it. But these were crises of his own creation involving human adversaries he knew how to confront. Nothing in his background in business, entertainment or multiple marriages prepared him for the coronavirus pandemic now threatening America’s health and wealth. Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know. “When he’s faced a problem, he has sought to somehow cheat or fix the outcome ahead of time so that he could construct a narrative that showed him to be the winner,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer. “And when it was all about feuds with other celebrities or contests over ratings or hotel branding, he could do that and no one cared enough to really check. And the bluster and bragging worked. But in this case, he tried that in the beginning and you can’t brag or bluster your way out of people dying. And I think more than the human suffering, it’s been the inexorable quality of the data that’s forced him to change.”
3.21 Trump Tweet: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
3.20 Tom Brady signs two year deal with the Bucs.
3.20 Gov. Cuomo issues a statewide stay-at-home order.
3.20 “What do you say to the Americans who are scared?” asked NBC’s Peter Alexander at a press briefing. “Nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick. Millions, as you witnessed, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?” Total soft ball, to which Trump responded “I’d say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I’d say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”
3.19 Charles M. Blow in the Times: “The coronavirus pandemic changes the view of Donald Trump’s incompetence, because this time it is intimate. This time what’s at stake isn’t abstract in the mind of the average American, like constitutional law or international relations. It is not far away, like families at the border or Nazis in Charlottesville. It is not about carnal and craven acts that take place between two people or are committed by one against another, like assaulting women or paying them off. No, this is about all of us and all the things closest to us: our health and safety, our children and parents, our ability to move freely and sleep soundly, our ability to go to work and send our children to school. . . . This crisis is transcendent, which makes Trump’s disastrous approach to dealing with it all the more transparent. … America needs a leader; it has a lout.”
3.17 Trump renames the coronavirus the Chinese virus.' “It’s not racist at all.”
3.17 Biden romps in Arizona, Michigan and Florida
3.17 Mnuchin warns Republican senators the U.S. unemployment rate could hit 20% if they failed to act on a proposed coronavirus rescue package.
3.17 President Trump: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,”
3.17 Tom Brady announces that he will leave the Patriots. SI: “There are 20-year-old kids in Massachusetts entering their senior year of college who know nothing outside of Brady under center.”
3.16 Goldman Sachs investors call: “There will be economic damage from the virus itself, but the real damage is driven mostly by market psychology. Viruses have been with us forever. Stock markets should fully recover in the 2nd half of the year. . . .Technically the market generally has been looking for a reason to reset after the longest bull market in history. There is NO systemic risk. No one is even talking about that. Governments are intervening in the markets to stabilize them, and the private banking sector is very well capitalized. It feels more like 9/11 than it does like 2008.
3.16 Gov. Cuomo to Chris Cuomo: “I don’t see a curve; I see a wave, And the wave is going to break on the health care system, and I am telling you, my little brother, it is going to be a tsunami.”
3.16 The Dow ell nearly 2,997.10, the worst day in its history.
3.16 Trump, in response to his performance in response to the coronavirus crisis: “I’d rate it a 10. I think we’ve done a great job.”
3.14 Quartz: Foundations run by Jack Ma and Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant he founded, this week pledged to ship half a million testing kits and 1 million masks to the US, following similar donations to Japan, Korea, Italy, Iran, and Spain.
3.14 The New Republic: Just as the bailouts engineered in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown yielded mostly symbolic reforms in exchange for oceans of free money for Wall Street, so now it appears that the D.C. policy nexus will produce a lavish subvention of the status quo. Or, as Kate Aronoff observes, “both parties seem poised to make the worst of this crisis.” For starters, bailing out the oil sector will serve to prop up operations such asshale extraction that are already reeling from the Saudi-Russian price war. The challenge for such environmentally harmful models of oil extraction is less to bail them out than to wind them down, and to ensure a just transition for the workers displaced in the process. Given that there’s already a glut in supply, Aronoff notes, “paying drillers to produce more could do more harm than good. And there’s little about shale fuel’s house-of-cards business model that seems built to last, with or without the proposed stimulus.” And failing to produce an alternative to an industry bailout mostly benefitting executives presents a significant political risk. Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination, is closely aligned with oil interests, and disowns the kind of large-scale deficit-backed stimulus the present crisis calls out for. And that could leave Trump positioned as the champion of beleaguered oil workers—on paper, at least—in the critical run-up to the 2020general election. The fallout of the coronavirus … could make the American right embrace big government and deficit spending more openly than ever before, however haphazard its approach. While bound to fail in the long run—or provide a meaningful answer to the COVID-19 crisis—it could pump temporary life into the industries where Trump’s closest friends are and lend short-term relief to families in need, boosting his chances in November. The Democratic establishment, meanwhile, looks ready to double down on partisan posturing and deficit hawkishness. The result could be a zombie realignment in American politics, propping up the revivified corpse of Joe Biden’s approach to policy and politics in a move that will be as big a disaster for the planet as it is for the Democratic Party.
3.13 Trump: “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” Remember, there was a time when we had a president who said “The buck stops here.”
3.12 Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure shut their doors for “two weeks.”
3.12 “Everyone over 60 should become a hermit for a month.”–Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA, in a text.
3.12 Dr. Anthony Fauci, to a Congressional committee: “The system is not really geared to what we need right now. That is a failing. It is a failing, let’s admit it.”
3.11 Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson report positive for the coronavirus
3.11 The NBA suspends play
3.11 David Frum in The Atlantic: “At every turn, President Trump’s policy regarding coronavirus has unfolded as if guided by one rule: How can I make this crisis worse? Presidents are not all-powerful, especially not in the case of pandemic disease. There are limits to what they can do, for good or ill. But within those limits, at every juncture, Trump’s actions have ensured the worst possible outcomes. The worst outcome for public health. The worst outcome for the American economy. The worst outcome for American global leadership. Trump’s Oval Office speech of March 11 was the worst action yet in a string of bad actions.”
3.11 A renewed plunge in financial markets ended an 11-year bull market for the Dow Jones industrial average as the economic threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak came into stark relief.As policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic appeared unwilling or unable to mount an aggressive response to the crisis, the Dow closed with a loss of nearly 6 percent. That brought its decline from its most recent peak less than a month ago to more than 20 percent — the definition of a bear market
3.11 Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years
3.11 Megan McArdle in the Post: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days. The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold. In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike.
3.10 Biden seized control of the Democratic presidential contest Tuesday with victories in Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri and Idaho. Sanders won North Dakota. Washington continued counting
3.10 Paul Krugman in the Times: Trump’s luridly delusional response to the coronavirus and his conspiracy theorizing about Democrats and the news media aren’t really that different from the way the right dealt with the financial crisis a dozen years ago. True, last time the crazy talk wasn’t coming directly from the president of the United States. But that’s not the important distinction between then and now. No, what’s different now is that denial and the resulting delay are likely to have deadly consequences. It’s not clear, even in retrospect, how much better things would have been if right-wingers had recognized economic reality in 2008. Years of deregulation and lax enforcement had already weakened the financial system, and it was probably too late to head off the coming crisis.Virus denial, by contrast, squandered crucial time — time that could have been used to slow the coronavirus’s spread. For the clear and present danger now isn’t so much that large numbers of Americans will get sick — that was probably going to happen anyway — but that the epidemic will move so fast that it overloads our hospitals.
3.10 Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post: The most important lesson Trump learned from both his business days and his political career is that there are no consequences. Ever. For anything. He can lie. He can cheat. He can move goal posts. He can break his promises about deficits or who will pay for the wall. He can renege on international trade deals or private contracts for chandeliers. Yet he never pays a penalty, at least not politically. His followers forgive and forget. Understandably, then, he behaves like the protagonist in “Groundhog Day” (at least in the first part of the film): He does whatever he expects to bring the biggest short-term payoff today, since he can count on a reset tomorrow. Unfortunately for those he governs, the president has become almost pathologically incapable of thinking about the future. The problem isn’t that he merely plays down the value of tomorrow; he behaves as if tomorrow doesn’t exist. In economic terms, you could say he has a discount factor of zero. Or in layman’s terms: This is the YOLO presidency
3.10 Max Boot in the Washington Post: This is a time that calls for the candor and reassurance of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats.” Instead, we have a president who is emulating “Baghdad Bob”
3.10 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: “Biden quite deliberately offers himself as a transition figure to a new generation of exciting, pragmatic progressives. He told the crowd as he gestured to his three surrogates [Whitmer, Booker and Harris]: “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. They are the future of this country.” Ironically, it might be the vice-presidential pick that generates a sense of change and possibility on a ticket where the top name provides the competence, moral grounding and unifying spirit to clean up after the Trump years.
3.9 Tucker Carlson on Fox: “Our country is likely to experience a painful period we are powerless to stop. None of this is justification to panic. You shouldn’t panic. In crisis, it’s more important than ever to be calm. But staying calm is not the same as remaining complacent. It does not mean assuring people that everything will be fine. We don’t know that. Instead, it’s better to tell the truth. That is always the surest sign of strength.”
3.9 Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair: Stories about Trump’s coronavirus fears have spread through the White House. Last week Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. The source also said Trump has asked the Secret Service to set up a screening program and bar anyone who has a cough from the White House grounds. “He’s definitely melting down over this,” the source said.
3.7 John Lewis via Twitter: 55 years ago today, we were beaten, tear gassed, and trampled by horses. I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die. I don’t know how I made it back, but I know we cannot rest. We cannot become weary. We must keep pushing and pulling and find a way to get in the way.
3.7 Axios: The American dream is moving further and further out of reach for millions. Why it matters: That promise is essential to American identity — and its erosion will affect how we live, work and vote for decades to come, Erica Pandey and Courtenay Brown write for our “What Matters 2020” series. What’s happening: Buying a home or paying for college are increasingly unaffordable — and millennials, many of whom entered the job market at the height of the recession, are feeling the crunch.The cost of higher education is ballooning. From 1978 to 2017, the Consumer Price Index grew fourfold, but the price of college increased 14-fold, according to research by Ana Hernández Kent, a policy analyst at the St. Louis Fed. The price of homes is rising much faster than incomes. Per a studyby real estate company Clever that looked at census data from 1960 to 2017, U.S. housing prices have skyrocketed 121%, while incomes have increased 29%. And socioeconomic mobility is at an all-time low. As we’ve reported, fewer Americans are faring better than their parents did, and more are doing worse. Per a recent UPenn study, around 60% of people born in the 1940s did better than their parents, versus 40% of those born in the 1980s.
3.6 Trump at the CDC: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”
3.6 NY Times: A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic. Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge Walton said. The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released version so he could independently verify the justifications for those redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a full-text version of the report. The differences between the report and Mr. Barr’s description of it “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary,” wrote Judge Walton
3.5 Cuomo on Coronavirus: “The facts do not merit the level of anxiety”
3.5 Mika Zibanejad scored five goals, including the game winner 33 seconds into overtime in a wild 6-5 victory over the Washington Capitals. The feat matched the team record.
3.5 Fareed Zakaria in the Post: “Almost everywhere, the populist right is trying to blame the contagion on open borders and migrants. In reality, the disease has been spread internationally by travelers and tourists — impoverished asylum seekers don’t usually board cruise ships. But that hasn’t stopped politicians from trying to exploit the crisis. Italian firebrand Matteo Salvini railed against the government for continuing to allow in migrants from Africa, though there are few cases of coronavirus on that continent. Far-right parties in France, Germany and Spain have all called for tighter border controls. In the United States, the attacks have been directed mostly against China. A Fox News host explained that the world was suffering from this epidemic because the Chinese Communist Party cannot feed its people, who have resorted, he claimed, to “eating raw bats and snakes.” Tom Cotton suggested the virus might have originated in a high-security biochemical lab in China. Trump fuels fears by constantly talking about how the disease came from China and how he heroically saved American lives because he “closed the borders to China” in late January. Thank goodness he doesn’t seem to know that the H1N1 virus was first detected in Mexico. In fact, the focus should not be on massive border closures but rather comprehensive public health systems that can safely and speedily test people, isolate and provide care to those infected and issue clear guidelines for the rest of us. Things have now ramped up in the United States, but the process has been far too slow, in part because Trump eliminated the White House’s pandemic chain of command in 2018. It would have been even worse if Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other relevant agencies had gone through.
3.5 Quartz: In 1998, two researchers, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, published a study demonstrating that people who had experienced abuse or household dysfunction as children were more likely to have serious health problems, like cancer or liver disease, and unhealthy lifestyle habits, like drinking heavily or using drugs as adults. This became known as the “ACE Study,” short for “adverse childhood experiences.” Scientists have since linked more than a dozen forms of ACEs—including homelessness, discrimination, and physical, mental, and sexual abuse—with a higher risk of poor health in adulthood. Every child reacts to stress differently, and some are naturally more resilient than others. But the pathways that link adversity in childhood with health problems in adulthood lead back to toxic stress. As Quartz’s Jenny Anderson explains, “when a child lives with abuse, neglect, or is witness to violence, he or she is primed for that fight or flight all the time. The burden of that stress, what Bruce McEwan calls ‘allostatic load,’ can damage small, developing brains and bodies. A brain that thinks it is in constant danger has trouble organizing itself, which can manifest itself later as problems paying attention, or sitting still, or following instructions—all of which are needed for learning.” 9 million: “Persistently poor” children in the US, meaning those who spend at least half their lives from birth through age 17 living in poverty. 16%: Share of “persistently poor” children who become economically successful young adults
3.5 Warren suspends campaign
3.5 Coronavirus forces Bond movie to reschedule until November
3.4 Bloomberg withdraws, endorses Biden
3.3 Biden wins 10 states on Super Tuesday.
3.2 Greg Sargent in the Post: Trump has exposed a major leadership weakness, one that goes well beyond just the coronavirus response. The weakness in question: Trump’s chronic inability to admit that anything on his watch is less than stupendously wonderful. This pathology is deeply ingrained in this presidency. It infects everything from his depictions of the economy to his insane demands of border officials, in addition to (as we’re now seeing) the government’s handling of a public health crisis. Highlighting this provides a way to integrate criticism of Trump’s management failures with an indictment of his hideous character flaws —his towering dishonesty and megalomania. In this telling, those failings are not just the latest ugly installment of the Daily Trump Show. They’re also shortcomings that threaten major real-world consequences.
3.2 George Packer in The Atlantic: When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited. … James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in … They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.” The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents — his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power.
3.2 David von Drehle in the Washington Post: “This fever of mistrust is the desired symptom of a powerful virus — a confidence-sapping worm of mutual suspicion — that Russia has planted in the operating system of American democracy. At little cost and with surprising ease, Vladimir Putin and his government have exploited partisanship and social media to serve Russia’s long-term goal of weakening the West by encouraging disorder and disunity. Already, eight months before Election Day, the virus is spreading virtually unchecked, because the very existence of a Russian chaos project has itself become a partisan wedge. Democrats see Putin’s hand in nearly every news cycle, while Republicans increasingly scoff that the whole thing is, to quote the president, a witch hunt. Millions of us are unsure whether elections will be free and fair, whether the news we consume is real or fake, whether our foreign policy serves national or personal interests. This is a massive victory for America’s enemies. A climate of mutual suspicion at home erodes our ability to affect events abroad. Foreign governments lose confidence in a nation whose leaders — and followers — lack confidence in one another.”
3.2 Robert Costa and Sean Sullivan in the Washington Post: Four years after Trump seized control of the Republican Party with a right-wing populist movement, a new populist crusade has risen on the left, fueled similarly by grievance and anxiety and powered by Sanders’s remarkable drive to dispatch Trump from the White House. Each is powered by a disdain for elites they perceive as having flourished while other Americans suffered, a rejection of the establishment and the figures who have controlled it, and a contempt for the institutions that over the decades have blunted, as they see it, the success of efforts like theirs. Their collision in November would be unprecedented in modern American politics, a signal not only of the persuasive powers of the two men at the center of the movements but also of economic and cultural forces that have bent the American political landscape to their benefit. “At a time when there’s no real dominant ideology which can unite people,” historian Michael Kazin said, “it’s not surprising that people sort of go into their separate camps and find solace and comfort.” Trump’s and Sanders’s movements reflect a broader shift across Western democracies toward a politics rooted in passionate emotion and grievance — one that has pushed the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom from little-regarded sideshow to official British policy under the aegis of a prime minister whose public appeal is similar to Trump’s. In Germany, a far-right movement has gained influence in government. Meanwhile, left-wing populism and self-described democratic socialists are gaining power throughout Europe and the Americas, at times replacing an older guard of liberals who embraced globalization.
3.2 Amy Klobuchar ends her presidential bid
3.1 Pete Buttigieg ends his presidential bid
3.1 Dinner at Chatterbox for Cara‘s birthday, with Ginny, Molly, Shawn, Anne, Paul and Nadia
3.1 Margaret Sullivan in the Post: linguist George Lakoff’s prescription for handling the president’s false statements and lies, an approach that’s become known as the “truth sandwich.”Rather than lead with the falsehood and then try to debunk it, Lakoff — an expert on how propaganda works — suggested flipping that formula: Lead with the truth, air the falsehood, and then follow with the fact check. Avoid giving prominence to lies, he advises. Don’t put them in headlines, leads or tweets. It is that very amplification that gives them power, even if they are proclaimed false in the next beat. Of course, that recommendation runs in direct opposition to how news usually works. Traditionally, we have emphasized the words of top officials, and only then tempered them with fact checks. Too often, Lakoff told me, the media “has become complicit with Trump by allowing itself to be used as an amplifier for his falsehoods and frames.” And that’s true even when journalists make lists of lies. It’s the repetition and the prominence that does the harm.