1. Frank Figliuzzi: Hostage Survival Tips for Drs. Fauci and Birx

Dear Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci,

In order for all of us to survive the next month and beyond, you’ll both need to understand how similar your predicament is to a hostage standoff, and how you can employ kidnap and ransom negotiation techniques to overcome the challenges of your figurative captivity. Since you just bought us all another month of smart social distancing, there are already signs that you are applying some of these proven methods even if you don’t fully grasp them as such. But this can go south quickly, and we’re counting on you to get it right.

These techniques won’t work as well if the hostage-taker becomes aware of them, but based on available intelligence about your captor, he won’t likely read this. First, successful hostage negotiators must understand the kidnapper’s motivation. In most kidnappings, the captor wants money, but publicity, political demands, and yes, even ego, can drive ransom demands. This means that you both retain your value if you can remain alive; in your case that means not being kicked off the task force. Since the president has kept you in place thus far, he seems to understand that he needs you around, even if he’s growing weary of your incessant talk of science and epidemiological modeling. This mutually dependent dynamic gives you the leverage and influence needed to shape outcomes. You control what the president wants: public adulation, credit for mitigating a deadly virus, and the appearance that he understands complex medical concepts. You must delicately and subtly message the president that if he harms the hostages (you and us), he won’t get what he wants. This can be fraught with peril. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/survival-tips-for-drs-fauci-and-birx-from-a-former-fbi-hostage-negotiator

2. David Leonhardt: Not Winning This Fight

This chart shows why.

China and South Korea have flattened their curves. Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands have begun to flatten their curves.

The United States still has not.

More than half of all confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States have been diagnosed in the past five days. Depending on what data source you use, yesterday was either the worst day for new cases or one of the worst. And more than 3,000 Americans with the virus have died, meaning the death toll has now exceeded that of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

As you can see in the chart above, the other three countries with the world’s largest number of confirmed cases — Italy, China and Spain — were all making significant progress at a similar point in their outbreaks. But the response in the United States has been slow and uneven. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/coronavirus-cases-united-states.html

3. Boston Globe Editorial: A president unfit for a pandemic

It’s not too much for Americans to ask of their leaders that they be competent and informed when responding to a crisis of historic proportions. Instead, they have a White House marred by corruption and incompetence, whose mixed messages roil the markets and rock their sense of security. Instead of compassion and clarity, the president, in his near-daily addresses to the nation, embodies callousness, self-concern, and a lack of compass. Dangling unverified cures and possible quarantines in front of the public like reality TV cliffhangers, he unsettles rather than reassures. The pandemic reveals that the worst features of this presidency are not merely late-night comedy fodder; they come at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and our collective psyche.

Many pivotal decision points in this crisis are past us, but more are still to come. For our own sake, every American should be hoping for a miraculous turnaround — and that the too-little, too-late strategy of the White House task force will henceforth at least prevent contagion and economic ruin of the grandest scale. But come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/30/opinion/president-unfit-pandemic/

4. Mitch Albom: Hey, President Trump: Her name is Gretchen Whitmer

First of all, she has a name. Gretchen Whitmer. She is not “the woman” or “all she does is sit there” or “you know who I’m talking about” — all phrases President Donald Trump has used besides saying the actual name of the person Michigan voters elected to govern us.

It’s “Gretchen Whitmer.” Show some respect. At a time when Americans must adjust to a world without hugs, kisses or handshakes, the least a president of the United States can do is call our governor by her name.

And stop complaining about her “complaining.” Gretchen Whitmer hasn’t done anything that every Michigander doesn’t want her to do — ask the federal government for masks, ventilators, test kits and other aid to fight the COVID-19 virus that is infecting and killing us.

She’s not speaking for herself. She’s speaking for the people.

Trump’s response? Don’t call her back.

So let’s get this straight. The leader of our great country, when he feels that he hasn’t been treated “right,” doesn’t return the call of a governor begging for help to save the lives of her constituents?

Trump to Michigan: Leave a Message. https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2020/03/29/mitch-albom-president-donald-trump-gretchen-whitmer/2933518001/

5. Jennifer Rubin: Joe Biden’s podcasts are a welcome reminder that Trump is the irrational one

On Monday, former vice president Joe Biden kicked off the first in what he promises will be a series of podcasts. Aptly entitled “Here’s the Deal,” it is one way to overcome the void in campaign activity necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic and bans on public gatherings.

As a preliminary matter, Here’s the Deal, was a refreshing reminder that not all presidents or presidential candidates require bowing and scraping from aides, insult questioners, operate data-free on their “gut” and lack an appreciation for what ordinary people experience during a crisis. The overwhelming impression one came away with is that Biden would be a calm, rational and normal president.

In short, Biden is a welcome reminder that Trump is the abnormal, irrational one — not the leaders with data, not the governors who are building mobile hospitals and not the Americans who take seriously the stay-at-home directives from their governors. Biden does not present himself as the most informed on every subject (as does the perpetually under-informed Trump), but rather as a leader who knows how to source the best information from the best people. That would be a radical change from what we must all suffer through until January 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/31/biden-podcasts-talking-rationally-americans/

6. Sean Sullivan, Michael Scherer and David Weigel:  Bernie Sanders says he’s staying in the presidential race. Many Democrats fear a reprise of their 2016 defeat.

Behind the growing fear among many Democrats that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s continued presence in the presidential race could spell doom in November is the belief that they’ve seen it happen before — in the last campaign.

The 2016 Democratic convention was just about to get started when Sanders (I-Vt.) addressed his delegates. It was time to support her, he told his backers. They disagreed, booing loudly. Some stuck their thumbs down as TV cameras captured the extraordinary show of dissent, which would continue on the convention floor.

To some Democrats in that campaign, it was a lesson learned the hard way about the limitations of Sanders’s promises of support and the ferocity of his unbridled backers. Four years later, with the senator from Vermont still running against former vice president Joe Biden despite almost impossible odds of victory, some party leaders are increasingly worried about a reprise of the bitter divisions that many Democrats blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss.

“It’s the equivalent of a World War II kamikaze pilot,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Clinton. “They have no better option than to plow into USS Biden.”

The judgment Sanders makes about his fate and the direction taken by his supporters could be among the most consequential decisions of the race, determining whether Democrats speak with one voice against a president who is already aimed at November, or squabble for months more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bernie-sanders-says-hes-staying-in-the-presidential-race-many-democrats-fear-a-reprise-of-their-2016-defeat/2020/03/28/a6b8a8dc-7032-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html

7. Jonathan Chait: The Coronavirus and Conservatism’s War on Science

Trump’s extreme, almost comic myopia has driven Washington’s laggard response. Having a television-addled president with the memory and long-term planning capabilities of a fruit fly is deeply unhelpful. But there is more behind Trump’s intermittent disregard for the virus’s danger than simple Trumpiness. As is often the case when analyzing any of the horrors of the Trump era, Trump’s coronavirus response combines his idiosyncratic personality disorders with ingrained pathologies of the conservative movement.

Conservatism has built an alternative-fact universe, in which pseudo-experts can confidently explain why tax cuts will increase revenue, Obamacare will fail to increase health-insurance coverage, greenhouse-gas emissions will not warm the planet, and on and on.

It is not surprising that the movement generated an alternative reality in which the conclusions of epidemiologists across the world could be confidently discarded. Nor is it surprising that Trump has clung tightly to such thinking at junctures in the crisis. It is almost impressive that Trump has managed to heed the advice of real scientists at all. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/social-distancing-culture/609019/

8. Molly Jong-Fast: Don’t Worry, America, Jared Is Going to Save You From COVID-19

As the pandemic fills New York City’s morgues, the president has decided to bring in the very best and smartest people. For Donald Trump, that’s his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And it just makes sense, since Jared has already brought peace to the Middle East and innovated America within an inch of its life with his office of American innovation. Now it’s time for the young slumlord to once again fail upwards. This time, hundreds of thousands of American lives are at stake, but I mean, Jared did go to Harvard (via a $2.5 million donation), so…

One might find the fact that one in 1,000 people in the New York City metro area are infected with COVID-19 terrifying. But not me. No, I have confidence that the president’s son-in-law will handle this with his usual competence. I mean, we have peace in the Middle East now so... Wait, we don’t? Oh well then. I would say we’re all in a lot of trouble. But if we survive, just think about how good this will be for the Trump brand and for Ivanka’s 2024 run. If we don’t die, that is.  
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dont-worry-america-jared-kushner-is-going-to-save-you-from-covid-19

9. Susan B. Glasser: The Trump O’Clock Follies

The President’s mendacious nightly press briefings on the coronavirus will go down in history for their monumental flimflammery.

During the Vietnam War, the United States had the Five O’Clock Follies, nightly briefings at which American military leaders claimed, citing a variety of bogus statistics, half-truths, and misleading reports from the front, to be winning a war that they were, in fact, losing. Richard Pyle, the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau chief, called the press conferences “the longest-playing tragicomedy in Southeast Asia’s theater of the absurd,” which, minus the “Southeast Asia” part, is not a bad description of the scene currently playing out each evening in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, in the White House. We now have the Trump Follies, the nightly briefings at which President Trump has lied and bragged, lamented and equivocated, about the global pandemic that poses an existential threat to his Presidency. Just as the Vietnam briefings became a standard by which the erosion of government credibility could be measured then, historians of the future will consult the record of Trump’s mendacious, misleading press conferences as an example of a tragic failure of leadership at such a critical moment. There will be much material for them; the transcripts from just the first three days of this week run to more than forty thousand words.

Since Trump began making the press conferences a daily ritual, a couple of weeks ago—an eternity in the pandemic era—his more memorable lines are already featuring in political attacks against him. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump insisted, two weeks ago. When asked to assess his own performance, he said, “I’d rate it a ten.” This Wednesday, with members of his coronavirus task force joining him onstage, he added, “We’ve done one hell of a job. Nobody has done the job that we’ve done. And it’s lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem or you wouldn’t even have a country left.”

The disconnect between Trumpian reality and actual reality has never been on starker display than in the past few days, as the true face of the horror we are facing in the United States has shown itself, in New York City, with overwhelmed morgues and emergency rooms, a governor pleading for ventilators and face masks from the federal government, and heartbreaking first-person accounts reminiscent of the open letters sent from Italy a few weeks back, which warned Americans: this is what is coming for you—don’t make our mistakes. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said that the United States was emerging as the “epicenter” of the global pandemic, which makes the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room the emerging epicenter of the failure to respond to it. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trump-oclock-follies

10. Micah Zenko: The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History

Suffice it to say, the Trump administration has cumulatively failed, both in taking seriously the specific, repeated intelligence community warnings about a coronavirus outbreak and in vigorously pursuing the nationwide response initiatives commensurate with the predicted threat. The federal government alone has the resources and authorities to lead the relevant public and private stakeholders to confront the foreseeable harms posed by the virus. Unfortunately, Trump officials made a series of judgments (minimizing the hazards of COVID-19) and decisions (refusing to act with the urgency required) that have needlessly made Americans far less safe.

In short, the Trump administration forced a catastrophic strategic surprise onto the American people. But unlike past strategic surprises—Pearl Harbor, the Iranian revolution of 1979, or especially 9/11—the current one was brought about by unprecedented indifference, even willful negligence. Whereas, for example, the 9/11 Commission Report assigned blame for the al Qaeda attacks on the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush, the unfolding coronavirus crisis is overwhelmingly the sole responsibility of the current White House. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-worst-intelligence-failure-us-history-covid-19/

11. Frank Rich: What a Plague Reveals

A society reveals a lot about itself, heroic and not, when confronting a plague. But we didn’t need a plague to tell us that Trump places zero value on any life except his own, and it’s no surprise that many of his zealots are willing to blindly follow his example. Witness that so-called man of God, Jerry Falwell Jr., who decided to end social distancing and summon the previously dispersed student body back to Liberty University in Virginia, at whatever cost to themselves. Or Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser who had previously assured Americans that the virus was “contained” and advised them to buy stocks just before the bottom dropped out of the markets. Not content to speed the destruction of Americans’ 401(k)s, he has led the cheerleading for Trump’s kamikaze goal of getting the country back to work by . Perhaps Trump can kick off this return to normalcy by holding the biggest and best MAGA rally ever on Easter Sunday at Liberty U.

As the virus spreads from its current epicenters throughout the country, the grotesque discrepancy between the elites and the have-nots is going to make Parasite look as benign as an episode of Modern Family. The anger and despair that have fueled populism in America, even to the point of inducing voters to hand power to a charlatan like Trump, may metastasize at least as fast as the plague. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/frank-rich-what-a-plague-reveals.html

12. Bess Levin: If New York Wants Ventilators Cuomo Better Start Kissing The Ring

On the off chance it was previously unclear or existed in a gray area for some people, the coronavirus crisis has confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Donald Trump is a complete and total sociopath. Last week, in response to a softball question about what he would say to the millions of Americans who are scared of the deadly virus sweeping the nation, Trump told a reporter, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter.” On Sunday, after taking the pandemic semi-seriously for about a week, he started pushing to “open” the country by Easter, arguing that the economy is more important that actual lives. And during a virtual town hall with Fox News on Tuesday, he appeared to suggest he’s willing to let thousands of New Yorkers die because Governor Andrew Cuomo hasn’t sufficiently sucked up to him.

Seemingly referring to Cuomo’s plea this week for the federal government to send more ventilators to the epicenter of the crisis, where 192 people have died—“Four hundred ventilators? I need 30,000 ventilators,” Cuomo said—Trump told Fox: “It’s a two-way street, they have to treat us well also. They can’t say, Oh gee we should get this, we should get that. We’re doing a great job. Like in New York where we’re building as I said, four hospitals…we’re literally building hospitals and medical centers, and then I hear there’s a problem with ventilators, well we sent them ventilators and they could have had 15 or 16,000, all they had to do was order them two years ago but they decided not to do it, they can’t blame us for that.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/donald-trump-andrew-cuomo-ventilators

13. John Stoehr: Amid a Viral Pandemic, the Republicans Reveal Their Contempt for Working Americans

It’s still unclear to me what Lindsey Graham was complaining about last night. He and three other GOP senators made a stink over a provision in the $2 trillion stimulus bill regarding jobless insurance. It’s unclear because their complaint was incoherent.

They claimed that workers would lose incentive to work if they received too much in unemployment benefits. They’d quit—and go on the dole. But unemployment benefits don’t apply to people who resign. They apply to people furloughed or laid off. Since “incentive” is about choice, and since choice is moot, their mewling was meaningless.

The rich can be trusted with billions. Working Americans can’t be trusted with $600.

Unless they were trying to save face. Conservatism under Donald Trump is not the conservatism of my youth (think Ronald Reagan), but these people have reputations to protect even if their reputations are political fictions. They understand well what it looks like for “conservatives” who for years sabotaged the economy to wound a black president to all of a sudden support the biggest economic relief package in US history.

The Senate passed the bill last night, but at least Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott, Tom Scott and Ben Sasse had a chance to make-believe they are dutiful limited-government conservatives forced into compromising their principles by circumstance beyond their control. Never mind that they voted yes. Never mind that they could have voted no without jeopardizing the bill’s passage. Never mind, because the play’s the thing. https://stoehr.substack.com/p/amid-a-viral-pandemic-the-republicans

14. Aaron Blake: Trump ties coronavirus decisions to personal grievances

Trump is a commander in chief dealing with a coronavirus outbreak in which many difficult decisions have to be made. And on Friday, he seemed to suggest some of those decisions could be made according to who has run afoul of him personally.

Appearing at the daily White House briefing, Trump disclosed that he has told Vice President Pence, who is leading the coronavirus task force, not to call the governors of Michigan and Washington state because those governors had been critical of Trump and the federal response.

“When they’re not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps, they’re not appreciative to FEMA, it’s not right,” Trump said.

He then added: “I say, ‘Mike, don’t call the governor of Washington; you’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan. It doesn’t make any difference what happens.’ You know what I say: ‘If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.’ He’s a different type of person; he’ll call quietly anyway.”

Those states are particularly important. Washington state was the first real hot spot in the United States for the coronavirus outbreak. Michigan, which has among the nation’s highest rates of the virus, is also a key swing state in the 2020 election. You wonder if Trump’s comments about not wanting to communicate with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) during a crisis might be used against him in his reelection campaign.

Asked what more he wants from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), in particular, Trump said he just wants more gratitude.

“All I want them to do — very simple: I want them to be appreciative,” he said. “I don’t want them to say things that aren’t true. I want them to be appreciative.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/27/trump-suggests-personal-grievances-factor-into-his-coronavirus-decisions/

15. Andrew Sullivan: America Is Trapped in Trump’s Blind Spot

Trump will improvise and reverse himself again before this is over; he will turn vital government information into performative propaganda; he will undermine his own appointees; he will use the epidemic to punish enemies and reward friends; and he will be focused at all times on himself. As tens of thousands of Americans will literally gasp for air, their lungs sustained only by ventilators, he will grasp at petty slights. As social distancing becomes ever more vital, this man will want Easter churches packed with congregants. And as he lies and distorts and emotes, the casualties will mount.

Given the crisis, we have only one option. We need to listen to the experts, rely on governors, trust in Drs. and Birx, and do our bit. But we also have a more urgent patriotic task: to ignore this president until we can eventually rid ourselves of him. This is too grave a crisis to give him the respect he doesn’t deserve. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan-america-is-trapped-in-trumps-blind-spot.html

16. George T. Conway III: Blaming Trump’s virus failures on impeachment is gaslighting of the highest order

The problem wasn’t impeachment — it was the president. There was never any chance that the government was going to take sufficient action on the virus when the president himself wasn’t taking the virus seriously. It was Trump, after all, who claimed — at the very end of February, weeks after the impeachment trial had ended — that criticisms such as Murphy’s were a “hoax” and that “within a couple days,” the number of coronavirus cases “is going to be down to close to zero.”

And the problem with the president stemmed from the very same impulses that got him impeached. Just as his focus on himself, and his reelection, led him to extort Ukraine and lie about it, so, too, it led him to deceive the public about the coronavirus as well. Eager to keep the number of coronavirus cases from going up, he didn’t want to let a cruise ship full of Americans dock. He didn’t want virus warnings to spook the stock markets, lest he not be able to brag about the markets during the campaign. Even as late as March 8, a month after the impeachment trial, he told Republican donors at Mar-a-Lago that his political opponents were “trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election.”

For Trump, it’s always about Trump and only Trump. If anything, it was McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans’ refusal to remove him, not the impeachment itself, that helped bring us to where we are today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/31/impeachment-didnt-distract-coronavirus-preparations-trump-did

17. Eric Boehlert: Trump’s pandemic propaganda comes straight from Putin playbook

Trump's commitment to creating confusion with lies and contradictions continues unabated during the national health crisis. Recently he has:

• Claimed one hundred thousand coronavirus in the United States should be deemed a success.

•  Accused hospital workers of stealing much-needed surgical masks.

• Lied about recorded statements he had made days earlier about the pandemic.

• Mistreated reporters who asked factual questions about the government's criminally inadequate response to the coronavirus.

• Told governors on a conference call that he hadn't heard complaints about a lack of coronavirus tests.

• Offered false hope about an unproven covid-19 cure.

It's all part of White House's pattern of sending mixed and conflicting pandemic messages, often from multiple sources. It's exactly what the federal government should not be doing at a time of a national health crisis, according to guidelines established by the Center for Disease Prevention, which urges leaders to be consistent, transparent, and accurate. Trump has effectively ordered a stand down for the virus invasion, dangerously downplayed the public health risk ("I think it's going to work out fine"), and relentlessly praised his own performance. ("We’ve done a phenomenal job on this.”)

In response, lots of journalists ask with genuine astonishment, 'Why is he undermining scientists? Why is he knowingly misleading the public during the pandemic?' Because the plan is to create a nonstop loop of puzzlement to the point where it's not possible to understand what Trump's policy is and what direction the federal government is going. All the while attacking the news media in order to create confusion about the facts. (Today, nearly eight-in-ten Republicans think the press is exaggerating the covid-19 risks.) https://pressrun.media/p/trumps-pandemic-propaganda-comes

18. Margaret Carlson: The Only Curve That’s Flattening Is Trump’s Learning Curve

It’s hard to believe that every day during a pandemic Trump puts on a show that pulls a supporting cast to the White House for hours of kumbaya. Traditionally, even lackluster presidents raise their game in a crisis and the great ones like Lincoln and FDR saw us through the darkest days. Instead, Trump is concentrating on being his own press secretary, completing a transition begun months ago in the White House driveway. With rehearsal and performance, it consumes much of his day. He boasts that his rating beat the finale of The Bachelor, the only metric that matters to him. He didn’t retreat on his promise of an Easter Day resurrection to save lives. He retreated to keep his numbers up.  

Trump’s turn as his own spokesperson and TV producer is not victimless. He relegates experts to bit players. Trump can barely do one job, much less two. He pulls Dr. Anthony Fauci away from his work for hours a day while giving him just enough crumbs to convince the sleepless doctor that it’s worth it to keep trying to convince Trump to do his job. Right after dropping the Easter fantasy, Trump threw out another date a month hence, moments after Fauci cautioned that only the virus sets the timeline.

To bolster his claim that his response has been a 10 on a scale of 10 while also stressing that he’s not responsible for anything that’s gone wrong, Trump took credit for pushing through limited FDA approval for drugs Fauci is cautious about but that Dr. Trump believes will cure COVID-19. All he’s done is create a run on those drugs so that people with the life-threatening diseases they’re intended for can’t get them. 

Trump squandered a good six weeks while experts tiptoed around his fragile ego and cajoled him into taking the slightest measures. Meanwhile he descended from depraved indifference to reckless endangerment, jeopardizing lives in states with unappreciative governors he accused of hoarding, whining, and exaggerating the need for ventilators as an excuse for not providing them. He’s still surprised when he sees a picture of a truck as long as the Rose Garden serving as a makeshift morgue outside a hospital in Queens, where he was raised. No one else is. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-only-coronavirus-curve-thats-flattening-is-trumps-learning-curve