1. Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes: He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus

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 Trump's 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html

2. Dana Milbank: Trump and Kushner could reap a pandemic windfall

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have insisted that Congress spend another $250 billion on small businesses devastated by the pandemic, but they refuse to “renegotiate unrelated programs” from last month’s emergency coronavirus bill.

What are they afraid of?

Well, maybe it’s this: As the dust settles on the $2.2 trillion legislation, it has become clear that one of its largest provisions, a $170 billion tax giveaway, appears to be tailor-made for the benefit of wealthy real estate investors such as President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is running one of Trump’s coronavirus task forces.

The giveaway, primarily to real estate investors and hedge funds, is larger than the total amount in the legislation for hospitals ($100 billion) and for relief for all state and local governments ($150 billion). Worse, the bonanza for these millionaires and billionaires has little to do with the coronavirus: It lets them offset losses not just from 2020 but from 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic.

This is repugnant. Cash-strapped states don’t have the funds to care for the sick, much less to do the testing, contact tracing and isolation needed to reopen workplaces and schools. As The Post’s Tony Romm reported Tuesday, more than 2,100 U.S. cities expect major budget shortfalls — and therefore possible cuts to vital public services.

But this provision gives tax filers who earn more than $1 million a year an average windfall of $1.6 million this year alone. (Compare that with the $1,200 break the average wage earner gets.) As The Post’s Jeff Stein reported Tuesday, the Joint Committee on Taxation found that 82 percent of the benefit of this and another tax giveaway in the coronavirus relief bill will go to the 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1 million — and just 3 percent to those who earn less than $100,000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/trump-kushner-could-reap-pandemic-windfall/

3. David Zurawik: Trump more focused on TV briefings and rewriting history than saving lives 

Ignorance, arrogance and petulance ― that’s the Trump administration from the president on down. And it has been that way since the inauguration.

But the burning media question now is how much longer can we stomach heaping TV helpings day after day of the president’s reckless behavior as thousands die horrible deaths due to the COVID-19 virus. When are enough lies, spin and disinformation every night on TV enough?

Citing an inspector general’s report from the Department of Health and Human Services that found “severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results,” Fox News correspondent Kristin Fisher asked, "When can hospitals expect a quick turnaround on these test results?”

That set Mr. Trump off ― straight down the bunny trail of vitriol and press hatred. Hip-pity-hop to the paranoia shop as Mr. Trump blamed the hospital and states for any problems in testing. He then demanded the name of the author of the report and date of appointment suggesting any criticism was the result of partisan politics.

“You should say, ‘Congratulations, great job,’ instead of being so horrid in the way you ask a question,” Mr. Trump angrily told Ms. Fisher.

But Mr. Trump’s anger didn’t truly boil over until Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, followed up with the date of Ms. Grimm’s recent promotion.

“You’re a third rate reporter,” he told Mr. Karl. “And what you just said is a disgrace ... You will never make it.”

Ms. Fisher and Mr. Karl did exactly what the press is supposed to do in challenging Mr. Trump. He is desperate to rewrite the history of his failure in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis early on, and that’s what these daily TV performances are mainly about: him trying to change the narrative of failure that is settling in. https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/zurawik/bs-ed-zontv-trump-media-covid-20200408-zpcth34oqjaa5lvmc6p65remmm-story.html

4. Susan B. Glasser: How Did the U.S. End Up with Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags?

America was watching, shocked, as doctors and nurses pleaded for protective gear and medical equipment such as ventilators. Ries was asked to help start a Web site that would match hospitals and suppliers. Sure, Ries said, he could have something up and running by Monday. What followed over the next two weeks was an inside glimpse of the dysfunction emanating from Trump’s Washington in the midst of the pandemic, a crash course in the breakdown that has led to nurses in one of the wealthiest countries in the world wearing garbage bags to protect themselves from a virus whose outbreak the President downplayed until it was too late to prepare for its consequences.

Earlier this week, the office of the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services released a survey of three hundred and twenty-three hospitals in forty-six states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and it found “widespread shortages of PPE,” and also of other equipment. After the report was released, Trump claimed it was “wrong,” tweeted that it was “Another Fake Dossier!,” and attacked the principal deputy I.G. who prepared it because she had also served during the Obama Administration. Trump, of course, omitted the fact that she is a career official who also served in the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations.

All of this was predicted. On February 13th, the Center for Global Development, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, warned in a report about the “urgent but closing window” for the U.S. government to prepare, including specifically recommending an immediate review of the P.P.E. supply chain; the creation of a plan for distribution of supplies and the public communication of that plan; and the development of “options for addressing PPE shortfalls,” which ranged from increasing manufacturing to coming up with new “parameters for reuse in crisis conditions.” This was in mid-February, a full month before Trump deputized Kushner to step in and the first orders went out.

The mad dash for supplies set off by Trump’s incomprehensible handling of the crisis cannot help those already in the thick of the outbreak; the help that is on the way now, finally and belatedly, will be for the next cities and states to face it. There was a window for action. It wasn’t just closed. It was slammed shut. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-coronavirus-and-how-the-united-states-ended-up-with-nurses-wearing-garbage-bags

5. Bess Levin: Surprise: William Barr Fully Supports Trump’s Totalitarian Oversight Purge

Despite generally enjoying the unfettered support of Republicans who seemingly took a blood oath to back him on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s decision over the last week to purge not one but two inspectors general, with an eye on even more, has drawn bipartisan criticism. That likely has to do with the fact that firing Michael Atkinson, who oversaw the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment trial, and removing Glenn Fine from his role overseeing the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, smacked of an out-of-control despot who would stop at nothing to consolidate power, even amidst an unprecedented health and economic catastrophe. One person totally cool with the moves, though? William Barr, the president’s lackey attorney general.

In an interview with Fox News that aired Thursday night, Barr told Laura Ingraham that he fully supported Trump’s decision to oust Atkinson, which is not that surprising given his previous comments on impeachment (to wit: that the inquiry was led by people “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary”). Claiming Trump, who has never done the right thing, “did the right thing” in removing the intelligence community’s internal watchdog, Barr argued that Atkinson had erred in letting people know about the whistleblower report (the contents of which, as a reminder, turned out to be 100% true). “He had interpreted his statute, which was a fairly narrow statute which gave him jurisdiction over wrongdoing…by intelligence people, and tried to turn it into a commission to explore anything in the government and immediately report it to Congress without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem,” Barr said of Atkinson. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/william-barr-trump-ig-purge

6. ErIc Lutz: Can The Republican Machine Rewrite Trump’s Coronavirus Bungling?

Donald Trump in recent weeks has been hammered by advertisements taking him to task for his disastrous handling of the coronavirus crisis. The ads have been effective, largely because they’ve been true: Trump did, as a Joe Biden ad last month illustrated, fail to take the COVID threat seriously. He has, as a new spot from liberal Super PAC Win the West highlighted Thursday, repeatedly spread false information and lies about both the virus and his administration’s response to it. Trump has appeared on television every day in rambling, self-aggrandizing, and highly misleading press conferences, ostensibly to discuss his administration’s efforts to combat the deadly virus—and every day, he provides new soundbites for his opponents to use against him.

Concerned that could hurt his reelection chances in November, the Republican National Committee is springing into action to provide some counter-messaging, pouring more than a million dollars into the president’s effort to rewrite his coronavirus response. According to Politico, the GOP is launching a massive ad offensive in battleground states, praising Trump’s leadership in the crisis. The ads are aimed at convincing swing voters of Trump’s emergency management, in part by using clips of Democratic governors Gavin Newsom of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York speaking positively of parts of the administration’s efforts. It’s an unusually large ad campaign this early in a race, as Politico noted, but reflects the extent to which Republicans fear his coronavirus response has threatened him politically.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/can-the-republican-machine-rewrite-trumps-coronavirus-bungling

7.  Paul Krugman: American Democracy May Be Dying

Wisconsin, like most of the country, is under a stay-at-home order. So why did Republican legislators, eventually backed by the Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, insist on holding an election as if the situation were normal?

The answer is that the state shutdown had a much more severe impact on voting in Democratic-leaning urban areas, where a great majority of polling places were closed, than in rural or suburban areas. So the state G.O.P. was nakedly exploiting a pandemic to disenfranchise those likely to vote against it.

What we saw in Wisconsin, in short, was a state party doing whatever it takes to cling to power even if a majority of voters want it out — and a partisan bloc on the Supreme Court backing its efforts. Donald Trump, as usual, said the quiet part out loud: If we expand early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Does anyone seriously doubt that something similar could happen, very soon, at a national level? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/opinion/wisconsin-primary-democracy.html

8. Adam Tooze: The Normal Is Never Coming Back

As the coronavirus lockdown began, the first impulse was to search for historical analogies—1914, 1929, 1941? As the weeks have ground on, what has come ever more to the fore is the historical novelty of the shock that we are living through. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, America’s economy is now widely expected to shrink by a quarter. That is as much as during the Great Depression. But whereas the contraction after 1929 stretched over a four-year period, the coronavirus implosion will happen over the next three months. There has never been a crash landing like this before. There is something new under the sun. And it is horrifying.

As recently as five weeks ago, at the beginning of March, U.S. unemployment was at record lows. By the end of March, it had surged to somewhere around 13 percent. That is the highest number recorded since World War II. We don’t know the precise figure because our system of unemployment registration was not built to track an increase at this speed. On successive Thursdays, the number of those making initial filings for unemployment insurance has surged first to 3.3 million, then 6.6 million, and now by another 6.6 million. At the current rate, as the economist Justin Wolfers pointed out in the New York Times, U.S. unemployment is rising at nearly 0.5 percent per day. It is no longer unimaginable that the overall unemployment rate could reach 30 percent by the summer. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/09/unemployment-coronavirus-pandemic-normal-economy-is-never-coming-back/

9. Tom Nichols: With Each Briefing, Trump Is Making Us Worse People

Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival. Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.

Most leaders would at least have the sense not to re-litigate every vendetta in their personal Burn Book at such moments. That’s what rallies and sycophantic interviews with Fox News are for, after all. Indeed, polls now suggest that even the president’s base might be tiring of this exhibitionism. But that is irrelevant to Trump. With cable news constantly covering the pandemic, he seems to be going through withdrawal. He needs an outlet for his political glossolalia, or his constantly replenishing reservoir of grievance and insecurity will burst its seams. https://wikkorg.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/with-each-briefing-trump-is-making-us-worse-people/

10. Jeff Greenfield: How Coronavirus Will Blow Up the 2020 Campaign

The coronavirus pandemic poses challenges to the candidates and their operative unlike any ever seen or even anticipated. From the earliest days of American politics, the whole system has been driven by interaction with people: from Fourth of July speeches to door-to-door canvassing to conventions themselves. Even in the age of TV and social media, political fortunes rest on in-person contact, and candidates being in the right place and the right time—precisely what cannot happen now.

With some kind of social distancing policy possibly in place for months, and no vaccine on the horizon till next year at the earliest, campaign insiders are already asking questions that don't appear to have any good answers. How do you hold a safe convention, or create a new kind of "virtual” event that accomplishes anything a convention is supposed to do? How do you try to unify a party without being able to bring any of its factions together for face-to-face negotiating? What kind of a campaign can you even run if the key element of a campaign—regular, in-person visits to battleground states—is off the table? How do you mount a “get out the vote” campaign if door-to-door canvassing and sign-up efforts at mass rallies are out of the question? https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/12/coronavirus-2020-campaign-178487

11. Jane Mayer: How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief

Many have regarded McConnell’s support for Trump as a stroke of cynical political genius. McConnell has seemed to be both protecting his caucus and covering his flank in Kentucky—a deep-red state where, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump is far more popular than he is. When the pandemic took hold, the President’s standing initially rose in national polls, and McConnell and Trump will surely both take credit for the aid package in the coming months.

Yet, as COVID-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell’s alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the President would remain in office. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-mitch-mcconnell-became-trumps-enabler-in-chief

12. Jonathan Chait: Trump Campaign’s Genius Plan to Blame China for the Coronavirus Has One Flaw

Trump is trying to get voters to stop thinking of the coronavirus as a public-health problem, and instead imagine it as a foreign-policy confrontation, with the important quality of leadership being a willingness to offend China. Trump had the guts to take the un-PC step of closing travel to China, they argue, and Biden didn’t. Trump was willing to be called racist to save lives, but Biden is either too sensitive or too compromised by China to take the tough steps.

In reality, the argument strings together a series of falsehoods and bizarre logic. The first and largest lie is Trump’s claim that Biden opposed his travel ban as racist. Biden did not oppose the travel ban, and Trump’s campaign has produced no statement by him opposing the ban. In place of evidence that he ever did, Trump has quoted Biden describing him promoting “xenophobia” in general, but Biden’s comment was not specifically directed at the travel ban. (Biden made that remark at about the same time of day the travel ban was instituted, and apparently without even knowing that Trump did it.)

Biden also appears in Trump’s ad saying, “banning all travel will not stop” the coronavirus. The best evidence for this point of view is that the coronavirus still made it to the United States. Of course the travel ban didn’t stop the coronavirus. Trump’s ad is attacking Biden for a prediction that was correct. It was Trump’s apparent belief that the travel ban permanently halted the coronavirus’s progress that contributed to his disastrous complacency over the following weeks. Trump’s campaign is anchoring the debate on an specific argument — will the China travel ban by itself stop the coronavirus? — where his opponent has been proven right, and he has been proven wrong. It’s as if the president of France was running for reelection in the fall of 1940 by boasting the Maginot Line had kept out the Germans.

What brings the charge beyond mere falseness, to the point of outright absurdity, is that Trump himself is guilty of the exact thing he is falsely charging Biden of. Trump’s depiction of his opponent as a corrupt dupe for the Chinese communist regime is a much more accurate depiction of Trump himself.

Trump’s charge of corruption is connected to reality by the thinnest strand: Hunter Biden’s firm sought to make a deal in China while his father served as vice-president. But Trump’s claims are ludicrous. He says Hunter Biden “walked out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund” and earned “millions.” In fact, there is no evidence he earned any money at all from China, let alone any evidence Joe Biden did anything unethical on his son’s behalf. Hunter Biden is a screwup who was trying to trade on his father’s name, but — perhaps because he’s a screwup — he apparently did not succeed. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-china-biden-coronavirus-false-travel-ban-wuhan.html

13. Rick Wilson: Trump the Narcissistic Authoritarian Statist Declares He Has ‘Total’ Authority

If you watched President Donald Trump’s daily press briefing Monday, you know that even by his abysmal standards this was the loudest siren yet, a warning that the man occupying the Oval Office is more suited to a very long, involuntary stay in an inpatient mental-health facility than the presidency of the United States.
It wasn’t presidential leadership. It wasn’t executive power made manifest. It wasn’t a grown-ass adult facing a serious crisis. It was an angry, needy man not looking outward to the needs of a nation in crisis but inward, and downward.

Anyone—and I mean anyone—who tells you Monday’s presser was anything other than a complete meltdown shitshow on the top of the dumpster fire at the peak of Burning-Tire Mountain is a liar.

It was a manic, gibbering, squint-eyed ragefest by America’s Worst President, a petty display by a failed man who long ago passed the limits of his competence and knowledge. It left little to cling to for even his most fervent lackeys but the grunting media animus that replaced conservatism as the motivating force of the Republican Party.

Trump just gave the nation a performance that was so manic, so furious, and so utterly unhinged that anyone watching it walked away thinking the 25th Amendment has been too long unexercised and the proof is behind the podium every damn day.

What you saw was the real Trump, unbound by facts, reason, logic, the law, or the Constitution, a petty bitch picking petty fights with reporters, a bard of his own songs of grievance and anger. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-the-narcissistic-authoritarian-statist-declares-he-has-total-authority-to-reopen-the-economy

14. Josh Kraushaar: Why Trump’s slump is likely to last all year

Trump is in an increasingly precarious position for reelection as he struggles to maintain focus on the coronavirus pandemic, instead nursing his personal grievances against the press and his political rivals in a time of crisis. He has already squandered the “rally around the flag” bounce that he received in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and polling suggests that the president is losing ground to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden both nationally and in key battleground states.

Here’s the harsh reality: Trump is down in the polls, and may still slip further back. With Biden expanding the map into Arizona and the president losing ground in the Midwest, Democrats have more plausible paths to an Electoral College majority. And as a recession becomes a reality, the president will bear the brunt of the blame. These are trends more suggestive of a Democratic blowout than a second Trump term. https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/706071?unlock=2CDI60WYWVDTTMGJ

15. John Stoehr: Is the COVID-19 Pandemic Signaling the End of a 40-year Republican 'Regime'?

It’s tempting to see the current crisis as the beginning of the end of the Reagan-Bush regime. The new coronavirus has killed more than 26,000 people in this country and will likely lead to thousands more deaths. Its economic impact threatens to push unemployment up to 20 percent (that’s firmly in Great Depression territory). Farmers are plowing under crops and dumping milk while people are going hungry. Experts are warning of the need for “social distancing” practices for at least two more years, which, when you think about it, means we could be living abnormally for such a long time that the very notion of normal will eventually become a distance memory.

There’s another sign of regime change. What was politically impossible is all of a sudden politically expedient. For instance: Criminal justice reformers have for years been advocating for releasing prisoners convicted of minor crimes, such as the sale of marijuana. GOP lawmakers always balked, saying releasing them before they repaid debts to society would give people free license to commit future crimes. Yet, in the thick of a pandemic, states are releasing non-violent felons in droves. Just like that.

A host of progressive policy ideas are quickly worth talking about in Washington. Permanent paid medical leave, employment guarantees, universal basic income, higher minimum wages, universal health care, comprehensive immigration reform, even climate change regulation—the list goes on and on. In the past, the GOP and the business class said we can’t do this. It would hurt the economy! But we may soon be getting to the point where we can say: if we don’t do this, that will hurt the economy! https://stoehr.substack.com/p/is-the-covid-19-pandemic-signaling