1. Philip Bump and Ashley Parker: 13 hours of Trump: The president fills briefings with attacks and boasts, but little empathy

Trump strode to the lectern in the White House briefing room Thursday and, for just over an hour, attacked his rivals, dismissing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a “sleepy guy in a basement of a house” and lambasting the media as “fake news” and “lamestream.”

He showered praise on himself and his team, repeatedly touting the “great job” they were doing as he spoke of the “tremendous progress” being made toward a vaccine and how “phenomenally” the nation was faring in terms of mortality.

What he did not do was offer any sympathy for the 2,081 Americans who were reported dead from the coronavirus on that day alone — among the now more than 54,000 Americans who have perished since the pandemic began.

What began as daily briefings meant to convey public health information have become de facto political rallies conducted from the West Wing of the White House — events that are now in doubt after an uproar last week over Trump’s suggestion of another bogus coronavirus cure. The president has offered little in the way of accurate medical information or empathy for coronavirus victims, instead focusing on attacking his enemies and lauding himself and his allies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/13-hours-of-trump-the-president-fills-briefings-with-attacks-and-boasts-but-little-empathy/2020/04/25/7eec5ab0-8590-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

2. Charles M. Blow: For Trump, Lying Is a Super Power

Trump, as a person and politician, is riddled with flaws. But he also has an ignominious super power: He is completely unencumbered by the truth, the need to tell it or accept it. He will do and say anything that he believes will help him. He has no greater guiding principles. He is not bound by ethics or morals. His only alliances are to those who would support and further his devotion to self-promotion.

No one is as shameless a showman as Trump. He was in survival mode. Nothing was too far, nothing was too crass.

Don’t fall prey to false hope that defeating Trump will be easy, that his horrifically incompetent response to the coronavirus has doomed him. It hasn’t. Trump will fight with everything he has to the bitter end to stay in power. He will never admit any fault. He will lie and lie and lie and lie some more. And the people who support him will stick with him every step of the way.

I put nothing past Trump, absolutely nothing! And neither should you. Be prepared for Trump to do anything and everything to win re-election in November. A man who can dismiss a recording of his own voice bragging about assaulting women is capable of anything. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html

3. John Stoehr: Mitch McConnell's Multiverse of Betrayal

Not so fast, said Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader said yesterday that his conference was in no mood for more relief. The national debt is becoming a serious issue, he said. We can’t mortgage our children’s future on a “blue-state bailout.” “We’re not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created for themselves with bad decisions in the past,” he said. Instead, he said, he’d rather work to change current federal law so states can declare bankruptcy.

It’s hard to express the depths of betrayal here, but I’m going to try. First, future insolvencies are not a consequence of past decisions by the states, but instead recent inaction by a president whose gross negligence and incompetence forced cities and states to take matters into their own hands. Second, McConnell is suggesting the country does not owe these cities and states a debt of gratitude deserving of federal compensation even if the money ended up covering “bad decisions in the past.” Third, in not recognizing the debt owed, and instead offering the possibility of bankruptcy, he’s slapping the face of anyone who has sacrificed, which is to say everyone.

With respect to blue states, the betrayal goes even deeper. Blue states are richer, and they send more tax dollars to Washington than they get in return. That’s not so painful given that blue states tend to believe in the common good, plus they used to keep some of the money thanks to a tax code allowing filers to deduct state and local taxes from their federal tax returns. In 2017 Trump, McConnell and the Republicans capped SALT deductions, in effect raising taxes on rich states while cutting taxes for obscenely rich individuals. Blue states were already subsidizing red states. Now that went double.

Make it triple. McConnell is fine with extracting wealth from major cities and blue states, redistributing it to red states and GOP-friendly corporations, while at the same time expressing concern for the national debt just when 56 million Americans, who collectively send Democrats to Washington, are in full need of assistance. McConnell is happy, in other words, to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals. That’s not what you expect from a leader governing in the interest of all Americans.

It is, however, what you’d expect from a traitor. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/coronavirus-mcconnell-states-bankruptcy.html

4. Jonathan Chait: Top Government Vaccine Expert Fired for Questioning Trump’s Fake Science

Yesterday, Dr. Rick Bright was suddenly deposed from his position as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an agency at the center of government efforts to produce treatment and a vaccine for the coronavirus. The firing “couldn’t come at a more inopportune time for the office, which invests in drugs, devices, and other technologies that help address infectious disease outbreaks and which has been at the center of the government’s coronavirus pandemic response,” reported the health publication STAT.

Today, Bright gave an explanation for his untimely departure: He believes he was pushed out for insisting on limits to the use of hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment that Trump has touted as a miracle cure for the virus. “Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit,” Bright tells Maggie Haberman.

Bright also alleges that political appointees pressured him to support drugs promoted by Trump’s political allies: “I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.” That Trump loyalists’ lobbyists tried to subvert the scientific method to allow their donors and political allies to benefit from the billions of dollars in federal funding is an explosive and all-too-plausible charge.

The loss of one of the nation’s most highly regarded vaccine specialists is a devastating blow to what is quite literally the most important project in the world. It is also indicative of a Trumpian war on science of which Bright is far from the only casualty. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/top-vaccine-expert-fired-trump-hydroxychloroquine-messonnier-science.html

5. Jonathan Bernstein: Trump’s Disinfectant Idea Is More Than a Silly Sound Bite

There’s a clip circulating of Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, reacting in resigned disbelief as Trump launches into this digression. It was astonishing in a sense. But also: par for the course. Birx is every trade expert when Trump talks tariffs, every health-policy expert when he talks health care, every defense expert when he talks about the military. He combines uncanny confidence with a total lack of knowledge on topic after topic. 

To listen to him in his briefings and other appearances is to hear howler after howler if one has a reasonable grasp of politics and government. The U.S. military, he says, was out of ammunition when he became president. NATO allies owe us money because they’re behind on their dues. Trade deficits are simply unilateral transfers of money from one nation to another. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what “pre-existing conditions” means, even though I’ve heard him discuss the topic dozens of times.

All presidents enter the White House with significant gaps in their knowledge of public policy. Every modern one has worked reasonably hard or very hard to catch up. Trump by all accounts (including his own) instead watches hours of cable news every day. As I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with presidents monitoring the media, even though they have much better sources of information. It’s a good way to get outside the White House bubble and understand what other people are hearing. But Trump appears to use cable news as a substitute, not a supplement, to basic briefings.

Trump’s confused answer underlines the extent to which he is still, even now, disengaged from any real planning to control the pandemic and revive the economy. Perhaps he realized that talking about preparations for the fall might contradict his insistence that the federal response is perfect right now. But even then it’s shocking that he didn't have some kind of prepared answer for a question that’s so central to the crisis.  https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-24/donald-trump-s-coronavirus-briefings-don-t-inspire-confidence

6. Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman: Many Republicans believe President Trump’s daily news briefings are inflicting grave damage on his political standing.

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

The scale of the G.O.P.’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Mr. Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he is even narrowly behind in must-win Florida.

Democrats raised substantially more money than Republicans did in the first quarter in the most pivotal congressional races, according to recent campaign finance reports. And while Mr. Trump is well ahead in money compared with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democratic donors are only beginning to focus on the general election, and several super PACs plan to spend heavily on behalf of him and the party.

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.

His daily news briefings on the coronavirus outbreak are inflicting grave damage on his political standing, Republicans believe, and his recent remarks about combating the virus with sunlight and disinfectant were a breaking point for a number of senior party officials. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/us/politics/trump-election-briefings.html

7. Rick Wilson: Never forget that the man spouting a stream of absurd BS is the president of the United F*cking States

Abandoning the little things like science, medicine, chemistry, and pharmacology, Alchemist in Chief Donald Trump used his daily rant session to leap so far off the deep end that viewers would not have been shocked to see him in a wizard’s robe covered in mystic symbols.

“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light,” Trump said. “And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way and I think you said you’re going to test that too.”

Case closed!

But Mr. President, have you considered the role of the bilious humours in COVID-19? Perhaps the falling damps? What about comets? Would you recommend leeches or bloodletting after the mythical light therapy, or should we have a cunning woman from the village mix up some sort of poultice? Is mandrake root contraindicated in the treatment of coronavirus?

It got better, and by better I mean even more insane.

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

Interesting. Injecting disinfectant. What could possibly go wrong?  https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-idiot-alchemist-says-sun-bleach-will-save-us

8. John Stoehr: ’Light and Heat,' the Politics of the Occult

It doesn't make any sense, because it's not supposed to.

It’s natural to call Trump an idiot. It’s understandable to call him deranged. A more sophisticated reaction might be that he’s a conspiracy theorist or a fascist demagogue or an anti-intellectual populist. I have touched on all of these. But today, I’d like to suggest another view: that Donald Trump’s politics are the politics of the occult.

Coronavirus protesters, sovereign citizen militias, Deep State conspiracists, QAnon (the belief that Democrats worship Satan and have orgies with children), and even white evangelical Christian preachers defying stay-at-home orders and turning congregants into idolaters—all of these and more can be better described as variations on a theme of the politics of the occult. None of it makes sense, because it was never intended to make sense, and our trying to force it to make sense actually empowers it.

I don’t intent to besmirch the good names of genuine believers in the occult or the earth-centered religion of magick. (I’m thinking specifically of the late Margot Adler, an esteemed NPR reporter and Wiccan priestess who wrote the book that established what’s now known as neopaganism.) But the fact is, occultism has a bad reputation, and I’m not above exploiting it to put Trump’s politics in a rhetorical box.

So the next time a white evangelical preacher says his followers can defend against the new coronavirus by drenching themselves in the blood of Christ, know he’s not practicing the Christian faith so much as practicing the politics of the occult. Same thing goes for anyone deciding it’s a good idea to inject themselves with bleach. https://stoehr.substack.com/p/light-and-heat-the-politics-of-the

9. Mark Lebovich: Trump Turns Shared American Experiences Into Us vs. Them

Mr. Trump’s performance during this pandemic has been a missed opportunity. “The coronavirus could have been Donald Trump’s finest hour,” Mr. Widmer said. “You really sensed that Americans wanted to be brought together. But now that appears unattainable.”

For whatever reason, Mr. Trump seems uninterested in setting aside personal resentment, even when some small gestures — a photo op or a joint statement with Democratic leaders in Congress; a bipartisan pandemic commission chaired by former presidents — could score him easy statesmanship points.

His unwillingness to deal in any way with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (they have reportedly not spoken since the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January) has rendered him a bystander during negotiations with Congress on massive economic recovery bills that were by and large led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He has taken shots at popular Democratic governors in the hard-hit states of Washington and of Michigan; his approval ratings are dipping — and lag behind that of most governors.. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/us/politics/white-house-correspondents-dinner-bipartisan-trump.html

10. Joe Scarborough: The cost of Trump’s deadly state of denial

President Trump has been stumbling through a year of magical thinking. The consequences of this deadly state of denial have been catastrophic for pandemic victims and the U.S.

In January, Trump said the coronavirus threat was “one person coming in from China”: “We have it totally under control . . . it’s going to be just fine.” But the president’s intelligence community had been warning him for weeks about the coming threat when he made that spurious claim.

In February, Trump predicted the virus would go away by April. “It’s like a miracle. It will disappear.” That reckless prediction also came weeks after White House staff warned the virus could imperil millions of Americans’ lives while costing the U.S. economy trillions of dollars.

In March, the president told worried Republican senators to “just stay calm” because “it will go away.” Trump spent much of that month ignoring Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, by declaring that the untested use of a malaria drug to treat covid-19 could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” This week, the Food and Drug Administration had to warn Americans against the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus because it caused “serious heart rhythm problems.”

Throughout April, Trump’s magical thinking continued full force, with the flustered president assuring reporters this week that covid-19 “might not come back at all” this fall. Fauci again had to correct the president’s spurious claims. The next day, Trump publicly peppered his staff and medical about imagined benefits of ingesting disinfectants and implanting lights for pandemic patients. Once again, Trump’s own administration had to warn the public against believing the president’s ramblings.

As the former reality TV host trotted out these baseless remedies and delusional denials at his afternoon news conferences, 53,000 Americans died from a disease that did not go away miraculously in April. Instead, as former vice president Joe Biden predicted in January, Trump left America ill-prepared for the coming pandemic. Trump and Fox News’s Sean Hannity were still claiming in March that the press was overblowing a crisis that Hannity declared was being used to “bludgeon Trump again with this new hoax.” A month after the cable news host pushed out that obscene and dangerous disinformation, covid-19 killed more Americans on a single day in April than died in combat during the United States’ 19-year war in Afghanistan. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-trumps-deadly-state-of-denial/2020/04/25/d0488c5c-8591-11ea-878a-86477a724bdb_story.html

11. Arwa Mahdawi: Trump is unravelling – even his supporters can't ignore it now

The tide now seems to have turned. Recent polls show that most Americans are unimpressed with Trump’s handling of the crisis. This includes conservatives: a Siena College poll released on Monday found that 56% of Republican voters in New York say they trust Andrew Cuomo, the state’s Democratic governor, to decide how to reopen the state over Trump. Even Fox News seems to have cooled towards Trumpism; the network has just cut ties with Diamond & Silk, a pair of rightwing social-media stars who have been two of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, after they promoted conspiracy theories and disinformation.

Perhaps the only people more incompetent than Trump are the ragtag team of sycophants he has surrounded himself with. According to Politico, Trump is leaning heavily on Hope Hicks, who he reportedly calls “Hopey”, to steer him through the coronavirus crisis. Hicks, 31, who was formerly the White House communications director, is one of Trump’s most-trusted aides; according to one tell-all book, her duties used to include steaming his trousers – while he wore them. It turns out Hopey is the mastermind who urged Trump to “act as a frontman” during the crisis instead of deferring to health experts. Now that plan has backfired, Hicks – who officially works under boy genius Jared Kushner – is apparently developing a new strategy for Trump. He had better Hopey this one is a little more effective. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/28/trump-is-unravelling-even-his-supporters-cant-ignore-it-now

12.  Robert Draper: Can the Trump Campaign Rewrite the Story of the Trump Presidency?

Trump has pronounced himself a “wartime president” struggling against an “ enemy,” suggesting the hope that he might benefit from the nation’s shared sense of embattlement. The question is whether voters will see him that way or judge him missing in action. The boost in approval he enjoyed early in the pandemic was short-lived and much smaller than other presidents in recent decades have received amid national emergencies; by the middle of April it stood, according to Gallup, at a familiar (for Trump) 43 percent. More ominous, according to a mid-April Morning Consult poll, support for the president’s handling of the coronavirus among senior citizens — a stronghold of his electoral support — dropped 20 points in the preceding month. On the other hand, his approval among Republicans remained as stable, and as high (93 percent), as it has been throughout the rest of his presidency.

The selling of a president to voters under such circumstances has no precedent in the history of American politics. Herbert Hoover had three years to try to convince the electorate that the Great Depression was a consequence of World War I, that his administration had staved off catastrophe and that his Democratic opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, would usher in a crippling expansion of federal power. (And he failed.) Parscale will have had eight months to persuade voters that the Trump campaign’s official slogan, “Keep America Great,” accurately reflects the state of the country they are seeing with their own eyes. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/magazine/trump-campaign-manager-coronavirus.html

13. Zack Stanton: ’The Nightmare Scenario’: How Coronavirus Could Make the 2020 Vote a Disaster

The prospect that terrifies election experts isn’t the idea that Trump moves the election (something he lacks the power to do); it’s something altogether more plausible: Despite an ongoing pandemic, the 2020 election takes place as planned, and America is totally unprepared.

The nightmare scenario goes something like this: Large numbers of voters become disenfranchised because they’re worried it’s not safe to vote and that participating makes it more likely they catch the coronavirus. Voter-registration efforts, almost always geared toward in-person sign-ups, bring in very few new voters. A surge of demand for absentee ballots overwhelms election administrators, who haven’t printed enough ballots. In some states, like Texas, where fear of coronavirus isn’t a valid reason to request an absentee ballot, turnout drops as Americans are forced to choose between voting in person (and risking contact with the coronavirus) or not voting at all.

At the same time, confidence in the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service — whose coronavirus funding President Donald Trump has already threatened to block — teeters, and its involvement in handling so many absentee votes causes concern. Much as happened during the Wisconsin primary, a flood of mailed-in ballots makes it impossible to get full returns on election night, with heavily blue Democratic cities being, as usual, among the slowest to count. Trump declares victory based on those early returns, and again claims that the yet-to-be-counted absentees are tainted with fraud. Days later, with those votes counted, Joe Biden is declared the victor. Across the political spectrum, faith in the democratic process disintegrates as Americans question both the validity of the election and the ability of the government to respond to challenges it should have seen coming.

In surveying this scenario, what’s especially frightening is that it’s not far-fetched — at least according to University of California, Irvine professor Rick Hasen, one of the nation’s top experts in election law and the author of “Election Meltdown.” While much of the hand-wringing for the past month of more has been forward-looking — how coronavirus will change life at some point in the future — Hasen says the coronavirus is already changing American democracy, and that unless we adapt swiftly we’re headed for a world of pain in November. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/28/2020-election-coronavirus-disaster-impact-215559

14. Richard Stengel: “You Have to Be Albert Einstein to Figure It Out”: Trump’s Scientific Ignorance Is Crippling His Coronavirus Response

Disregard for science is part of a long American tradition of anti-intellectualism and scientific know-nothing-ism. The U.S. has overwhelmingly won more scientific Nobel prizes since World War II than any other nation, yet 40% of Americans do not believe in evolution. This scientific backwardness is fueled in particular by a Republican contempt for expertise and elites. Trump’s prejudices are a throwback to the 1950s; he treats scientists like delicate eggheads, a rarefied species to be carted out for show but not listened to. He’s the class bully who shoots spitballs at the kids who wear glasses and like Bunsen burners. This contempt is dangerous because it influences the American public, which is precisely what it is designed to do. Although popularity and respect levels of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx are far higher than those of the president, a poll reported on this past week shows that almost half of Americans believe the virus was created in a lab. Nearly a third of Americans believe there is already a vaccine, but it is being hidden from the public. Disinformation is also a pathogen, and Trump injects it into the national bloodstream every day.

Trump’s own scientific ignorance offers a contrast with a scientifically savvy president. In an interview in May of 2017, Trump was asked about the future of USS Ford-class carriers. Trump said he had been briefed about the catapults on these ships and was told the system was digital. He asked, why don’t they use steam anymore? “It sounded bad to me,” Trump said. “Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated. You have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out.” His quote reminded me that Albert Einstein had actually once given scientific advice to an American president, and it was Einstein’s letter to FDR outlining the possibilities of developing a nuclear weapon that launched the Manhattan Project. But of course, Trump has his own views on nuclear weapons: He’s reportedly suggested dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes to prevent them from hitting U.S. shores. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trumps-scientific-ignorance-is-crippling-his-coronavirus-response