1. Eric Lutz: They’re Starting To Feel Good”: In Trump’s Mind, Coronavirus Is Already Over

By virtually any indicator, the U.S. is still at the beginning of this public health crisis—not at the end. But Trump has once again reverted to the unrealistic optimism of February and March, when he downplayed the crisis as it escalated. All but declaring the U.S. victorious over the “invisible enemy” of coronavirus, the president has repeatedly suggested the worst of COVID is behind us and the country is now mounting a comeback over the pandemic. “I think [Americans are] starting to feel good now,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview Monday with the New York Post. “The country’s opening again.” Suggesting there’s “great optimism” among Americans, Trump insisted that he will “keep the virus at bay” amid his aggressive push to “reopen” the nation’s COVID-ravaged economy.

“If we have a flare up, we can put it out,” the president said. “We’ve learned a lot.”

How would he “put it out?” Who knows. There’s no proven treatment so far, a vaccine remains far off, and the administration is still failing to provide the adequate testing Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly said is necessary to begin reopening the country.

Nevertheless, Trump and his allies continue to push for a return to normalcy, even if that means tens of thousands more deaths. “Everybody wants to save every life they can,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said on CNN Monday. “But the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if Americans would accept perhaps 3,000 casualties a day, Christie replied: “They’re gonna have to.” But despite highly-publicized—often armed—protests across the country against stay-at-home orders, which Trump has encouraged, polls continue to show that Americans strongly oppose lifting the restrictions prematurely, apparently unwilling to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones for the sake of the economy. Trump may feel “great optimism” that the U.S. has turned a corner—but a majority of Americans don’t share in it. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/theyre-starting-to-feel-good-in-trumps-mind-coronavirus-is-already-over

2. Virginia Heffernan: As virus deaths rise, where’s Trump’s ‘great story’?

In late 2019, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, counseled a Saudi prince in his time of need. Poor Mohammed bin Salman. He was in hot water, you’ll recall, for ordering up an assassination that included sawing off the limbs of an American resident.

Kushner told MBS the gruesome killing could be smoothed over. The Saudis’ sadism, in other words, was merely a PR speed bump.

Kushner is treating American death as a personal publicity project once again. With his fingers all over the White House’s catastrophic coronavirus policy, he’s been lying about the pandemic with increasing rashness.
“We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this,” he told Fox News on Wednesday with a smooth smile. “The federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story.”

Note the past tense. Note the callousness.

The national death toll shot past 61,000 this week. My father’s sister was among the casualties — along with so many aunts, uncles, brothers, daughters, sisters, sons, mothers and fathers that the badly managed coronavirus crisis has killed — more Americans in three months than in 19 years of warfare in Vietnam.

On Wednesday, Kushner didn’t utter a word of condolence to the American people. Instead, he called their deaths his triumph.

No sane person buys what Kushner is selling. People are still dying by the thousands each day, and, in new hot spots, cases are mounting. The roller-coaster trend in Los Angeles is worrisome even as the state has overall succeeded in flattening the curve. And as Dr. Anthony Fauci keeps explaining, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over.

But Kushner is smearing his patented formula of shellac, Brylcreem and greasy lies — oh, and bleach — over these facts and the latest set of ghoulish Trumpian misdeeds. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-30/jared-kushner-donald-trump-covid-19-federal-response

3. Michael J. Stern: Why I'm skeptical about Reade's sexual assault claim against Biden: Ex-prosecutor.

 https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/29/joe-biden-sexual-assault-allegation-tara-reade-column/3046962001/

4. John Pavlovitz: The White Privilege to Terrorize

As a white man watching the Michigan protests of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders, all I could think was: 

• Black people don’t get to do this.
• Muslims don’t get to do this.
• Latinos don’t get to do this.
• People who don’t look like this don’t get to do this.
• They don’t get to swarm American capitol buildings in tactical gear with high-powered weapons, screaming in close proximity to police officers.
• They don’t get to dress up like Call of Duty cosplayers and attempt to physically intimidate politicians into bending to their wills.
• They don’t get to get to stop traffic in city streets decked out like they work at the Death Star and brazenly wield semi-automatic rifles.
• They don’t get to terrorize decent people and walk away.
• Only white people get to do this. 
• This violence is a singular privilege afforded to caucasian men in America. 
• People of color aren’t afforded this luxury.
• They can’t even get close to such ugliness.
• Heck, they barely get to breathe.
• No, they’re shot as 12-year olds walking through the park with toy guns.
• They’re choked out selling cigarettes on street corners.
• They’re assassinated while unarmed in their cars during routine traffic stops.
• They’re gunned down in their homes by uninvited police officers.
• They’re driven into the pavement by overzealous security guards.
• They’re demonized as mothers declaring that their murdered children’s lives mattered.
• They’re publicly vilified by white presidents for silently kneeling on NFL sidelines.
• Black people don’t get to to wear menacing masks or flash handguns on courthouse steps or accost strangers looking like dollar store stormtroopers, in an attempt to frighten people. https://johnpavlovitz.com/2020/05/01/the-white-privilege-to-terrorize/

5. Edward Luce: The golden age of Jared Kushner

George W Bush declared mission accomplished in Iraq just before the war fell off a cliff. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has just gambled the same on coronavirus.

The US economy would be “rocking by July”, Mr Kushner promised Fox News. The Trump administration’s handling of the epidemic had been a “great success story”, he said. “We’ve achieved all of the different milestones that are needed.” 

It is possible Mr Kushner knows something others do not — a breakthrough vaccine, for example, or a new therapy. Failing that, America’s milestones are not the type any country should emulate.

Having lost more than 60,000 people, the US accounts for a quarter of the world’s Covid-19 deaths with just 5 per cent of its population. America has a third of global infections. Forty-two countries have higher per capita rates of testing than the US — some by a considerable multiple.  Other countries, notably Belgium, Italy, Spain, the UK, France, Sweden and Switzerland, have higher death rates. America is on course to catch up with most of them. It took two months for the US to go from its first infection in late January to 1,000 deaths in late March. From there it took 15 days to reach 10,000 deaths. In the three weeks since then, the US has lost more than 50,000 people. America’s curve is not yet bending downwards. Now is not a good time to declare victory. 

Covid-19 has crystallised Washington’s descent into patrimonialism. The word of the ruling family holds more weight than science. For now America must live with government of the Trumps, by the Trumps and for the Trumps.  https://www.ft.com/content/1c079f85-2c61-4bd0-a7c6-39356ea6a6eb

6. Eric Levitz: Ending Lockdowns Won’t Revive the Economy

In recent days, many Republicans and advisers to Donald Trump have called for an immediate “reopening” of the U.S. economy to halt this historic contraction.

“You’re talking about real devastation. So that’s why I have been such a bull on getting the economy open quickly,” Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to the president, told Yahoo Finance this week. “Really, it’s just heartbreaking, and you see what’s happening with the food lines, with people at the Salvation Army, where trucks in some cities are a mile long. We are facing real devastation here, and the human toll is growing with each passing day.”

Moore’s position is morally odious in several respects. The supply-side economist has been fighting to deny the Americans in those food lines expanded unemployment benefits. When Moore calls on states to prioritize economic recovery over public health, he is not volunteering to sacrifice his own physical well-being on the altar of GDP; white-collar workers like himself need not choose between employment and the safety of social distancing. Rather, Moore is demanding that service workers be coerced (through the suspension of UI benefits) and coaxed (through official reassurances that the worst has passed) into subordinating their health to the restoration of the profitability of the enterprises that provide Moore and his ilk with streams of unearned income.

But the fundamental problem with Moore’s argument is less its dodgy ethics than its delusional substance. Formal lockdown orders are not what ail our economy. A highly contagious, unusually lethal virus, as well as the shock that virus has already delivered to consumers’ finances and confidence in the future, are. GOP governors may be able to “reopen” their states’ economies. But absent a COVID-19 vaccine and more robust income and payroll supports than Congress has yet mustered, no one will be able to revive growth anytime soon.

The U.S. is now suffering Great Depression levels of job losses, which will take many years to undo — no matter how prematurely the U.S. economy “reopens.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-reopen-economy-lockdowns-jobless-claims-sweden-south-korea.html

7. Ed Kilgore: Trump Blasts ‘Fake Polling’ (Unless It Makes Him Look Good)

Nothing illustrates the self-interested moral relativism characterizing our president’s worldview quite like his purely instrumental view of public-opinion research. If it redounds to his power and glory, it’s wonderful and worth proclaiming to the whole world like some sort of heathen gospel. If it doesn’t, then it’s “fake” and the mendacious work of his anti-American enemies.

For the president polling results are nothing more than agitprop to be praised or attacked, depending on how well they show him faring. Since recent head-to-head polls matching Trump against Joe Biden have been pretty generally negative for him (he trails the Democrat by 6.3 percent in the RCP polling averages), he’s on the warpath again. According to multiple accounts, his campaign’s internal polls show pretty much the same thing, and he’s sufficiently upset about it to lash out at the people around him, which is par for the course. Here’s how Vanity Fair reported a recent blowup with campaign manager Brad Parscale:

After Trump’s disinfectant comments set off a new political firestorm — the president reportedly took his anger over his dimming electoral prospects out on Parscale, whom he shouted at over the phone. “[Trump is] pissed because he knows he messed up in those briefings,” one Republican close to the White House told CNN about the president’s attack. CNN, which first reported the news of Trump’s call with Parscale, notes that Trump “berated” the campaign manager for the president’s poor polling numbers, and even threatened to sue Parscale, though the Post reports the comment was intended as a joke. 

All in all, it’s clear Trump wants to undermine the credibility of adverse polls as part of a broader project of undermining the credibility of unfriendly media. The erroneous but pervasive myth that polls got 2016 terribly wrong will help him in this endeavor, and if his polling performance improves, he will have no inhibitions about boasting that “even” the fake-news media’s fake polls acknowledge his towering popularity among a grateful populace. The scarier prospect is that he’s preparing to declare adverse election returns “fake” unless they confirm he’s won. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-blasts-fake-polling-unless-it-makes-him-look-good.html

8. Bess Levin: Trump Is Losing His Mind Over Reports He’s Losing His Mind

Donald Trump has never been the picture of mental stability, but over the last few weeks he’s appeared to crank up the crazy from about a 45 to a 337. From seemingly proposing intravenous Lysol as a coronavirus  to claiming the United States is close to testing 5 million people a day for COVID-19—a number so completely absurd that he might as well have said we’ll soon be running 8 billion tests a day—to reportedly threatening to sue his campaign manager over a dimming 2020 outlook, the president has well and truly lost whatever remaining shred of sanity he once had on reserve.

That people have had the audacity to point out how having a full-fledged lunatic in charge of the country during an unprecedented crisis is not exactly ideal has of course not gone over well in the Oval Office, whose inhabitant believes he’s the most reasonable, compos mentis person on earth (just ask him—he’ll tell you). After claiming in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday that he simply doesn’t “believe the polls” showing his reelection prospects circling the drain, the president—who is working so hard to overcome the pandemic that he sometimes only has 10 minutes for lunch—proceeded to tuck in for roughly 12 hours of screeching in a pitch only dogs can hear, tweeting and retweeting more than 56 times on everything from “DIRTY COP JAMES COMEY” to the wisdom of forcing meatpacking plants to stay open without worker protections to a plot by Democrats to “steal” the election. Mostly, though, he trained his fire on various journalists reporting his blowup with campaign manager Brad Parscale, sounding like a guy explaining to his cellmate at the asylum that this is all a big mix-up, he was framed, and he doesn’t actually belong here.

So anyway, the president is clearly well beyond the point where, were he not president, he would have been dropped off by his kids at a nice facility for “some rest.” Only in this case, we’re just letting him carry on running the country. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-coronavirus-meltdown

9. Jonathan Chait: Trump Thinks He Can Make China Pay for the Virus Like Mexico Paid for the Wall

During the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to support its preferred conclusion that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Since Iraq was a totalitarian state that had resisted international demands for transparency, its behavior provoked suspicion that both encouraged Bush administration officials to suspect the worst and made their manipulation of intelligence appear more plausible.

In keeping with its apparent commitment to repeating all the abuses and failures of the last Republican presidency, along with inventing many new ones, the Trump administration is running the same play, this time with China. The New York Times reports the administration is pressuring intelligence officials to find evidence that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

The bulk of scientific evidence points to a different conclusion — that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans. The lab theory remains theoretically possible but unlikely and difficult to prove. Conservatives have obsessed over the lab theory for strange reasons. It seems to fulfill an elemental impulse to recast the coronavirus as a moral struggle against communism — the kind of problem conservatives instinctively grasp and can use as a bludgeon against liberals — rather than as a matter of public-health management. Republicans have privately conceded that they need to deflect attention onto China because Trump’s record on handling the pandemic is literally indefensible.

But the campaign to blame China has always run into the problem of: What are you going to do about it? Suppose China did cause the coronavirus to escape through neglectful security protocol at a research lab. Heck, suppose the full Tom Cotton conspiracy is true and China manufactured the coronavirus as a bioweapon and then it escaped the lab. What recourse do we have?

The answer is, fortunately, much more ridiculous than it was under the Bush administration. Trump wants to “set the stage for holding China responsible” and is interested in suing China for damages. The Washington Post has a dedicated story on the administration’s plans to pursue a lawsuit or seek reparations.

The idea of suing China for damages has obvious intuitive appeal to Trump, a lifelong abuser of the legal system who is currently pursuing frivolous lawsuits against several media outlets and who just last week threatened to sue his own campaign manager for polls that show him losing the election. But in real international relations, you generally can’t just make other countries give you money.

The only discernible endgame here seems to be creating a predicate for Trump to publicly demand repayments from China as his solution to the crisis. If he could insist Mexico would pay for the wall, he can say China will pay for the coronavirus. The obvious fact that neither is going to happen is immaterial to their value as nationalistic campaign slogans. History is repeating itself, the first time as tragedy (the Iraq intelligence scandal) and second time as farce. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trump-china-lab-intelligence-coronavirus-reparations.html

10. Jennifer Rubin: No, the media isn’t fair. It gives Republicans a pass.

Let’s start with the big picture: Right-wing groups persistently engage in conduct for which Republicans are not held to account. The latter are allowed to remain silent after instances of conduct with a strong stench of white nationalism, but pay no penalty for their quietude. Right-wing demonstrators at Michigan’s statehouse this week — angrily shouting, not social distancing, misogynistic in their message, some carrying Confederate garb — were not engaged in peaceful protest. This was a mob endangering the health of police officers and others seeking to intimidate (small "d") democratic government. Some protesters compared Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) to Adolf Hitler and displayed Nazi symbols. Newsweek reported:

“What happened in Lansing today is dangerous in so many ways,” said Michigan Democratic Congressman Dan Kildee in a Thursday statement. “Today’s protest will come at the expense of public health. Protesters openly defied the advice of medical experts, putting their own lives and the health of all Michiganders at risk.”

“The political rhetoric on display was also appalling. Republican elected officials compared Michigan’s stay at home order to the Holocaust, and protesters carried signs calling for the execution of those they disagree with. This behavior is especially appalling the week after Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every leader in our state must condemn the use of hate speech, racism or threats of violence,” Kildee added.

“There was a lot of really disgusting symbols of hate,” Michigan Democratic Senator Dayna Polehanki told Newsweek in a Thursday interview. “You’ve got your Confederate flags still, disgusting, misogynistic signs about our governor, signs suggesting she may be killed . . . and then lots of people bearing arms.”

On Twitter, Trump insisted: “These are very good people, but they are angry.” Where was the media outrage? Where were the questions to every Republican member of the House and Senate? Could anyone imagine Black Lives Matter protesters, armed to the teeth and shouting disgusting comments about a Republican female governor, without the media demanding comment from Democrats? Once more, the media normalizes entirely abhorrent conduct from the right and fails to even try to hold Republicans to account. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/01/no-media-isnt-fair-it-gives-republicans-pass/

11. Bess Levin: Trump Casually Doubles the Number of Americans He’d Be Okay Losing to the Coronavirus

If your sense of time has become a flat circle these last couple of months, it might be hard to remember what was going on in February 2020. But as a reminder, that was when Donald Trump declared that there would be no more than 15 coronavirus cases total in the U.S. Shortly thereafter, he nudged that number up just slightly, claiming that the disease would prove nowhere near as bad as the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, which killed roughly 12,500 Americans. At the end of March, he shifted expectations a tad, saying that if the U.S. death toll clocked in between 100,000 and 200,000, it would mean his administration had “done a very good job.” Later, when strict social distancing measures began to flatten the curve, he opined that 60,000 dead Americans would be a win. Now, as the U.S. has surpassed that figure, the president has adjusted his yardstick for success once again, casually declaring that, actually, maybe 100,000 people will die.

Speaking to reporters before departing for a weekend at Camp David, Trump shared that “hopefully we’re going to come in under 100,000 lives lost,” and if that’s the case, it’ll mean he saved something like 1 millions lives, or 1.5 million or hey, let’s just call it 2.5 million lives.

The president did not take questions but if he had, and someone had asked him about the fact that he tacked on another 40,000 Americans from his latest prediction, one can assume he would have claimed to have never said such a thing because that’s what he does every time he’s caught in a monumental lie which is frequently. Presumably this won’t be the last time between now and November that he revises both the number of dead Americans the country should consider a success, and how many he’ll take credit for saving. Next month, 250,000 coronavirus deaths will presumably mean he did a bang-up job and hey, how about those 300 million people he saved? https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/donald-trump-coronavirus-death-toll

12. Dana Milbank: Trump’s gun-toting supporters are firing blanks

Four years ago, Donald Trump’s core supporters embraced Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” label because it encapsulated their class struggle against the perceived ruling elite.

Now, as Trump’s reelection nears, the Deplorables are back, but this time they’re gunning for a new moniker: the Discombobulateds.

If his supporters are unified by anything in 2020, it is a shared confusion about his rationale for a second term. This has become a movement without a message.

At the American Patriot Rally at the state Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on Thursday, many of the hundreds of protesters wore red “Make America Great Again” caps or flew “Trump 2020” banners and “Build the Wall” or “Drain the Swamp” signs. Others waved the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags of the tea party. Demonstrators, several armed with military-style guns, then marched into the statehouse and stared down the police.

What did they propose to do with these weapons? Shoot the virus? Shoot the governor? Shoot themselves in the foot? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/01/trumps-gun-toting-supporters-are-firing-blanks/

13. Bess Levin: Trump: Abraham Lincoln Had It Easy Compared to Me

Unfortunately for The Donald, journalistic outlets have continued to cover his efforts during the coronavirus crisis. And given that, on a good day, he’s recommended the American people give themselves a Clorox enema, the stories have not been entirely positive. While another president might decide to momentarily set aside his beef with the free press to focus on the pandemic at hand out of some crazy notion of responsibility, or even respect for the 65,000-plus dead, these are things that Trump’s malignant narcissism will not allow. Instead he’s upped the ante, telling reporters they’re subhuman for asking him legitimate questions and making it abundantly clear that he’d round them up in some kind of gulag situation if he could. And you want to know why? Because according to Trump, he’s been treated worse than any president in U.S. history, including one who was literally assassinated.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday night during a virtual town hall at the Lincoln Memorial, Trump was asked about his attacks on reporters. To which he responded: “I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there,” he said, gesturing to Abraham Lincoln, who the history buffs among us will recall was shot and killed one night at the theater. “They always said Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln—I believe I am treated worse. You’re there, you see those press conferences, they come at me with questions that are disgraceful, to be honest, disgraceful. Their manner of presentation and their words. And I feel that if I was kind to them, I’d be walked off the stage. I mean, they come at you with the most horrible, horrendous, biased questions. And you see it, 94 and 95% of the press is hostile…The media, they might as well be in the Democrat Party…Nobody’s ever seen anything like this…I’m standing up there and instead of asking me a normal question, the level of anger and hatred, I’ll look at ’em and I’ll say, ‘What’s your problem? What is your problem?’”

In fact, one might respond that their “problem” has to do with Trump downplaying COVID-19 for months and insisting it was fake news. Or instructing his advisers not to “do or say anything” that would spook the stock market, like publicly warning Americans to take the virus seriously. Or gutting the administration’s pandemic team. Or lying about the accessibility of tests. Or emboldening social distancing protestors to continue endangering people’s lives. Or blaming everything on Obama. Or casually doubling the number of people he’d be okay losing to the virus. Or saying, during the same interview in which he claimed he’s been treated worse than a guy who was literally shot in the head, that he was not warned about the deadly disease until late January and that there will be a vaccine by Christmas, both of which were objectively astonishing lies. Things like that!

Anyway, stay tuned for the next Fox town hall, during which Trump will likely claim JFK also had it easy compared to him. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/donald-trump-abraham-lincoln-debate

14. Gabriel Sherman: “Trump Is Really Aiming To Take Down Fox”: A Group Associated With Donald Trump Jr. Is Buying A Major Stake In OANN

Trump’s view that Fox is insufficiently loyal has motivated him to look for a more reliable media partner. On April 26, he tweeted: “The people who are watching @FoxNews, in record numbers (thank you President Trump), are angry. They want an alternative now. So do I!”

Trump now is on the verge of having that alternative. According to sources, an investor group aligned with his son Don Jr. and the Dallas-based Hicks family has acquired a major stake in One America News Network, the fledgling conservative cable-news channel that features hosts like Jack Posobiec, a chief promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy. “[RNC co-chair] Tommy Hicks and Don Jr. have been looking to buy a station for Trump TV,” said one source briefed on the talks. “This is all about building a Fox competitor. Trump is really aiming to take down Fox,” the person briefed on the deal told me. (A person close to Hicks said he resigned his position from the family business when he joined the RNC and isn’t involved in the OANN deal).

“Trump’s big thing was always to own a network and be a multibillionaire,” the source said. “If Trump loses, he can be on OANN all the time. And before he leaves office, he has months to pump it up.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-is-really-aiming-to-take-down-fox

15. Kaitlan Collins, Jeremy Diamond and Kevin Liptak: Ousted vaccine director files whistleblower complaint alleging coronavirus warnings were ignored

Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of the office involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, formally filed an extensive whistleblower complaint Tuesday alleging his early warnings about the coronavirus were ignored and that his caution at a treatment favored by President Donald Trump led to his removal.

"I was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions over the opinions of the best scientists we have in government," Bright said on a call with reporters after filing his complaint.

Bright said in the complaint he raised urgent concerns about shortages of critical supplies, including masks, to his superiors in the Trump administration but was met with skepticism and surprise.

While Bright said some officials shared his concerns -- including top White House trade adviser Peter Navarro -- he describes an overall lack of action at the top of the administration even as the virus was spreading outside of China. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/rick-bright-complaint/

16. Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Plan to Solve the Coronavirus Crisis Is to Give Rich People Another Tax Cut

The Trump administration, thrashing around for solutions to the pandemic and recession, is falling back on the response every Republican administration has sought for four decades: giving rich people a big tax cut. The administration has already endorsed restoring the tax deduction for business meals, a tax break that allows the executive class to dine out at taxpayer expense. Jim Tankersley reports that the administration is also considering several more juicy tax cuts for the affluent: extending the full expensing of business investment, and of course a capital gains tax cut. Trump seemed to endorse the notion by tweeting his support for two of the measures.

Trump and the Republicans enacted a huge tax cut for business two years ago. At the time they promised that reducing taxes on business income would give business owners a stronger incentive to invest, thereby producing enough new economic activity that the resulting acceleration in growth would generate enough revenue to pay for itself. Business investment did not increase at all, nor did overall economic growth, and revenue from the corporate tax dropped like a stone.

One of the measures in that bill that failed to yield the promised surge in investment was a measure allowing business to expense all investments through 2022. In theory, that measure gave them an incentive to push up their investment quickly — they could enjoy a tax benefit by moving up their plans to, say, open a new factory, before the tax break expires at the end of 2022. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/trumps-coronavirus-economy-plan-tax-cut-rich.html

17. John Cassidy: The White House’s Push to the Economy This Early Is a Dangerous Gamble

With the White House having effectively abdicated responsibility for testing, many states are still having difficulty acquiring the necessary test kits and chemical agents. And, of course, this hasn’t been the only Presidential failure. Even as his own medical advisers have warned against moving too quickly, Trump has defended protestors, including armed ones, who have demonstrated against the state lockdown orders. In the past few days, he has cheered on governors who are relaxing restrictions even as their states have failed to meet some of his Administration’s own safety guidelines.

The early reopening is far from the carefully calibrated, carefully monitored exercise that Birx and Fauci, the White House’s two leading medical advisers, talked about when they unveiled the federal guidelines last month. It looks more like a reckless gamble to get the economy going before the November election without sparking a big new wave of infections. Perhaps it will succeed: no one can say for sure either way. But if it doesn’t work out well, and the new projections for the spread of the virus prove to be accurate, the weakest and most vulnerable members of American society will be the ones who bear the heaviest cost. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-white-houses-push-to-reopen-the-economy-this-early-is-a-dangerous-gamble

18. Michael Tomasky: Trump’s America Now Leads the World—in Suicidal Stupidity

“American exceptionalism” is the general idea that the United States is different from other countries, endowed with special traits, better, superior. It goes back—well, actually, people debate how far it goes back.

But there’s no debating when it ends. It ends this month, in May 2020, under Donald Trump, who in prematurely sending people back to work (and to gyms) so they can die needlessly is destroying not just thousands of human lives but also any idea of America as a special place. That shining city on a hill business? Done.

We are a laughing stock. And, we are a horror show. The other day, there was a world conference on vaccines, a virtual summit run out of London. There were speeches, live and pre-recorded, by Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Shinzo Abe; even thugs like Netanyahu and Erdogan chimed in, putting aside their usual venality out of respect for the gravity of the occasion. The United States? Not represented. By anyone. https://www.thedailybeast.com/with-coronavirus-response-trumps-america-now-leads-the-worldin-suicidal-stupidity

19. Jay Rosen: The plan is to have no plan

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence. 

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign. So much has already been made public that the standard script for a White House cover up (worse than the crime…) won’t apply. Instead, everything will ride on the manufacture of confusion. The press won’t be able to “expose” the plot because it will all happen in stark daylight. The facts will be known, and simultaneously they will be inconceivable. https://pressthink.org/2020/05/the-plan-is-to-have-no-plan/

20. S.E. Cupp:The president is not well: The umpteenth reminders of Trump’s mental state and the consequences

Less than two weeks after unimaginably suggesting injecting disinfectants might help kill off the coronavirus, the past few days have seen him spiral out of control, proving utterly incapable of staying focused on the biggest crisis a president can face. Instead, he has:

• Spread unfounded conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, about former President Barack Obama and about an MSNBC cable-news host;
• Made statements that can only be described as delusional, like comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, inventing a non-existent letter of apology from Joe Biden, and spewing non-science about his favorite drug, hydroxychloroquine;
• Attacked two female reporters for doing their jobs, lamenting that they didn’t behave like “Donna Reed,” an actress synonymous with the gender role-abiding, kitchen-dwelling 1950s housewife she played on television more than 60 years ago;
• Attacked another female cable-news host, calling her a “3rd rate lapdog”;
• And in the middle of the night on Tuesday, at 12:45 a.m., gone on a 234-word rant on Twitter, complaining about an ad released by a Republican anti-Trump group whose leaders include George Conway, husband of his staffer Kellyanne, in which he used words like “deranged loser of a husband,” and “Moonface” to describe him.

It’s a frightening commentary on the slow normalization of this completely abnormal behavior that we can greet the undeniable deterioration of the president of the United States with mere shrugs. And the only concerns from his inner circle seem not to be about the mental instability itself, but the political ramifications of it being exposed in daily press briefings. https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-the-president-is-not-well-20200505-37i32k3q55c55bnnk6hdkgxvga-story.html