1.  Jonathan Chait: As the World Reaches for Face Masks, Trump Buries His Head in the Sand

Trump inherited from his predecessor a large and capable corps of disease-prevention experts, including ones who guided the country through the 2014 Ebola outbreak and deliberately pared it back. Several officials in charge of pandemic response — Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert; Dr. Luciana Borio, the National Security Council director for medical and biodefense preparedness; and Tim Ziemer, the NSC senior director for global health security and biodefense — have left or were fired since 2018. The global health community has been raising alarms for two years about the administration’s lack of preparedness. “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable,” complained the Center for Global Development’s Jeremy Konyndyk when Ziemer departed and his staff was dissolved. An administration official explained the rationale to the Washington Post at the time, “In a world of limited resources, you have to pick and choose.” And since there was no terrifying global pandemic at that moment, preparing for one didn’t seem like a priority.

Bleeding the department charged with protecting our health seems bafflingly risky. From Trump’s perspective, though, it looks like a shrewd streamlining process. Throughout his first term, the president has grown increasingly obsessed with internal subversion. He has reportedly been working through lists of officials his loyalists suspect of harboring impure thoughts about the president. The coronavirus has hit at the moment when Trump is intensifying an ongoing purge of the entire federal bureaucracy of any official suspected of disloyalty. “The federal government is massive, with millions of people — and there are a lot of folks out there taking action against this president, and if we find them, we will take appropriate action,” warned White House spokesman Hogan Gidley just last week.

It is fair to assume that the supply of employees possessing both high levels of technical expertise and hearts purely devoted to Donald Trump is finite. Even as the crisis has appeared, though, the president has evinced far deeper concern with his staff’s loyalty than its competence. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/trump-coronavirus-response.html

2. Greg Sargent: Trump just pushed one of his worst conspiracy theories yet

Trump is now fully embracing the conspiracy theory that his assorted enemies are deliberately hyping the coronavirus threat, all to damage him politically. At his Wednesday news conference, Trump agreed with Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that Trump’s foes are “weaponizing” the outbreak against him.

By telling voters that this is solely about hurting him, Trump is casting aside that imperative as a dead letter. This is of a piece with Trump’s constant downplaying of the threat: Everything is absolutely under control, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just out to get him.

Trump’s biggest cheerleaders in the media are aggressively feeding this instinct. As Matthew Gertz documents, numerous Fox News segments are pushing this line: “You can’t trust the other party, you can’t trust the media, you can’t trust the experts, you can only trust Trump and those loyal to him.”

Time will tell just how badly this ends up misleading the American public about the coronavirus threat, and what the consequences will be. But we already know this is really about placing Trump’s response to it beyond accountability entirely. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/27/trump-just-pushed-one-his-worst-conspiracy-theories-yet/

3. Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein: Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intra-party damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Such a situation may result in a brokered convention, a messy political battle the likes of which Democrats have not seen since 1952, when the nominee was Adlai Stevenson.

From California to the Carolinas, and North Dakota to Ohio, the party leaders say they worry that Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist with passionate but limited support so far, will lose to President Trump, and drag down moderate House and Senate candidates in swing states with his left-wing agenda of “Medicare for all” and free four-year public college.

Mr. Sanders and his advisers insist that the opposite is true — that his ideas will generate huge excitement among young and working-class voters, and lead to record turnout. Such hopes have yet to be borne out in nominating contests so far.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

In a reflection of the establishment’s wariness about Mr. Sanders, only nine of the 93 superdelegates interviewed said that Mr. Sanders should become the nominee purely on the basis of arriving at the convention with a plurality, if he was short of a majority.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/democratic-superdelegates.html

4. Gail Collins: Let’s Call It Trumpvirus

Losing faith in presidential appointees for health protection? Stop being so negative. They’re all vetted by the Presidential Personnel Office, which is now headed by John McEntee, 29, who was previously fired from another White House job because of concerns about a history of gambling problems and issues.

McEntee will be getting plenty of help from other stellar appointees, the newest being a 23-year-old college undergraduate. Together they’re going to be cleaning house, getting rid of folks who are insufficiently loyal to the president. Or maybe aren’t qualified or something. Never can tell. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html

5. Paul Krugman: The Trump team confirms all of our worst fears.

So, here’s the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It’s actually good for America. Also, it’s a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it’s no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we’ll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn’t believe in .

From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we’ve gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we’ve been fearing.

And the results aren’t looking good.

The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.

Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. “We’ll leave the field open to microbes,” declared Tom Frieden, a much-admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from — basically, scary brown people — and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html

6. Fareed Zakaria: Bernie Sanders’s Scandinavian fantasy

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says that his proposals “are not radical,” pointing again and again to countries in Northern Europe such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway as examples of the kind of economic system he wants to bring to the United States. The image he conjures up is of a warm and fuzzy social democracy in which market economics are kept on a tight leash through regulation, the rich are heavily taxed and the social safety net is generous. That is, however, an inaccurate and highly misleading description of those Northern European countries today.

Take billionaires. Sanders has been clear on the topic: “Billionaires should not exist.” But Sweden and Norway both have more billionaires per capita than the United States — Sweden almost twice as many. Not only that, these billionaires are able to pass on their wealth to their children tax-free. Inheritance taxes in Sweden and Norway are zero, and in Denmark 15 percent. The United States, by contrast, has the fourth-highest estate taxes in the industrialized world at 40 percent.

Sanders’s vision of Scandinavian countries, as with much of his ideology, seems to be stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when these countries were indeed pioneers in creating a social market economy. In Sweden, government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product doubled from 1960 to 1980, going from approximately 30 percent to 60 percent. But as Swedish commentator Johan Norberg points out, this experiment in Sanders-style democratic socialism tanked the Swedish economy. Between 1970 and 1995, he notes, Sweden did not create a single net new job in the private sector. In 1991, a free-market prime minister, Carl Bildt, initiated a series of reforms to kick-start the economy. By the mid-2000s, Sweden had cut the size of its government by a third and emerged from its long economic slump.

It is true that these countries have a generous safety net and, in order to fund it, high taxes. What is not often pointed out, however, is that in order to raise enough revenue, these taxes fall disproportionately on the poor, middle and upper middle class. Denmark has one of the highest top income tax rates in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 55.9 percent, but that rate is applied to anyone making 1.3 times the average national income. In the United States, this would mean that any income above $65,000 would be taxed at the rate of 55.9 percent. In fact, the highest tax rate in the United States, 43 percent, applies to income that is 9.3 times the national average, which means that only those with incomes over approximately $500,000 pay this rate.

The biggest hit to the poor and middle classes in Northern Europe comes because they, like everyone, pay a national sales tax (value-added tax) of about 25 percent. These countries raise more than 20 percent of their taxes this way. In the United States, the average sales tax rate is 6.6 percent and accounts for only 8 percent of tax revenue.

One final statistic: A 2008 OECD report found that the top 10 percent in the United States pay 45 percent of all income taxes, while the top 10 percent in Denmark pay 26 percent and in Sweden 27 percent. Among wealthy countries, the average is 32 percent. The basic point is worth underlining because the American left seems largely unaware of it, and it has only become more true over the past decade: The United States has a significantly more progressive tax code than Europe, and its top 10 percent pays a vastly greater share of the country’s taxes than their European counterparts.

In other words, bringing the economic system of Denmark, Sweden and Norway to the United States would mean embracing more flexible labor markets, light regulations and a deeper commitment to free trade. It would mean a more generous set of social benefits — to be paid for by taxes on the middle class and poor. If Sanders embraced all that, it would be radical indeed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-scandinavian-fantasy/2020/02/27/ee894d6e-599f-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html

7. Jonathan Chait: Here’s What I Do Like About Bernie Sanders

I have devoted a lot of space to criticizing Bernie Sanders (and, especially, bad arguments made on his behalf). I will probably continue to do so, in part because I have disagreements with his worldview, and mainly because I think the available evidence says his nomination would increase President Trump’s odds of reelection. But we should be cognizant of the distorting effect a primary can have on our perspective. The flaws of candidates we oppose feel more irritating over time, even if they haven’t actually grown, while their virtues seem to recede. As an exercise in maintaining perspective, I’m devoting a column to the virtues of Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is motivated by an ideological vision that is fundamentally humane. For all his attacks on the “millionaires and billionaires,” the only true visceral rage he shows is at poverty in the midst of one of the world’s wealthiest societies. His anger at the inaccessibility of health care, housing, and basic needs for all Americans is the through line of his career, through all of its idiosyncratic turns.

Sanders is generally pragmatic about how he advances this goal, and has spent decades working with people who do not share his values in order to make incremental advances. He is not motivated by wealth. (While Sanders has a lot of money, he accumulated it by saving what he earned; like his Larry David caricature, he does not enjoy creature comforts.) His passion to lift the unfortunate is pure and admirable.

Finally, and most importantly, Sanders is not an authoritarian. Far from it: He is a passionate small-d democrat. This fact has been distorted by conservatives, who believe that Sanders’s socialist economics along with his noninterventionist foreign policy — which has in the past brought him uncomfortably close to communist governments overseas — add up to some form of left-wing revolutionary program.

There is nothing Sanders would need to do to earn my vote against Donald Trump, and nothing he could do to lose it. All I can hope is that everybody else who opposes Trump and his war on democracy and the rule of law feels the same about every other candidate. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/bernie-sanders-praise-critic-vote-2020.html

8. LA Times Editorial: Trump’s war against immigration is grinding on — with unfortunate success

Immigration was a highly contentious issue in the U.S. long before President Trump took office, but his ascension to power, his predisposition to unilateral action, and his willful ignorance about immigrants and their value to the American economy have made the discussion even more fractious, if that’s possible. The situation is especially fraught because of Trump’s racially framed view of the world, and because Congress is too ineffectual to stand up to him.

In fact, over the last three years, the Trump administration has simply ignored Congress, and in some cases, federal law, to reshape U.S. immigration policy through a series of executive orders, departmental rulings and internal directives. It has been a broad, multipronged assault on decades of U.S. policy that had encouraged immigrants from a cross-section of the world to come to this country.

Among those the U.S. had encouraged were aging parents reunifying with their immigrant children, workers with in-demand skills, wealthy entrepreneurs willing to invest their money here, and the lucky — people who won visas in annual lotteries from nations underrepresented in the other immigration categories. And the U.S. lived up to a long-standing commitment to take in refugees from war zones and those who suffer persecution in their home countries.

That has all changed not because of congressional action, but because of congressional inaction.
Into the void leapt Trump and his nationalistic minions, who have dramatically redefined the criteria to determine who is allowed to become an American, how they must get here, where they must come from, and what kinds of reasons are acceptable — all without congressional input. And, in some cases, in flat-out defiance of congressional intent. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-03-01/trump-immigration-border-asylum-detention

9. David Von Drehle: Vladimir Putin’s virus. How the Russian president has infected our national trust

The president of the United States fires his director of national intelligence after aides brief a congressional committee on new Russian efforts to interfere in the 2020 election. His acting replacement is a man whose main qualification appears to be his skepticism that Russia is meddling in our politics at all.

Meanwhile, intelligence officials tell Sen. Bernie Sanders, the leading candidate to unseat the president, that Russian bots have infiltrated his online army to sow discord in the Democratic Party. They say the goal is to help Sanders, but Sanders thinks it is a leak designed to hurt him.

Millions of us are unsure whether elections will be free and fair, whether the news we consume is real or fake, whether our foreign policy serves national or personal interests. This is a massive victory for America’s enemies. A climate of mutual suspicion at home erodes our ability to affect events abroad. Foreign governments lose confidence in a nation whose leaders — and followers — lack confidence in one another. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/02/did-vladimir-putin-turn-america-itself/

10. Maureen Dowd: Trump Makes Us Ill

For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt.

He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn’t eat afterward.

Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis for his re-election prospects.

The scaremonger in chief has been downplaying the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic and joining Fox News hosts in accusing the “anti-Trump” media and “Do Nothing Democrats” of scaremongering about the virus.

Trump seems more consumed with how the Democrats might blame him for a coronavirus recession than with the virus itself.

Trump had tweet-shrieked at President Barack Obama about how he should handle Ebola. (“Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!”)

At the White House press conference, Trump preened: “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.” He later said that one day, like a miracle, the virus “will disappear.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/opinion/sunday/trump-coronavirus-response.html

11. Nick Bilton: Coronavirus Is Creating A Fake-News Nightmarescape

Donald Trump Jr.’s comments to Fox & Friends on Friday might be the purest example of the sort of misinformation that’s spreading almost as quickly as the coronavirus. “For [Democrats] to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people, so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning, is a new level of sickness,” he said. “You know, I don’t know if this is coronavirus or Trump derangement syndrome, but these people are infected badly.” To some extent, propaganda has always cropped up alongside mass disease—the whole black-cats-and-bubonic-plague thing, for example—but as technology has evolved, and information reaches exponentially more people exponentially faster, the potential for misinformation to spread has become correspondingly voluminous. “The scariest thing about this virus is the fact that there are a lot of people out there who don’t believe this is a scary virus,” a biomedical investor told me. “This is a bad one, and you’ve got people conspiring that it’s a hoax made to get Trump thrown out of office.”

This time around, the president is proclaiming at his rallies that coronavirus is a “hoax” constructed by the Democrats. Conspiracy theorists on YouTube say it’s a false flag (I’m not even going to link to the videos), and QAnon theorists on Reddit are regurgitating the insanity that it’s all part of another deep state plot to overthrow the government. Other false stories have deduced that the Defense Department created the virus to target China. Millions of tweets argue a number of conspiracy theories, including that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation cooked up the virus—for what purpose, God only knows. Rush Limbaugh is telling his millions of listeners that media emphasis on the virus is designed to destabilize the stock markets in a threat to Trump’s presidency, and that coronavirus is “the common cold, folks.” (Fact-check: It is not.) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-is-creating-fake-news-nightmarescape-social-media

12. Max Boot: Bernie Sanders would be an awful president

I misjudged Trump’s electability in 2016, and I might be misjudging Sanders’s today. I was right, however, that Trump would turn out to be an awful president — and I am convinced that Sanders would be awful, too.

Part of the problem is Sanders’s hectoring personality. He is a closed-minded ideologue who shows little willingness to compromise and little ability to bring people together. He prefers denouncing those who disagree with him as sellouts rather than trying to persuade them. That helps to explain why in 29 years in Congress he has been the lead sponsor of only three bills that became law — and two of those were to name post offices.

Sanders claims to be a Scandinavian-style socialist, but the Scandinavian countries are far more fiscally responsible. He is really a Santa-style socialist offering goodies to everyone whether they’ve been naughty or nice. His generosity with other people’s money would risk a debt crisis and endanger our prosperity. Please, Democrats, don’t give him the chance to wreck either your election prospects or our economy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/02/bernie-sanderss-free-stuff-everyone-plan-would-bankrupt-america/

13. George Packer: The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions

When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters loved—he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own.

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/