James.galbraith

A vaccine is a year to 18 months away from approval, the European Medicines Agency estimates.

A historian of presidents and pandemics explains Trump's unique depravity.

Two new reports put Jared Kushner at the center of the Trump administration’s incompetent response to the coronavirus threat.

Writes Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman: “Sources told me Trump is regretting that Kushner swooped into the coronavirus response last week. Kushner, according to sources, encouraged Trump to treat the emergency as a P.R. problem when Fauci and others were calling for aggressive action. ‘This was Jared saying the world needs me to solve another problem,’ a former White House official said. One source briefed on the internal conversations told me that Kushner advised Trump not to call a national emergency during his Oval Office address on March 11 because ‘it would tank the markets.’ The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency on Friday. ‘They had to clean that up on Friday,’ another former West Wing official said. Trump was also said to be angry that Kushner oversold Google’s coronavirus testing website when in fact the tech giant had a fledgling effort. Trump got slammed in the press for promoting the phantom Google product. ‘Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That’s just a lie,’ the source briefed on the internal conversations told me.”

The NYT has a bigger picture report worth reading, but returns to Kushner: “Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat. But when Mr. Pence’s chief of staff asked him to help merge the Pence and Trump communications operations because the two-person shop in the vice president’s office found itself overwhelmed and trying to keep up, Mr. Kushner, long critical of the White House communications shop, tried to supplement the vice president’s team with other aides. One of them was Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director, who recently rejoined the administration as Mr. Kushner’s aide.”

The post Jared Kushner Encouraged Trump to Treat Coronavirus as PR Problem Rather Than Take Immediate Action: Reports appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Despite COVID-19 forcing Apple to close down all retail stores outside of China indefinitely, the company just announced a new 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro (starting at $799 and $949, respectively). From a report: Last refreshed in 2018, the new iPad Pros come with a faster A12Z Bionic chip equipped with an 8-core CPU and GPU, a new ultra-wide camera and a "LiDAR scanner" for AR. However, the most surprising (or not surprising) announcement is a new Magic Keyboard accessory with a trackpad (which starts at $249). Simply put: Apple just turned the iPad Pro into a laptop. The gap between an iPad Pro and Microsoft's Surface Pro is now narrower than ever before. This could mean the beginning of the end for MacBooks. There's lots to unpack about the new iPad Pros. Apple is saying the A12Z Bionic chip has an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU, but stopped short of saying how much faster it is compared to the A12 Bionic in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. Apple only says the gigabit-class LTE is 60 percent faster and the battery life is still the same 10 hours. The cameras on the back look like the iPhone 11 Pro's triple-camera setup at first glance. But they're not. First, the ultra-wide camera is 10 megapixels versus 12 megapixels on the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. And second, the third lens isn't a telephoto lens, but a "LiDAR Scanner" which Apple says improves AR applications. The LiDAR Scanner "measures the distance to surrounding objects up to 5 meters away, works both indoors and outdoors, and operates at the photon level at nano-second speeds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Beginning in late January, scientists began loudly ringing the alarm about COVID-19 and began predicting dire scenarios that were moving toward the U.S. like a slow-moving tidal wave. My colleague Mark Sumner wrote extensively for this site about the virus and his warnings and advice put many members of the community on better footing to be prepared for extensive social distancing. 

While those of us in the science-based world began making preparations and informing our friends and family, those who watch Fox News were getting a different message, one that echoed Donald Trump. In all fairness, it’s hard to tell which came first, the chickenshit president’s messaging or the eggheads at Fox News, but like all Republican messaging, they were feeding off each other. 

From the morning show to primetime Hannity, the hosts at Fox News dismissed the threat, a threat that is particularly aimed at the older viewers watching Fox News. And then the markets tanked. And then the cases kept mounting. And then the CDC warnings weren’t just a distant “hoax,” people were getting sick and people were dying. Fox News was unable to ignore or deflect the crisis in front of us. The tidal wave was crashing ashore whether they liked it or not. Especially after two reports became public, both showing the real advice that national leaders in both the U.S. and U.K. are getting behind the scenes: SHUT IT ALL DOWN.

And with that, a switch flipped, both in the administration and on Fox News. The Washington Post spliced the contrasting commentary together to show just how starkly different the coverage was from roughly a 10-day period this month. Watch and then jump below to see how and why they’ve likely cost lives.

On one hand, hats off to Fox News for finally doing the right thing and informing their audience of the dangers lurking, well, everywhere. But did they get the message out too late? To show how damaging the misinformation at Fox News has been, check out these polling numbers on who is worried about the coronavirus and who is not:

Again, this cannot be emphasized enough—this is not simply differing opinions, this is life or death for the Fox News audience and the rest of us. One of the communities that should’ve been ahead of the curve and bracing for the worst is America’s largest retirement community, The Villages in central Florida. With more than 51,000 residents, the 55-and-over retirement community was the fastest growing community in the entire United States in 2019. Plans for an additional 49,000 homes are currently underway.

The Villages residents are so important to the Republican stranglehold on Florida (and the nation via the Electoral College) that it is a regular stop for those aspiring to the White House. Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-1 in the community. Sarah Palin was a frequent visitor in 2008 and Donald Trump held a huge event there in October to sign an executive order relating to Medicare. It was masquerading as an official White House event, but was clearly a 2020 campaign device to win over or keep this demographic going into 2020.

And yet, this community was largely carrying on business as usual over the last several weeks. Reporters from The Washington Post interviewed residents of The Villages last week and many weren’t concerned about the virus, still holding large social gatherings, still giving firm handshakes, and joking about the virus threat being overblown. 

At the end of the day, the network that has been amplifying the “fake news” message from Donald Trump may have been the source of the worst kind of fake news imaginable, one that may very well end up costing their own audience their very lives. Let’s just hope the residents at The Villages and other Fox News-friendly communities like it finally got the message and will begin to heed the advice and warnings of the experts. 

Surgeon General Jerome Adams acknowledged Wednesday that the Trump administration's recommendation that Americans practice preventative measures for 15 days is "likely not going to be enough" time to successfully halt the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

"Fifteen days is likely not going to be enough to get us all the way through. But we really need to lean into it now so that we can bend the curve in the next 15 days, and at that point we'll reassess," Adams said during an interview on NBC's "Today."

The concession from the surgeon general comes after the administration announced a slate of new guidelines Monday intended to blunt the disease's rapid rate of transmission in the U.S., where positive cases have now been reported in all 50 states and more than 100 people have died as a result of the virus.

The federal guidance urged Americans for the next two weeks to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people; work or attend school from home whenever possible; and abstain from eating or drinking at bars, restaurants and food courts.

But scientific studies and even senior administration officials have suggested in recent days that the coronavirus' effects on American life could extend much longer than initially thought and bring about a remarkable loss in human life.

An internal report from the Department of Health and Human Services, produced over the weekend and first reported on by The New York Times, predicted that the "pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness."

Another report compiled by British researchers and released Monday estimated that as many as 2.2 million people in the U.S. could die from coronavirus if drastic steps were not taken to fight its spread. The dire findings appear to have influenced the administration's latest recommendations.

Adams' remarks Wednesday echo a similar assessment issued Tuesday by Vice President Mike Pence, who told NPR that "the 15 days is about measures we believe can impact the growth and expansion of the virus in the United States."

Pence, who is leading the U.S. response efforts against the public health crisis, also said that administration officials "fully expect that we will be dealing with the coronavirus in the United States for months," and that "according to some of our modeling, we could well be dealing with coronavirus cases in the United States well into July."

President Trump at a press conference on March 16 started referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.” | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The president is stoking xenophobia with his rhetoric about the coronavirus.

Two days ago, President Donald Trump suddenly stopped referring to the Covid-19 coronavirus by its common name, which experts and laypeople and the president himself had been using for months, and started using a racist designation: the “Chinese virus.”

The world has been trying to move past the racist disease-naming conventions of the past in recent years, making it all the more telling that Trump has revived them in a moment of crisis. He might be annoyed that Chinese officials and media have, for their part, tried to blame the virus on America. He might want to deflect blame onto anybody else given the harsh criticism his administration has faced for being slowed to respond to the outbreak.

But whatever the reason, it appears the term he’s been using — with all of its potentially dangerous consequences, particularly for Asian Americans — is now the preferred nomenclature of the White House.

Looking at Trump’s Twitter account, his megaphone to the nation, he tweeted about “coronavirus” about 40 times between January 24 (the first mention) and March 15. But on March 16, his rhetoric flipped: He hasn’t referred to the “coronavirus” at all and has instead tweeted using his new preferred racist name five times in the past two days.

Other variations among administration officials and Republicans in Congress include “the Chinese flu” or “the Chinese coronavirus” or “the Wuhan coronavirus.” Some of the reported comments from people around Trump are even less decorous.

There is a long history of racializing pandemics by attaching them to a specific place and people, othering a pathogen that originated in another land in much the same way white Americans have historically othered people of color who came to (or whose ancestors came to) the United States from somewhere else. Trump’s comments are just yet another example of this lamentable instinct and another illustration of his xenophobia in office. This is the same president who referred to some African countries as “shitholes” in advocating for restrictive immigration policies.

Trump defended his comments at a Wednesday press conference as simply striving for accuracy, after a journalist asked him about reports of prejudiced acts taken in the United States recently against people of Asian descent.

“Because it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, not at all,” the president said. “It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images

But the virus and the disease it causes in humans have been referred to by experts as the novel coronavirus, Covid-19 and SARS-CoV-2, so Trump’s name for it is not at all accurate. But it does fit with the president’s history of xenophobia and of blaming problems in the US on outside actors. It is dangerous rhetoric, unbecoming of a national leader in this time of crisis.

It’s simply not true we’re supposed to call diseases by their country of origin

Whenever a pandemic pops up, we need a name for it. There are usually those used in the common parlance (like coronavirus) and then the scientific names (like SARS-Cov-2). The latter is usually produced through some kind of formula — this article in Nature explains how the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses came up with SARS-Cov-2 — but the former is more happenstance. “Coronavirus” entered the lexicon even though it covers a family of viruses, including the one that causes the common cold, and it’s stuck.

When naming the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, international leaders actually went out of their way to avoid a name with any reference to people, places, or even animals, as Vox’s Umair Irfan reported.

“We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual, or a group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said in February.

But you’ll still see some of Trump’s defenders refer to the history of colloquial names that (seemingly) relied on a disease’s place of origin — like the Spanish flu, Ebola, etc. — as evidence that the president is simply following a long-held practice. This tweet from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is a good example of this misconception:

The White House has cited this history to accuse its critics of trying to divide America at a time when unity is needed.

But the Spanish flu didn’t get that name (real name: H1N1!) because it started in Spain. It actually started in Kansas. It became commonly known as the Spanish flu because in the middle of World War I, in which Spain remained neutral, Spain was one of the only Western nations willing to report frankly on the pandemic. As Rachel Withers wrote for Slate in 2018:

The misnomer, according to an episode of the podcast BackStory, came about as a result of geopolitical forces. When the pandemic broke out during World War I, neither side wanted the other to find out they were sick—nor did they want their own troops to lose morale or their publics to panic. News of the outbreak was suppressed or heavily underplayed in Germany, France, the U.K., and the U.S. But Spain, like Switzerland, was neutral in the war, and its media had no qualms about covering the contagious outbreak weakening its population, creating the false impression that this was a Spanish disease. As virologist John Oxford put it: “And the rest of the world I think looked around and said, ‘What’s going on in Spain?’ And so since that time, much to the annoyance of the Spanish and much to the annoyance of Spanish virologists, I can tell you, we’ve all called the Spanish flu ever since.”

Or take the Ebola virus, which, despite being named for a river in Africa, actually got that name because the scientists who discovered it wanted to avoid stigmatizing the village where the disease first appeared.

One team member suggested naming it after the village, known as Yambuku, but the other scientists pushed back. As Bahar Gholipour wrote for Live Science in 2014:

But naming the virus Yambuku would run the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeria in 1969.

They ended up going with Ebola because an inaccurate map led them to believe it was near Yambuku and it seemed “suitably ominous.” The Ebola wasn’t actually the nearest river to the village, as they found out once they saw an accurate map, but the name stuck anyway. We have seen other recent outbreaks, like the 2015 Zika virus, also take the name of nearby natural features but not the name of the place or the people associated with where they originated.

So Trump’s preferred names are not simply an adoption of the usual formula for naming pathogens — at least not a formula the world is currently interested in following. Instead, they reflect a dark history of blaming disease on outsiders.

Trump is stoking xenophobia in a time of worldwide crisis

Though Trump and his allies are certainly wrong that calling the coronavirus “the Chinese virus” is simply following longstanding naming conventions, it is very much in keeping with a history of disease drawing out a fear of foreigners. (And let’s remember Trump has his own much more recent history of accusing immigrants of bringing infectious diseases into the country.

“The language of disease has always been linked to our discourse around immigration,” Natalia Molina, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California, told Vox’s Sean Illing. “I think it’s pretty clear that our fears about immigrants and outsiders have always been bolstered by fears about disease and contamination.”

Chinese people in particular have been the targets of outbreak-related fearmongering before in the United States. As historian James Mohr, who authored a book on the 1899 outbreak of the bubonic plague in Honolulu, Hawaii, wrote recently for Oxford University Press’s blog:

Since the early victims were Chinese, ugly cries arose for the destruction of all Asian neighborhoods on the pretext that they seemed to be breeding grounds for plague; blaming victims and increased hostility toward minorities had been hallmarks of health-related panics since ancient times

Local officials did resist the mob mentality, but their good intentions still went awry. They tried to do a controlled burn of the houses where plague victims had died to eradicate the disease, as CityLab pointed out in a recent story, but the fire grew out of control and ended up destroying 5,000 homes in the city.

Here in 2020, we’ve seen people arrested in New York City for hate crimes against Asian Americans as coronavirus fears mount. Researchers in San Francisco found more than 1,000 reported cases of xenophobia toward Chinese Americans and their communities between January 28 and February 24; one of the researchers found in an informal survey of small businesses owned by Chinese Americans that they had lost between 50 and 70 percent of their business in recent days.

We all have to do our part to protect against prejudice spiraling out of control in a moment of crisis. The media must be vigilant too, as Vox’s visuals editor Kainaz Amaria recently pointed out. It has become common to stick a photo of an Asian person on top of a coronavirus story, whether or not the underlying article had anything to do with an Asian country:

“In regard to editorial accuracy, meaning how close does the photography relate to the content of the story, this picture [referring to this New York Post story] is from a different location and does not relate to any element of the story,” she says. “As picture editors, we need to apply what we know about the history of xenophobia and public health into our editorial decisions when it comes to stories about coronavirus.”

But the president is not doing his part at all and doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of his words. Instead, he risks making the situation worse.

The girls’ 1600 meter run at the North Coast Section Meet of Champions track and field meet held at Edwards Stadium in Berkeley, California, on May 27, 2017. | Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group

The bill would allow anyone to challenge a female athlete’s sex — and force her to prove it.

As the country deals with the growing coronavirus pandemic, Republicans in the Idaho state legislature met on Monday to blaze forward with their anti-trans agenda. The state Senate passed a bill, 24-11, banning trans and intersex girls from competing as girls in school athletics, even though there are currently no trans athletes competing in the state.

The bill — which, if signed by Gov. Brad Little, would become the first state-level anti-trans bill passed so far this year — would require female athletes in high schools and colleges to undergo invasive sex testing to determine eligibility to compete in the girls’ division. The bill passed in the state House in late February, by a 24-11 vote.

According to the bill’s text, if a girl’s sex is challenged by an opposing coach, administrator, or parent, it can be proven by presenting “a signed physician’s statement that shall indicate the student’s sex based solely on: The student’s internal and external reproductive anatomy; the student’s normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone; an analysis of the student’s genetic makeup.”

That requirement places an undue burden on female athletes — making them go to the doctor for a genital exam or DNA test in an attempt to prove they meet the state’s standards for girlhood — that simply isn’t enforced upon their male counterparts. It also misunderstands trans kids, and the science behind trans athletes.

“This bill attempts to solve a problem that does not exist while slamming the door shut for transgender student athletes to fully participate in their school communities,” said Kathy Griesmyer, policy director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, in a statement. “Idaho has not seen any issues with trans girls competing in the girls sports. This unconstitutional and mean-spirited bill prevents trans girls from finding community and self-esteem in sports and will certainly result in litigation to defend the civil rights of Idaho’s transgender community.”

While some schools in Idaho have chosen to close in an abundance of caution over coronavirus, Gov. Little declined over the weekend to issue an order to close schools statewide. It’s unclear if interscholastic athletic events are even happening in the state. Nonetheless, the legislature hasn’t let a global pandemic get in the way of pushing through legislation that will harm trans people.

Why trans athletes now?

Two of the most high-profile high school trans athletes in the past few years have been Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, two trans girls in Connecticut who won state track championships. That handful of wins — as well as a smattering of other trans women who have succeeded in lower-level championship events — has kicked off fears that trans women are “ending women’s sports” due to an alleged “inherent male advantage” in athletics, according to bill sponsors in Idaho, furthering the kind of anti-trans messaging on conservative sites like the Daily Caller and National Review.

Several students who competed against the Connecticut trans girls, and their parents, filed a federal lawsuit, with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the one-stop legal shop for nearly every anti-trans lawsuit in the US, against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference. The suit claims that it’s biologically impossible for the cisgender complainants to defeat their “biologically male” trans counterparts.

But a handful of wins by half a dozen athletes does not spell an end to women’s athletics. Those same Connecticut trans girls failed to place in the top five at the New England High School track championships in 2019, losing to faster cisgender competition. In fact, just days after filing their federal suit, one of the complainants beat both trans girls in a 50-meter indoor sprint event. The suit is awaiting a hearing.

The science of trans athletes is unsettled

Thus far, the science of trans athletes has been fairly muddled. The International Olympic Committee has allowed trans women to compete after undergoing bottom surgery since 2003, and in 2016 relaxed its requirements to allow trans women without surgery to compete as long as they’ve suppressed their testosterone levels for at least a year. The NCAA adopted the same standard. So far, no openly trans athletes have qualified for the Olympics since 2003.

Most people assume that because cisgender men are typically more athletic than cisgender women, trans women must also fit that bill. But hormones have a large effect on muscle development, with testosterone rebuilding muscle tissue more quickly than estrogen. That means a testosterone-dominant body can more quickly recover from workouts than its estrogenated counterpart, so it can work harder and more often. That results in more muscle growth, according to hormonal science.

Some anti-trans voices argue, however, that it’s male puberty that makes trans women stronger and faster, pointing to the fact that trans women, on average, have narrower hips and broader shoulders, as well as denser bones. But it’s difficult to measure how much those attributes influence athletic performance when muscles are obviously a key athletic factor.

Regardless, most high school athletes are still going through puberty, and many trans adolescents could be taking puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones — which Idaho is also trying to ban. Idaho Republicans’ interest in banning both trans athletes and their transitions, which often means stopping natal puberty, signals this is more about pushing an anti-trans agenda than it is about science.

In fact, next up on the Idaho Senate agenda: banning gender changes on trans people’s birth certificates.

An attendee at last week’s Miami Beach Winter Party gay circuit event has tested positive for coronavirus.

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We definitely hit a home run last night with our teammates at @masterbeat for MAJOR LEAGUE. Our long anticipated return to Mansion Nightclub hit every base and DJs @nachochapado and @ivangomezmusic delivered an intensity of ferocity of energy that is simply unparalleled! #ThisIsWinterParty #BeYou : @adiadinayev

A post shared by Winter Party Festival (@winterparty) on Mar 8, 2020 at 9:30am PDT

NBC Miami reports: “Rea Carey, the executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, sent a letter confirming that one person who attended the annual Winter Party Festival held last week has told officials they tested positive for COVID-19. … Event organizers noted that educational posters were placed throughout the venue while 10,000 hand sanitizers were handed out to partygoers. Casey added that all guests are encouraged to monitor their health and contact their doctors if they think they have symptoms.”

Said Carey: “While we know there are many places people could have been exposed before and after Winter Party as this virus has developed, we wanted to make sure you have this information as soon as possible.”

Miami-Dade County and Fort Lauderdale officials recently announced new business restrictions: “Miami-Dade County announced restrictions for businesses across the area in order to stop the spread. Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced all bars and clubs are to be closed by 11 p.m. Restaurants must close their dining areas at the same time but can still deliver meals or have customers pick their orders up. At a news joint news conference Sunday with Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said the beach would be closing from 5th Street to 15th Street, and there would be an 11 p.m. curfew in the entertainment district.”

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Trump's efforts to discredit the media may be failing. That's good news.

From "This is no big deal" to "It's a big deal but Trump's masterful leadership is saving us."

There’s an easy way to tell that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi negotiated a bad deal on the bipartisan coronavirus response bill that Congress is expected to pass this week. It’s not the liberal complaints that she let the White House limit paid sick leave to about one-fifth of U.S. workers. It’s not the Republican complaints that the bill doesn’t provide tax relief and cash for businesses and individuals hurt by the pandemic. It’s not even the general consensus that this initial legislation will need to be followed up by a much more aggressive economic stimulus bill.

No, the easy way to tell Pelosi negotiated a bad deal for Democrats is that she negotiated a deal at all—rather than dictating the terms and telling President Donald Trump to take them or leave them.

The lesson of the last congressional response to an economic emergency, President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, is that when a president desperately needs legislation to address a crisis, anyone with the power to stop him can decide what’s in it.

When Obama took office, in the midst of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, Democrats controlled the House and Senate as well. But they needed 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster in the Senate, and there were only 57 Democratic senators, which meant Obama had to recruit three Republicans to vote for a stimulus bill.

In just his second week in office, his blunt-spoken chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had to pose a blunt-spoken question to Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania: Whaddya want?

Specter’s ask was simple, and by Washington horse-trading standards, noble. He wanted $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health. Then he would vote for the Obama stimulus.

“Are you f---ing kidding me?” Emanuel exploded.

Emanuel assumed $10 billion-with-a-b was just Specter’s initial bid, a shock-tactic negotiating ploy. But Specter gruffly said no, that was his final offer, take it or leave it.

“What the f--- does a vote cost around here?” Emanuel screamed.

In Specter’s case, it cost precisely $10 billion. He understood that Obama needed his vote to fix the economy, so he held all the leverage. But today’s congressional Democrats don’t seem to understand that at all.

Right now, after initially downplaying the threat of coronavirus, then bungling the response to the pandemic, then watching the swift demise of the bull market he had hailed as proof of his leadership, Trump absolutely needs congressional action to limit the public health disaster and mitigate the economic damage on his watch.

House Democrats can pass whatever bill they want, and if Republicans aren’t willing to go along with it, another lesson of American crisis politics is that it’s Trump who will suffer the consequences.

Some Democrats have fretted that they might suffer politically if they don’t help Trump clean up the mess, but the opposite happened in 2009. The Republican minority in the House unanimously refused to support Obama’s stimulus, even though the crisis had exploded on his Republican predecessor’s watch, and the very next year those same Republicans took back the majority in the House. In fact, the only Republican in Congress who paid a political price was Specter, who had to switch to the Democratic Party after a GOP backlash over his vote for Obama’s stimulus, and ended up losing his seat anyway.

In 2020, Democrats are not acting like a party with that kind of leverage.

Instead, Pelosi frantically hashed out a compromise on Friday over 13 phone calls with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who accepted Democratic proposals to expand free COVID-19 testing and unemployment benefits, along with a modest boost in food aid for the poor, but made it clear that permanent legislation mandating universal sick leave was a “non-starter” for Republicans.

Trump ratcheted up the pressure by complaining publicly that Democrats weren’t “giving enough” in the negotiations, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the House proposals as “an ideological wish list.” Ultimately, Democrats accepted a temporary mandate that applies only to companies smaller than 500 employees, and allows companies smaller than 50 employees to seek exemptions.

“Democrats preferred to have something rather than nothing,” a Democratic source explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “That was the choice we faced.”

That was not the choice Democrats faced. Unlike the Republicans in 2009, who only had a filibuster-proof minority in the Senate, they also have a majority in the House, where they could have attached anything they wanted to the must-pass coronavirus testing and dared Republicans to say no.

If the president was unwilling to approve measures to help contain a pandemic and limit the economic fallout because he didn’t want sick workers to be guaranteed paid leave, he could have explained that to the public. He’s the president, the head of state, the “I alone can fix it” guy. He’s the one who will be judged by the outcome of the crisis that he initially insisted was not a crisis, then declared was under control thanks to his leadership.

After all, Obama was held responsible for an economic crisis that erupted on George W. Bush’s watch, and the party that fought his efforts to fix the crisis ended up taking back the House, the Senate and eventually the White House.

The public doesn’t follow the details of legislation on Capitol Hill, but it blames presidents for bad outcomes. The public also tends to blame presidents for partisan paralysis, while giving them credit for bipartisan cooperation; that’s why McConnell understood he could make Obama look partisan by fighting him, even though Obama’s stimulus was stuffed with tax cuts and other Republican priorities.

It is true that Democrats would be accused of trying to exploit the crisis if they tried to load up a coronavirus bill with unrelated priorities such as, say, a “Green New Deal” to fight the climate crisis—although it’s worth noting that Trump and McConnell have already accused them of trying to exploit the crisis just for trying to mandate sick leave during a pandemic. But they still have the leverage to shape legislation just about any way they want if they’re willing to take the heat.

In 2009, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine used her leverage to demand that the Obama stimulus include a technical fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax that added $70 billion to the price tag while providing virtually no economic stimulus. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine insisted on stripping a school construction initiative out of Obama’s stimulus—along with, ironically, an $870 million line item for pandemic preparedness. The 57 Democrats in the Senate also had the power to extract concessions for their votes; Obama had wanted a stimulus without congressional earmarks, but Dick Durbin of Illinois managed to include one for a $1 billion carbon-capture plant that never ended up getting built.

Setting aside the question of whether Democrats should try to exploit the leverage to advance long-term policy priorities, they can absolutely exploit their leverage to address the short-term crisis. If they think universal sick leave will help, they should demand universal sick leave. Meanwhile, with Louisiana and Georgia already postponing primaries over the virus, why shouldn’t Democrats attach provisions guaranteeing that Americans will be able to vote by mail in November? Jeff Hauser, director of the left-leaning Revolving Door Project, doesn’t understand why the Democrats didn’t insist on provisions restoring congressional oversight powers to help them ride herd on the administration’s response to the virus, ensuring that Trump and his aides can no longer defy subpoenas for documents and witnesses.

Again, if Trump thinks it’s so important to prevent Americans from voting by mail and preventing Congress from overseeing his administration that he would block measures to accelerate the pandemic testing that his own team has botched, he can try to convince the public.

“House Democrats don’t have some leverage,” Hauser says. “They have complete leverage.”

By giving Trump the emergency measures that he needs most without insisting on the worker protections that Democrats wanted most, Pelosi has sacrificed some of that leverage. She has also helped the president look like a bipartisan consensus-builder, while essentially confirming the GOP talking point that Democrats have a responsibility to meet Trump’s demands in order to avoid a partisan stalemate. In 2009, Republicans simply ignored all the pundits warning that they would pay a huge political price for refusing to help the first black president fix an economic mess he had inherited—and the pundits turned out to be wrong.

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders argue that it’s their duty to help Trump save lives and jobs in 2020, even though Republicans didn’t help Obama in 2009, even though Trump routinely calls them traitors, even though an economic downturn could doom his reelection. They’re pro-government people; they’re not inclined to stand in the way of government action during a crisis.

When the Great Recession was just getting started in January 2008, Pelosi negotiated a quick bipartisan stimulus bill with Bush’s Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, and within months Americans were receiving $1,000 checks from the federal government. It’s an honorable approach, even though it also probably reduces Pelosi’s leverage. It’s hard to win a game of chicken when the other driver knows you’re committed to avoiding a crash.

Once Trump signs this emergency response bill, he’ll start clamoring for a much larger economic stimulus bill loaded with tax cuts for airlines, cruise lines, his own hospitality industry and other Republican-friendly businesses, along with payroll tax cuts that can help get him reelected. And Democrats will find that many of the same Republicans who mocked the idea of using taxpayer dollars to stimulate the private economy as Big Government when Obama was in the White House—even though they had supported that bipartisan stimulus bill under Bush—will rediscover the attraction of Keynesian economics when it suits their party’s interests.

Democrats will have to decide whether to meet Trump in the middle, or whether to risk the obstructionist label by holding out for what they want in a time of economic pain. They will also have to decide exactly what it is they want. Some of Obama’s top economists have publicly called for Congress to send checks to American citizens, which would help the economy and also Trump’s reelection prospects.

Again, that’s honorable and responsible, especially since Trump is sure to denounce the Democrats as obstructionists no matter what happens, but it’s not clear it squares with Democratic rhetoric about the danger of Trump’s reelection, especially if they don’t get anything in exchange for helping to rescue the sinking Trump economy.

In any case, Trump won’t be able to pass a stimulus bill without them. At a minimum, one thing they can demand for their cooperation is legislative assurance that economic stimulus can no longer be something that happens routinely only under Republican presidents. They should insist on more robust “automatic stabilizers” so that any time the economy craters, no matter who’s in the White House, Washington will automatically spend far more on food stamps, unemployment insurance and other aid to vulnerable families, and perhaps automatically roll back payroll taxes and other economic burdens. That way, members of Congress will no longer have the power to take the economy hostage during crises.

For now, though, Democrats absolutely have that power. They need to choose their ransom wisely.

I posted this yesterday: 

Take with all the appropriate grains of salt. A whole shaker’s worth. I’m not going to argue that this is true, because who the hell knows. Other reports suggest that California Sen. Kamala Harris is a front-runner. Maybe there are 10 people who are “front-runners.” All I’m going to write here is that whether the rumors I’m hearing are true or not, Klobuchar would be a disastrous pick for VP. 

1. Amy Klobuchar would be Tim Kaine 2.0. 

Klobuchar promises exactly what Tim Kaine promised—competent technocracy. In a world in which a Democratic victory was guaranteed, that’d be totally okay. We could use a great deal of competent leadership just about now. But we don’t have a guaranteed Democratic victory. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yes, the coronavirus might scramble things, but we can’t assume so. We have to assume that they'll keep their coalition intact. 

Hillary Clinton had one job in 2016—win. Kaine did nothing to make that happen. His job was to be an able backup for Hillary if something happened to her, but he did nothing for the ticket. He didn't unify a party split by the Bernie Sanders primary challenge. He didn’t deliver any territory that might otherwise land in Donald Trump’s column. He didn’t reinforce any of Clinton’s perceived weaknesses (other than, perhaps, having a penis). Clinton very specifically picked him for his governing prowess, and that’s not the VP’s first job. The VP’s first job is to get elected. 

Notice the Republicans: Dick Cheney brought the neocons aboard the George W. Bush ticket. Sarah Palin was a desperation move to shore up John McCain’s weakness with his base. Donald Trump picked Mike Pence to shore up a disgruntled Christian right. Their VPs are designed to help unite their party. It doesn’t always work (no one was going to beat Barack Obama in 2008), but it’s a sound strategy. 

Biden has one job in 2020—win. He would be well advised to pick someone who helps deliver the White House, first and foremost. We have plenty of women who would do that, and still provide competent governance in case he was incapacitated. There’s no need to compromise on the electoral front.

2. Klobuchar doesn’t unite the party

As in 2016, our party is split between center-left and left-left factions. Consistently, throughout the campaign, it was the two left-lane candidates—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—who brought out the biggest crowds. Sure, that wasn’t enough to actually win the election, but do you want those excited crowds out working for the nominee, making phone calls, knocking on doors, evangelizing to their friends, coworkers, and family, or do you want them sitting at home simply casting a ballot? 

We have a choice between continuing the primary wars deep into the general election, or settling them with a unity ticket that makes (most) people happy. Yes, not every Sanders supporter will be happy, but we can do better than pick someone that explicitly says, “I’m turning my back on the energized faction of the party.” 

3. Klobuchar doesn’t have special appeal to the Midwest and Rust Belt

You’ll hear this one a lot: Klobuchar helps us win in the Midwest and Rust Belt, and we have key battlegrounds in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. 

Yes, those are critical battlegrounds. But if Biden can’t bring Pennsylvania on his own, we’re already screwed. Wasn’t that the whole point of Biden being safe? That he’s from Scranton and can speak the language of working-class rural whites?

But beyond that, Klobuchar parked herself in Iowa—one of those midwestern states—for four years. She put everything she had into the state. And the result? 

    Pete Buttigieg: 26.2%

    Bernie Sanders: 26.1%

    Elizabeth Warren: 18%

    Joe Biden: 15.8%

    Amy Klobuchar: 12.3%

She got fifth place in Iowa, the only “serious” candidate to do even worse than Biden in the state.

There is nothing about Klobuchar that makes her more likely to win Midwestern states than Kaine could do to win rural white people (an argument many made, given his success in winning Virginia rural whites during his gubernatorial run). 

4. And our Midwest problem was not necessarily white people

Yes, Trump scooped up disgruntled white voters by appealing to racism and bigotry. But our biggest problem in 2016 wasn’t those white people: it was a depressed urban vote in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other black strongholds. It wasn’t an accident: Republican governors in those states swept into office during the 2010 Republican wave, and immediately set out to make voting harder. It’s no accident that voting in Republican-leaning suburbs is easier than in Democratic-dominated cities and college campuses. 

We’ve made huge strides in reversing those voting impediments: all three of those states now have Democratic governors and secretaries of state. While we won’t have the kind of active suppression we had in 2016, many of the structural impediments can’t be erased by fiat, as they were acts of the legislature. We have to work hard to remove as many of those barriers as possible. But we also need someone who can directly speak to the concerns of those voters, which is why I am a fierce advocate of a black woman on the ticket. 

Some might argue that Biden has done a good job of activating the black vote all by himself, and he doesn't need a black VP nominee to make further gains. They might be right. I haven't seen data one way or another to validate that argument. But even assuming it’s true, the next demographic battleground is educated suburban white women—the only demographic to have shifted in any significant way since 2016. 

Again, I think we need to lock down our core base demographics first, and so I prefer a black woman on the ticket. But if suburban women are the play, then why not pick the candidate who best won educated white women in the primaries? That’s Elizabeth Warren. She’d also be a unifying force, helping bridge the left-center divide. Nothing in Klobuchar’s history suggests she’d be any better than Warren on that front, and she wouldn’t deliver the critical “party unity” component. 

So why would would picking Klobuchar be of any possible interest to Biden? This is as good a theory as any: 

Klobuchar would certainly be in Biden’s shadow. We’d pretty much forget she was on the ticket, just like we forgot that Kaine was on Clinton’s ticket. But how would that be a good thing? It would be beyond gross negligence if the Biden camp went that direction, just to protect Biden’s alpha status. 

The party electorate is resigned to Biden’s nomination, but let’s not pretend that there’s huge excitement for him. People considered him the “safe” choice in these troubled (and getting more troubled by the hour) times. Biden didn’t win because of a massive grassroots army. He was broke. His rallies were empty. He lacked any field or volunteer network. He won because people knew and trusted him—the end. I don’t say that to criticize or diminish; I’m merely stating a simple fact. 

Fear of a second Donald Trump term will certainly motivate many to work hard for Biden. Count me in that camp. But fear alone isn’t a sufficient motivator. It wasn’t enough for Clinton in 2016. 

People want a reason to work hard for the ticket, not just against Trump. Biden just isn’t that person, but a dynamic running partner would be. I’ve long advocated for a black woman like Stacey Abrams or Kamala Harris. Elizabeth Warren would be a unifying force. Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth would be amazing, and so would Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, if we didn’t risk losing that Senate seat in a special election. We don’t lack amazing women who would bring a spark to the ticket. 

So let’s hope that Klobuchar is, in fact, not at the top of any VP list, not if we want to maximize our chances of winning in November. Remember, the VP nominee has one job—to help us win the election. If she can't do that equal to or better than anyone else, then she shouldn't even be on the list at all. 

As nations around the world buckle down amid coronavirus outbreaks, approaches to isolation and social distancing are inconsistent, at best, in the United States. While some cities and states are implementing bans on restaurants and bars staying open and capping the number of people in a space, some groups are moving forward with, ahem, business as usual. One example from last Sunday morning? Pastor Guillermo Maldonado, of King Jesus International Ministry, a megachurch in Kendall, Florida, encouraged his congregation to keep coming to service, downplaying concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, as reported by the Miami Herald.

“Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” Maldonado, a Trump supporter, said to his congregation, as reported by the outlet. 

“This service is usually packed. So now they’re home in a cave afraid of the virus, that you want to transmit the virus,” Maldonado continued. The Herald noted the venue “appeared half empty.”

Maldonado’s take contradicts advice from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cancel group gatherings of more than 50 people for the next two months. It also stands in opposition to what other religious groups are doing. For example, Catholic churches have begun canceling mass until further notice, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) canceled service indefinitely, and even some megachurches have switched to virtual services.

Of course, this is far from the first time Maldonado has been outrageous. The pastor once told his congregation that no undocumented immigrants would be deported if they attended a Trump campaign rally held at the church. As reported by The Advocate, Maldonado has claimed homosexuality “invites unclean spirits into our lives” and may stem from a “demonic attack while in the womb.” In terms of being chummy with Trump, Maldonado was selected to pray for the president as part of the “Evangelicals for Trump” rally in January. 

Maldonado is not the only religious leader dismissing coronavirus concerns. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, also a Trump supporter, encouraged people to shake hands while at service in Tampa, Florida, as seen in the Twitter video below.

“If we die, we die for Christ,” Maldonado told parishioners. “If we live, we live for Christ, so what do you lose?”

Given that a mere 26% of Republicans believe coronavirus will impact their day-to-day life in a major way, perhaps this isn’t surprising. But it’s definitely concerning, especially as we consider that people generally leave these large, congested spaces and go back into the world with everyone else, including the immunocompromised and the elderly. Decisions like these are dangerous for all involved and reinforce the point that amid rampant misinformation, we should be trying to educate others with patience, not mock or dismiss. 

Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans.

In a sober briefing, Trump’s incoming team learned that the disease was an emerging pandemic — a strain of novel influenza known as H9N2 — and that health systems were crashing in Asia, overwhelmed by the demand.

“Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918,” Trump’s aides were told. Soon, they heard cases were popping up in California and Texas.

The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama.

And in the words of several attendees, the atmosphere was “weird” at best, chilly at worst.

POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

But roughly two-thirds of the Trump representatives in that room are no longer serving in the administration. That extraordinary turnover in the months and years that followed is likely one reason his administration has struggled to handle the very real pandemic it faces now, former Obama administration officials said.

“The advantage we had under Obama was that during the first four years we had the same White House staff, the same Cabinet,” said former deputy labor secretary Chris Lu, who attended the gathering. “Just having the continuity makes all the difference in the world.”

Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, was among those who participated in the meeting. He said he understood the reasons such exercises could be useful, but described the encounter as a massive transfer of information that ultimately felt very theoretical. In real life, things are never as simple as what’s presented in a table-top exercise, he said.

“There’s no briefing that can prepare you for a worldwide pandemic,” added Spicer, who left the administration in mid-2017.

The outgoing Obama aides and incoming Trump aides gathered for roughly three hours on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 13, 2017, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.

At least 30 representatives of Trump’s team — many of them soon-to-be Cabinet members — were present, each sitting next to their closest Obama administration counterpart. Incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared to keep dozing off. Incoming Energy Secretary Rick Perry was getting along famously with Ernest Moniz, the man he was replacing, several fellow participants said.

But it was clear some on the Trump team had barely, if ever, spoken with the people they were replacing. News had broken that same day about national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unusual contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, so his presence in the meeting added to the surrealness. Some members of both groups kept going in and out of the room, but most paid quiet attention to the presentations, which were led by top Obama aides.

Obama aides, in op-eds and essays ripping the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, have pointed to the Jan. 13, 2017, session as a key example of their effort to press the importance of pandemic preparedness to their successors.

In a Friday op-ed, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, blasted Trump for comments such as “you can never really think” that a pandemic like the coronavirus “is going to happen.” She mentioned the 2017 session as one of many instances of the Obama administration’s efforts to help its successor be ready for such a challenge. She also slammed the Trump team for dismantling the National Security Council section that would play a lead role in organizing the U.S. response to a global pandemic.

“Rather than heed the warnings, embrace the planning and preserve the structures and budgets that had been bequeathed to him, the president ignored the risk of a pandemic,” Rice wrote. (Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who oversaw the dissolution of the NSC’s global health security and biodefense section, has defended it as necessary streamlining, countering that global health “remained a top NSC priority.” Trump, when recently asked about the reshuffling, called the question “nasty” and said, “I don’t know anything about it.”)

Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, explained the thinking behind the January 2017 session in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs. “Although the exercise was required, the specific scenarios we chose were not,” she wrote. “We included a pandemic scenario because I believed then, and I have warned since, that emerging infectious disease was likely to pose one of the gravest risks for the new administration.”

None of the sources argued that one meeting three years ago could have dramatically altered events today. But Obama aides say the Trump administration’s fumbling of the coronavirus outbreak is partly rooted in how unprepared — and in some cases unwilling — it was to engage in transition exercises at all in late 2016 and early 2017.

David Shulkin, who was an Obama appointee at the time but had been nominated to be Veterans Affairs secretary in the Trump administration, said in an interview that with the exception of this exercise, which he didn’t recall well, he noticed that in his agency, there had been “little coordination” and “very little interest in working with the Obama appointees.”

“They had said we don’t really have a lot of need to talk to the Obama appointees,” he said.

That botched handoff sparked weeks of confusion, all the way up to Inauguration Day. “There was a frenzy before the transition where I was asked to consider staying because the [preparedness] mission was so important,” said Nicole Lurie, who served as Obama’s Health and Human Services assistant secretary for preparedness and response, where she worked on crises like the Ebola virus outbreak and attended the pandemic exercise. “Then through the HHS secretary’s office, the next day, I heard they changed their mind.”

The Trump campaign, like the rest of America, was shocked to win the November 2016 election. Soon afterward, Trump cast aside his team’s transition prep work that had happened already and started over; some of his aides described tossing carefully collected binders full of possible personnel picks into trash bins. It was days, sometimes weeks, before his nominees and their aides showed up to meet the people they were replacing — if they did so at all — or to engage in transition meetings. Obama aides said they left detailed memos for their successors, but that quite often it appeared those memos were never read. Many on the Obama side were genuinely surprised that so many actually showed up for the Jan. 13, 2017, exercise, and there were expectations that some would skip it. On the Obama side, several agencies were represented by their second-in-command at the meeting for reasons including a belief that Trump’s principals wouldn’t show.

The gathering was held to satisfy a requirement in a 2016 law that updated the procedures around presidential transitions to require, among other things, that the outgoing administration “prepare and host interagency emergency preparedness and response exercises.” Obama also mentioned it in a 2016 executive order laying out his transition goals.

The 2016 law came about at the urging of the Partnership for Public Service, a good-government organization that helps administrations and candidates with the transition process. The emergency preparedness provisions were inspired by how George W. Bush handled his transition to Obama; that process, regarded as the gold standard for transition planning, included joint exercises on how to react to improvised explosive devices in cities. Bush had insisted on a detailed and highly coordinated transition planning in part because he felt scarred by the rushed transition he’d experienced from the Bill Clinton administration, not to mention having to deal with the Sept. 11 attacks during his first year.

“The idea was hatched after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina precisely to prepare for situations like today,” said David Marchick, director of the Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition.

The Obama and Trump teams met in the afternoon, sitting around tables arranged in a rectangle. Participants were given a binder of unclassified materials titled “Presidential Transition Exercise Series,” the contents of which were obtained by POLITICO. The purpose of the exercise, the documents state, was to “familiarize” the incoming team with “domestic incident management policy and practices and continuity of government programs” in case it faced a major crisis. One key goal was to explain to participants the various legal authorities they had to pursue a response, and which agencies had which capabilities and responsibilities. The references provided included detailed explanations of numerous laws and regulations that might affect their work, such as the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

Aside from the H9N2 pandemic exercise, the participants discussed the case study of how the Obama administration handled Hurricane Sandy in 2012. One section covered a potential cyber incident. Another went through how to respond to a domestic terrorism incident, in this case one carried out by a group of U.S. citizens who placed bombs in nearby spots during a major sporting event in a U.S. city. The terror squad not only detonates the bombs, it also engages in a mass shooting and takes a dozen hostages.

Using the materials, Monaco led the discussion. Her incoming counterpart, Tom Bossert, acted as a “semi co-chair,” attendees said. Ross, the then 79-year-old incoming Commerce secretary, was spotted with his eyes closed on more than one occasion. Elaine Chao, tapped to run the Department of Transportation, paid close attention. Several attendees noted the tense body language between Rice and Flynn, who lasted only a few weeks as Trump’s national security adviser and was ousted amid questions over his dealings with Russian officials.

And then there was the Energy Department duo: Perry, the incoming secretary who previously served as the governor of Texas, and Moniz, the outgoing secretary and famed physicist. The pair seemed to get along fabulously, which stood out to other attendees given the overall distrust between the two teams and the fact that Perry had once proposed getting rid of the Energy Department altogether.

It was a “semi-bizarro lovefest” between the two, a fellow participant said. “They were ready to go make a buddy movie.”

Perry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Moniz, who now leads the Energy Futures Initiative, said, “It is correct that [Perry] and I offered relevant perspectives from a governor’s and Cabinet secretary’s seat, respectively. As governor of Texas for a long time, Perry had been through many episodes needing crisis management.”

For the most part, however, the Trump team was in receive mode.

Partly, that was not a surprise: Many of Trump’s personnel choices had little or no government experience, and the Obama aides were presenting massive troves of information to them about how a raft of agencies had to work together to respond to various crises.

Multiple current and former Trump officials reached by POLITICO said they did not recall much about the briefing. But some Obama aides who attended said they were left with the impression that many of the Trump aides showed up to simply check off a box more than to learn. The impression was boosted in part because the transition overall was going so poorly. Several Trump nominees had barely even spoken to their Obama counterparts.

The State Department representative at the meeting, for instance, was Tom Shannon, a veteran career foreign service officer serving as undersecretary of State for political affairs. Shannon attended instead of Secretary of State John Kerry in part because he would be staying on under Trump and was essentially the “transition designee.” But that Jan. 13, 2017, session was the first time he’d seen the incoming secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, in person since Trump picked him for the job a month earlier. (Before the inauguration, Kerry and Tillerson spoke once, by phone, for a few minutes, people familiar with the situation said.)

“The problem is that they came in very arrogant and convinced that they knew more than the outgoing administration — full swagger,” one former Obama administration official who attended said.

“There were people who were there who said, ‘This is really stupid and why do we need to be here,’” added another senior Obama administration official who attended, alleging that Ross and incoming Education Secretary Betsy DeVos were especially dismissive in conversations on the sidelines of the session. “But some Trump people, like Tom Bossert, were trying to take it seriously.”

Asked for comment, Liz Hill, a spokesperson for DeVos, told POLITICO: “This is nothing more than a hit piece with no basis in reality. This department, under the secretary’s leadership, has taken swift action to support students, parents, and education leaders during this pandemic and will continue to do so. This former Obama official’s wild claims don’t comport with reality.”

A Commerce Department spokesperson denied that Ross had dozed off. "Secretary Ross found the meeting quite interesting and informative, taking many notes during the exercise," the spokesperson said. "He continues to rely upon that knowledge and experience as he assists the president in confronting the crisis at hand."

Another participant noted that such exercises are primarily aimed at helping an incoming administration make it through the first several months of its tenure — “the idea being, of course, that during the transition period we’re uniquely vulnerable.”

Presumably, by the third or fourth year in power, the administration would have its own processes and muscle memory, the participant said.

Asked whether information about the pandemic exercise reached the president-elect, a former senior Trump administration official who attended the meeting couldn’t say for sure but noted that it wasn’t “the kind of thing that really interested the president very much.”

“He was never interested in things that might happen. He’s totally focused on the stock market, the economy and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit,” the person said. “The possibility things were things he didn’t spend much time on or show much interest in.

“Even though we would put time on the schedule for things like that, if they happened at all, they would be very, very brief,” the former official continued. “To get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”

Anything associated with Obama or his administration was also a no-go zone for Trump aides. If you brought them up, “that would be an immediate rejection, like, ‘Why are they even here? Why the fuck did you ask them?’”

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.

Back when he was a regular on Fox News, then-Sheriff David Clarke’s main schtick involved vicious attacks on Black Lives Matter and the progressive movement, all of which led to Donald Trump very nearly naming him to a top seat in the Department of Home Security.

Clarke, the onetime sheriff of Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, was denied that spot, for reasons—mainly related to his propensity to spout conspiracy theories and “constitutionalist” nonsense—that became all too apparent over the weekend, as Clarke (who has over 900,000 followers) took to Twitter to denounce measures to limit the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus as “government control” (nefariously manipulated by George Soros) and urging readers to “take the streets” in defiance of it.

Twitter later removed several of the tweets for violating its terms of service, which include a ban on posts urging self-harm.

“GO INTO THE STREETS FOLKS. Visit bars, restaurants, shopping malls, CHURCHES and demand that your schools re-open. NOW! If government doesn’t stop this foolishness…STAY IN THE STREETS. END GOVERNEMNT CONTROL OVER OUR LIVES. IF NOT NOW, WHEN? THIS IS AN EXPLOITATION OF A CRISIS,” Clarke tweeted on Sunday.

That tweet remained up on Monday. However, Twitter had removed three of his related tweets.

“It is now evident that this is an orchestrated attempt to destroy CAPITALISM. First sports, then schools and finally commercial business,” he warned in one since-deleted tweet. “Time to RISE UP and push back. Bars and restaurants should defy the order. Let people decide if they want to go out.”

Clarke’s first tweet, also removed, along these lines was mostly venting: “I am TIRED of all this, ‘we have to err on the side of caution’ BULL SH*T. WE HAVE TO GET BACK TO REASONABLENESS DAMMIT. It’s the DAMN FLU. Stop being afraid and start being SENSIBLE. WASH YOUR FUCK*NG HANDS! STOP BUYING TOILET PAPER. DO YOU FUC*ING HEAR ME????”

In short order, however, he shifted to figuring out a way to blame liberals for the pandemic’s spread. “Folks, the LEFT has collapsed our institutions that have served us in times of trouble,” he tweeted. “TAKE … TO … THE … STREETS. That is the battlefield the LEFT has defined. I will no longer sit back and watch the destruction of this great republic over the FLU.” (Twitter also deleted that tweet.)

Clarke—who has participated in the anti-Semitic attacks on financier George Soros in the past—also directed his ire at the Jewish man he believes is the “puppet master” behind “the left”: “Not ONE media outlet has asked about George Soros’s involvement in the FLU panic. He is SOMEWHERE involved in this,” he tweeted Sunday.

None of this comes as a particular surprise to anyone who has followed Clarke’s career. He first rose to fame in right-wing circles as a “constitutionalist” closely associated with extremists such as Richard Mack and his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the antigovernment organization that promotes the posse comitatus-derived belief, among others, that the county sheriff is the supreme law enforcement entity in the United States.

Not only is Clarke a member in good standing with the CSPOA, he was named its “Sheriff of the Year” in 2013, and addressed its annual convention. His speech openly endorsed the organization’s radical interpretation of the Constitution, and he called its members “the true patriots.” Clarke also emphasized his view that “our common enemy” is “the government.”

Clarke’s subsequent career as a frequent guest on Fox News included segments featuring vicious attacks on President Obama, whom he claimed was attempting to foment racial unrest due to his “divisive policies,” as well as accusing Obama of waging a “war on cops.” He was especially vicious in his attacks on black activists and the Black Lives Matter movement, describing them as “scum” and “subhuman” and calling for their eradication.

Eventually, after the DHS role was turned away, Fox News quietly scrubbed him from their contributor rolls.

Moscow Mitch McConnell's total obsession with overturning the federal judiciary really knows no bounds. He's prioritized it above everything, including safeguarding the nation's health during a global pandemic that is shutting down large swathes of the country. The Senate majority leader is so obsessed that he's even trying to push federal judges into retirement.

He's leaning particularly on "judges nominated by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush," telling them that "making the change now would be advantageous," The New York Times’ Carl Hulse reports. McConnell's sense of urgency is apparently driven by the likelihood that Donald Trump won't be in office another four years, as well as the fact that the Republican Senate majority is teetering right now. Never mind that further packing the courts with Trump's young, unqualified, and extremist partisans is one more issue voters are focusing on this election and will probably further endanger vulnerable Republicans: Moscow Mitch wants to put his lasting, extremist, nihilistic stamp on the nation for generations to come.

It's already terrifying: McConnell has helped confirm and place more than 50 appeals court judges. Those are the most influential of judgeships, the cases that wind their way up to the Supreme Court. As of right now, there's only one open appellate seat. More than one-quarter of the appeals court judges are now McConnell-Trump judges. This campaign of trying to talk more judges into retiring is purely political. Brian Fallon, the executive director of the progressive judicial group Demand Justice, describes it as "court-packing in a different form. […] It raises the question of what, if anything, McConnell is offering them to take senior status earlier than planned. This type of hand-in-glove coordination shows how utterly politicized the judicial branch is."

Here's an example of one issue these judges can fundamentally alter that's particularly important right now: health care. The Alliance for Justice has compiled a list of Trump nominees and appointees who have taken extremist positions against reproductive health freedom, against the Affordable Care Act, against the very basic notion that Americans have a right to health care. That includes Supreme Court justice and alleged sexual assailant Brett Kavanaugh, who while sitting in the D.C. Circuit twice wrote dissenting opinions to rulings upholding the ACA. One of Kavanaugh's clerks describes his dissent as providing the "road map" to invalidating the whole law.

Access to health care has been the battleground Republicans, and especially McConnell, have chosen for the past decade and they've put that fight smack dab in the middle of the courts. They've succeeded to a terrifying extent, which we're just now seeing as the COVID-19 epidemic starts to take hold. It seems like kind of an arcane, political-insiderish, and wonky issue, the federal courts. It's not: It's life and death, when it comes right down to it.

Mitch McConnell is once again demonstrating that he's perfectly willing to kill you for the sake of his ideology.

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President Trump answers questions at the Capitol on March 10, 2020, in Washington, DC. Forty percent of Republicans say they are worried about the coronavirus. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Most Democrats are a lot more worried than Republicans.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has revealed sharp partisan divides between Americans over the coronavirus pandemic.

The poll found 68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.

The gulf in perception over an outwardly nonpolitical issue underscores how signals from politicians and media outlets have played a critical role in shaping how seriously Americans are taking a viral outbreak that has overwhelmed health care systems and triggered mass quarantines in several countries around the world.

Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that. Overall, 53 percent of all voters are concerned that someone in their immediate family might contract the coronavirus, and 60 percent believe the worst is yet to come.

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The poll also found 56 percent of Democrats believe their day-to-day lives will change in a major way in the future — while just 26 percent of Republicans hold that view.

In response to every question about whether a respondent would change plans that would expose them to others, like travel, eating out at restaurants, and attending large gatherings, Democratic voters consistently responded affirmatively at much higher rates than Republicans. For example, 61 percent of Democrats said they’ve stopped or plan to stop attending large public gatherings, but only 30 percent of Republicans said the same.

The partisan disconnect is not due to a lack of information among conservatives or a function of not hearing much about the outbreak in certain regions of the country. NBC reports that 99 percent of respondents said they’ve seen, heard, or read about the spread of the coronavirus and 89 percent say they’ve heard “a lot” about it — the highest percentage that one of their polls has found for a major event since 2009.

The more likely explanation is that, as with so many other issues, people with different political ideologies consume different kinds of information and take cues on how to think about events from different political figures and institutions. Given that President Donald Trump and media institutions that cater to conservative audiences, like Fox News, have been downplaying the issue from day one, it’s not surprising that Republican voters are not nearly as alarmed as Democrats.

Still, as the virus spreads and more people know someone affected, the typical partisan divides might not hold.

Coronavirus has been politicized

Ever since it has been clear that the US was at risk of a serious outbreak of the novel coronavirus, Trump has continually downplayed the risks it poses and dragged his feet on policy responses that would help contain and mitigate the spread of the virus. Reporting indicates that he has done this in part because he’s worried about the political damage that would accompany treating the situation as a full-blown crisis.

As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, Trump has underplayed what’s at stake on many occasions:

Trump himself has tweeted comparisons of Covid-19 to the common flu — which [director of the Harvard Global Health Institute Ashish] Jha describes as “really unhelpful,” because the novel coronavirus appears to be much worse. Trump also called concerns about the virus a “hoax.” He said on national television that, based on nothing more than a self-admitted “hunch,” the death rate of the disease is much lower than public health officials projected.

And Trump has rejected any accountability for the botched testing process: “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said on Friday.

Jha described the Trump administration’s messaging so far as “deeply disturbing,” adding that it’s “left the country far less prepared than it needs to be for what is a very substantial challenge ahead.”

Trump also downplayed the issue by initially declining to get tested for it despite close contact with people who tested positive for the virus last week. He also never self-isolated despite being at risk of carrying the virus and spreading it to others (public health experts say it is possible to spread the virus even if you’re not showing symptoms).

Trump did eventually get tested days after his exposure — and on Saturday, the White House physician said the test was negative. But his behavior stood in stark contrast to Republican politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has self-quarantined after learning he came in contact with people who have tested positive for the coronavirus. Cruz reports he is currently showing no symptoms.

Conservative news outlets like Fox News have also promoted skepticism of the seriousness of the coronavirus as a serious health hazard as part of an effort to shield the Trump administration from criticism. Here are just a few examples, via progressive watchdog Media Matters:

- Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity claimed people are faking concern about coronavirus just to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”

- On her Saturday night show, Fox host Jeanine Pirro downplayed the possibility that the coronavirus is more deadly than the flu, arguing that “that’s only because there’s a flu vaccine” and if not for the vaccine, “the flu would be a pandemic.” Pirro somehow drew the conclusion that this means that “the talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly [than the flu] doesn’t reflect reality.”

- Fox host Pete Hegseth downplayed the impact of coronavirus: “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.”

- On Hannity, Fox News medical correspondent Marc Siegel said that the “worst case scenario” with coronavirus is that “it could be the flu.”

Other prominent right-wing commentators like radio personality Rush Limbaugh have painted coronavirus fears as a ploy to stop Trump rallies.

Messaging from Trump and hard-right news outlets like Fox News has diverged from the consensus among scientists and public health experts around the world who have indicated coronavirus is a serious health hazard that could easily overwhelm the US health care system and kill millions of Americans if not taken seriously by the federal government.

While mainstream and liberal media outlets have focused on pleas from the public health and scientific communities about the serious risks posed by the coronavirus, some conservative outlets and the Trump administration have gone the opposite way. And that in turn has led to a gap between liberals and conservatives on how seriously to take it.

Experts say that by the time everyone takes it seriously, it may be too late to mitigate risks.

Many Londoners and tourists are continuing their daily activities, such as these in central London on March 14, 2020. | Alberto Pezzali/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The UK’s chief science adviser suggested allowing the coronavirus to spread to build immunity. Government ministers said they’ll promote self-isolation instead.

The United Kingdom is previewing a new self-isolation plan for all people over 70 to address the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country, following backlash over a proposal to promote immunity by allowing up to 60 percent of its population to become infected.

On Friday, the UK government’s chief science adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said on BBC Radio 4 that one of “the key things we need to do” is to “build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”

But on Sunday, Matt Hancock, the UK secretary of state for health and social care, stressed that achieving herd immunity to Covid-19 is not a stated policy. Instead, he said that “in the coming weeks,” people over the age of 70 will be told to self-isolate. This stands in contrast with World Health Organization guidelines, which recommend that everyone, regardless of age, practice social distancing.

“What we will do is listen to all the credible scientists and we will look at all the evidence,” he said. “Herd immunity is not our goal or policy, it’s a scientific concept.”

The UK has faced questions over the efficacy of its social distancing guidance — for instance, at a press conference on Thursday, where government officials, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, would not specify whether large public gatherings, including football matches, would be canceled.

Simon Dawson/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Chris Whitty, the UK’s chief medical officer for England, said Thursday that holding off on recommending the sort of social distancing other countries have encouraged was a strategic decision, arguing that imposing it “too early” would cause people to become exhausted and stop participating in it.

But Johnson has since said that he will ban large gatherings in the coming week, in the face of pushback and a rising number of confirmed infections.

As in many countries, the coronavirus pandemic is of growing concern in the UK — more than 1,100 people there have tested positive for the virus as of March 15, and 21 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins’ tracker of Covid-19 cases.

As a result, the government is facing increased pressure to declare a clearer and more unified strategy for combating the virus — and is signaling that it may begin unveiling its strategy in the coming days.

The herd immunity controversy, briefly explained

The argument behind achieving herd immunity is that doing so would minimize the risk of a coronavirus resurgence similar to the second wave of the Spanish Flu of 1918. In a successful herd immunity scenario, a country’s population — the herd — would become infected with the virus, recover, and then have an immunity to it, making them resistant to reinfection.

For this to work in his country, according to Vallance, the virus would need to spread to about 60 percent of the UK.

With 66 million people living in the UK nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that strategy could lead to as many as 40 million people infected. Depending on the mortality rate — which itself depends on access to medical care and other factors — the death rate en route to improved immunity could range from 300,000 to more than a million.

That reality led to more than 200 scientists and medical professionals pushing back against the herd immunity strategy in an open letter Saturday. These experts argued that herd immunity does not “seem a viable option” because it could overwhelm the UK’s National Health Service. Instead, they called for strict social distancing measures of a more serious variety than the government has currently recommended.

“By putting in place social distancing measures now, the growth can be slowed down dramatically, and thousands of lives can be spared,” the letter reads. “We consider the social distancing measures taken as of today as insufficient, and we believe that additional and more restrictive measures should be taken immediately, as it is already happening in other countries across the world.”

Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images

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The scientists — which include geneticists, biologists, and physicists — write that the infection rate in the UK mirrors the growth rate of European countries that have seen dramatic increases in new cases. And they cautioned that without aggressive social distancing measures, “this outbreak will affect millions of people in the next few weeks.”

“This will most probably put the NHS at serious risk of not being able to cope with the flow of patients needing intensive care, as the number of ICU beds in the UK is not larger than that available in other neighbouring countries with a similar population,” they added.

This sentiment echoes that of other health officials over the weekend, who expressed dismay at Vallance’s proposal. On Twitter, the former director of maternal, child, and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, Anthony Costello, wrote that researchers don’t even yet know if people become immune to the novel coronavirus after catching it.

“Is it ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of an uncertain future benefit?” he wrote.

Amid this outpouring of criticism, Hancock’s Department of Health and Social Care said that Vallance’s comments were misinterpreted, according to the BBC.

The UK lags behind other countries in imposing social distancing

The UK’s approach to the coronavirus remains relatively mild compared to other places with similar rates of infection, as countries across the globe try to figure out how best to limit the spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel virus.

In the US, which is nearing 3,000 confirmed reported cases as of March 15, many public events such as baseball and basketball seasons, festivals like Coachella, and the 259-year-old New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade have been canceled.

By contrast, the Six Nations Rugby Cup has taken place across the UK and Europe over the last few weeks with only a handful of matches — including one scheduled for this weekend — being postponed. And on Friday, more than 60,000 people attended a crowded horse race in Cheltenham, in southwest England.

Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images

In France, where just under 4,500 cases have been confirmed, all cafés, bars, and restaurants, as well as other gathering spots like nightclubs and movie theaters, have been ordered to close.

Spain, Europe’s second-worst-hit country with about 6,300 confirmed infections, has implemented a nationwide shutdown, with citizens only allowed to leave their homes to buy groceries, work, care for people in need, or to seek medical care.

Israel has also ordered a partial shutdown of shopping centers and restaurants. And Australia and New Zealand are ordering that anyone entering the country, beginning at midnight on Sunday, will be required to self-isolate for 14 days.

There are not yet official bans against large gatherings in the UK, such as at restaurants or sporting events, although some organizations, such as Premier League football, have canceled events themselves. But Prime Minister Johnson recently signaled that he will ban large gatherings this week, meaning the UK’s response will likely fall in line with those of its neighbors in the coming days.

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President Trump takes questions during a news conference about the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic at the White House on March 13, 2020. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

From insufficient testing to a lack of coordination, Trump’s Covid-19 response has been a disaster years in the making.

President Donald Trump’s failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic didn’t begin with the administration’s inability to send out the millions of test kits and the protective medical gear for health care workers that experts say are needed to tackle the crisis. It didn’t start with Trump’s bungled messaging downplaying the crisis even as it’s worsened, nor with his mid-March insistence that social distancing measures could be lifted by Easter (he later backpedaled).

It began in April 2018 — more than a year and a half before the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, sickened enough people in China that authorities realized they were dealing with a new disease.

The Trump administration, with John Bolton newly at the helm of the White House National Security Council, began dismantling the team in charge of pandemic response, firing its leadership and disbanding the team in spring 2018.

The cuts, coupled with the administration’s repeated calls to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies, made it clear that the Trump administration wasn’t prioritizing the federal government’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks.

That lack of attention to preparedness, experts say, helps explain why the Trump administration has consistently botched its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

The administration has in recent weeks taken steps to combat criticisms about its slow and muddled response to the coronavirus. Trump has been appearing on TV a lot more, starting with an Oval Office address and recently with daily press briefings. He declared a national emergency, advised Americans to social distance, vowed more testing for patients and medical equipment for health care workers, and promised more economic relief to those affected by the crisis.

But experts say a lot of the damage has been done: The federal government is still only playing catch-up, as thousands of new cases of coronavirus are confirmed and the death toll steadily increases every day.

The first sign of a massive failure came with testing. South Korea, which has been widely praised for its response to coronavirus, tested more than 66,000 people within a week of the first community transmission within its borders. By comparison, the US took roughly three weeks to complete that many tests — in a country that is much more populous and, now, is on track to have a much worse outbreak than South Korea and other nations.

Testing is crucial to slowing epidemics. First, it lets public health officials identify sick people and subsequently isolate them. Second, they can trace that sick person’s recent contacts to make sure those people aren’t sick and to get them into quarantine as well. It’s one of the best tools we have for an outbreak like this.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

It’s also something that the federal government has done well before — recently, with H1N1 and Zika. “It’s been surprising to me that the administration’s had a hard time executing on some of these things,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, previously told me.

But it’s the kind of thing that the Trump administration has screwed up, while instead trying to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Trump himself has tweeted comparisons of Covid-19 to the common flu — which Jha describes as “really unhelpful,” because the novel coronavirus appears to be much worse. Trump also called concerns about the virus a “hoax.” He said on national television that, based on nothing more than a self-admitted “hunch,” the death rate of the disease is much lower than public health officials projected.

And Trump has rejected any accountability for the botched testing process: “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said this month.

Jha described the Trump administration’s messaging so far as “deeply disturbing,” adding that it’s “left the country far less prepared than it needs to be for what is a very substantial challenge ahead.”

Even as the Trump administration has tried to escalate its efforts to combat the pandemic, Trump has continued to downplay concerns. Recently, he’s suggested that social distancing measures — asking people to stay home and keep their physical distance from one another — could be lifted within weeks, instead of the months experts say is likely necessary. “What a great timeline that would be,” Trump said.

This kind of downplaying has previously worked for Trump, who successfully, at least politically, fended off concerns about his handling of Hurricane Maria, the opioid epidemic, and a host of self-inflicted crises, from his travel ban to the crisis at the US-Mexico border.

But in the current pandemic, the approach has left the Trump administration unprepared for the challenge ahead, whether it’s in the failure in testing or the administration’s inability to calm the public and markets as the novel coronavirus spreads. And all of this can be traced back to the Trump administration’s decision in the spring of 2018 to deprioritize the federal government’s ability to respond to pandemics.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s failures began years ago

When Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser in 2018, he quickly moved to disband the White House National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which President Barack Obama set up after the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak to lead federal coordination and preparation for disease outbreaks.

In April 2018, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, then the homeland security adviser, who, the Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.” Then, that May, Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and his global health security team. The team, the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, was never replaced.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

At the time, the Trump administration and Bolton argued the cuts were needed to streamline the National Security Council.

But, according to experts, the work of a global health security team, or something like it, is crucial to responding to any disease outbreak. Since the federal government is sprawling and large, it helps to have centralized leadership in case of a crisis. That leadership could ensure all federal agencies are doing the most they can and working toward a single set of goals.

But it’s important to have this kind of agency set up before an outbreak. Setting up an agency takes time; it requires hiring staff, handing out tasks and expected workloads, creating internal policies, and so on. A preexisting agency is also going to have plans worked out before an outbreak, with likely contingencies in place for what to do. That’s why it was so important to have this agency in place even during years, like 2018, when disease pandemics didn’t seem like a nearby threat to everyone.

“The basic systems need to be in place for global, state, and local responses,” Jen Kates, a senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “When you don’t shore those up, you’re not starting from scratch, but you’re catching up every single time.”

The Trump administration has since put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of handling the coronavirus pandemic, building out a team that includes well-respected experts like Deborah Birx. But this is in reaction to the epidemic, instead of something that a preexisting agency within the administration was working on for years.

Even some officials within the Trump administration have voiced concern about the team’s dismantling. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said during a congressional hearing. “We worked very well with that office.”

The cuts are part of Trump’s broader policy agenda, focused largely on trimming the size of the federal government. He has repeatedly proposed cuts to agencies, like the CDC and NIH, on the front lines of the federal response to disease outbreaks. Trump’s most recent budget proposals asked for similar cuts — and the administration has stood by them. (But Congress has generally denied such proposals.)

In the months before the coronavirus outbreak, the administration cut a public health position that was meant to help detect disease outbreaks in China, where the pandemic began, Marisa Taylor reported for Reuters.

Even without such cuts, experts and advocates argue the US generally underfunds disease outbreak preparedness and public health programs more broadly. Further cuts just deepen the risks of pandemics.

By repeatedly undercutting outbreak preparedness, Jha said, the Trump administration signaled “to the government and all the agencies this is not a priority. And that means that even other agencies end up not putting as much attention and energy on it. So I think this has been a longstanding problem of the White House.”

Trump, for his part, has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness should work. “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Washington Post. “You don’t wait for a fire.”

The administration has been slow to react

Even after it became clear that the coronavirus outbreak was becoming a global threat in January, the Trump administration has been slow to prepare and react. The common refrain among experts is that other countries’ actions, such as China’s draconian measures, gave the US a bit of time to do something, but the federal government has failed to get even the basics right in that time.

That begins, first and foremost, with testing. But as report after report has confirmed, the US has done a bad job in this area — falling behind its developed peers in Europe and Asia. While the US has dramatically scaled up testing in recent weeks, health care workers and patients still complain that they still sometimes can’t obtain tests even when symptoms are present.

Not all of this is necessarily the Trump administration’s fault. When the CDC rolled out its tests, a component in them turned out to be faulty. That was unfortunate, but it put a big spotlight on the CDC’s decision to use its own test kit instead of test kits other countries have used, reportedly in an effort to create a more accurate test. Since then, as Olga Khazan explained at the Atlantic, the Trump administration consistently failed to make things better, with reports of infighting making it harder for the administration to get its act together.

Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images

But this is exactly the kind of situation that proper preparedness, well, prepares federal agencies for. If the Trump administration had prioritized outbreak prevention before the coronavirus pandemic, it might have used the time prior to Covid-19’s appearance — or even January and February, when the global threat was increasingly clear — to establish contingencies in case something went wrong.

“These kinds of things are what you prepare for, why you do preparedness planning, so this kind of thing doesn’t happen,” Kates said. “Right now everyone’s playing catch-up to try to address these gaps, and every day matters. A good preparedness plan would be addressing that from the outset.”

This is, after all, something the federal government has done before for outbreaks, from H1N1 to Zika. A big difference from then to now is that Trump is in charge.

Recognizing the criticisms, the Trump administration has promised to try to boost testing output, including a partnership with the private sector. But while things are improving, the full rollout of tests will likely take weeks — eating up crucial time that could have gone to actually using the tests to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

One of the problems is Trump has consistently downplayed the coronavirus, comparing it to the common flu and claiming that his administration is doing a “GREAT job” and keeping things under control. Even when announcing his administration’s goal to get 5 million test kits out, Trump said, “I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”

Some of that may be political. Politico reporter Dan Diamond told NPR host Terry Gross that, based on his own reporting, Trump “did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.”

Some of it could also be a result of too much optimism. Trump in February said of the coronavirus, “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (As of March 25, the US has more than 55,000 confirmed cases, up from fewer than 100 at the beginning of March, according to Johns Hopkins University.)

In mid-March, as Trump more openly acknowledged the threat of coronavirus, he suggested that the country could pull back on social distancing efforts by Easter — in just a couple weeks. When pressed on why he chose that date, he did not cite any evidence or data. Instead, he said that Easter “is a beautiful time. It would be a beautiful timeline.” That timeline did not last long.

Trump has taken some steps as the pandemic has worsened

Trump initially focused his response to coronavirus on travel restrictions, first against China and most recently against Europe. While this likely bought the US a little time with China, the Trump administration didn’t use that time properly.

And in the case of Europe, the restrictions will likely do little to nothing. There’s one simple reason for that, Kates told me: “The virus is already here.” Since the coronavirus is already spreading within communities, the concern is no longer the virus coming in from outside the US.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Even conservatives have been critical of Trump’s response. The National Review editorial board wrote earlier this month:

[Trump] resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he could — refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the information they provided him — often offering up unsubstantiated claims and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clichés. He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more difficult to address them.

In the face of all these criticisms, Trump has, at least in public, seemingly taken the crisis more seriously. He held an Oval Office address. He’s led daily press briefings. A White House task force released guidelines advising people to avoid public spaces and larger gatherings. His administration has, in light of declaring a national emergency, promised to take all sorts of actions to shore up coronavirus testing, health care capacity, and a tanking economy.

At the same time, Trump has continued to do things that conflict with what experts are saying. He’s hyped up an anti-malaria drug, chloroquine, that experts say we simply don’t have enough evidence for as an anti-coronavirus treatment. He’s downplayed experts’ warnings that social distancing may be necessary for months, instead suggesting that it may just be weeks. And instead of using press briefings to convey clear, actionable messages and let his own experts speak, Trump often uses his time at the podium to brag about unrelated issues and criticize the media as “fake news.”

Meanwhile, the actual policy response continues lagging behind. Beyond the lack of testing, experts often cite a shortage of medical equipment, such as ventilators, masks, gloves, and goggles. While the administration has said it’s using federal authorities and tapping into its stockpiles to get more of this gear to the places that need it, health care workers on the ground complain that they still don’t have enough — forcing them to reuse possibly contaminated equipment and choose between working in unsafe conditions or not show up to work at all. All of this at a time when the country needs to, according to experts, boost health care capacity.

“Even with the infusion of supplies from the strategic stockpile and other federal resources, there will not be enough medical supplies, including ventilators, to respond to the projected COVID-19 outbreak,” a March 21 letter from the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association, and American Nurses Association stated. “We have heard of health care providers reusing masks or resorting to makeshift alternatives for masks.”

Again, this reflects on the lack of preparedness: A shortage of medical equipment is one of the many problems government simulations and exercises warned about before the current outbreak. But Trump simply didn’t prioritize pandemic preparedness beforehand.

“The US … was not prepared,” Kates said. “A good preparedness plan would have helped address this and had things in place to allow for that increased need to be met.”

But the Trump administration didn’t quickly prioritize such efforts, even after it got warnings in January and February based on how coronavirus cases took off in China.

Other Trump policies could impact the pandemic

In the background of all of this, the Trump administration has continued to push for several policies that, while not obviously related to the coronavirus, experts caution could have a negative impact on the pandemic.

For one, Trump has continued pushing for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, as well as efforts to reel back Medicaid with work requirements. With the outbreak growing, the US’s lack of universal health care has become an even more obvious problem: If people can’t get testing, they’re less likely to find out they have Covid-19 and take precautions to avoid spreading the virus. If they can’t get treatment in case of complications, they’re more likely to suffer, potentially spread the disease, and die.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The Trump administration seems aware of this problem, working with insurers to eliminate copayments for testing, stop surprise medical billing, and help expand coverage related to the coronavirus. But in many ways, the administration is working against problems that it’s also helping create by pushing to worsen access to health care.

The pandemic is “bringing to the fore the underlying challenges that we have in our health and social support system in the United States,” Kates said.

Another example: The administration has pushed forward on measures that will kick people off food stamps. This will not only lead people to suffer if they lose their jobs as a result of a coronavirus-caused recession, but it could lead to sick people going to work and spreading the disease, because they won’t have a safety net if they don’t bring in a paycheck.

“If you ask people who are very marginal and barely had enough money to put food on the table, if you ask them to not work and therefore not get paid, and choose between that and having to go to work and put themselves or others at risk, that’s a terrible choice,” Jha said. “And a lot of people are going to make ‘the wrong choice,’ and you’d understand why. This is not about just helping people economically; this is about fighting the virus.”

The Trump administration, for its part, appears to understand part of the problem here. He has signed a bill that’s providing economic relief to affected workers and Covid-19 patients — including paid leave, more food aid, and free testing — with more to come.

But his administration has also stuck to its other efforts to kick people off food stamps.

Experts also pointed to the “public charge” rule, which effectively discourages immigrants from seeking public services, including health care, by threatening their immigration status if they are “likely to be a public charge” by relying on those services.

“With an outbreak, that’s a recipe for potential disaster,” Kates argued. “You don’t want individuals to feel frightened about seeking the care that they need because they’re fearful of not being able to stay in the country or with their families. That would threaten the public’s health.”

Even if the administration doesn’t want to permanently back off these policy proposals, it could, Kates said, consider a moratorium. But so far, that’s not happening.

That reflects the lack of priority the Trump administration has given to the coronavirus pandemic, even as it rapidly worsens. If stopping the pandemic was the top priority, Trump could halt, even just temporarily, policies that could potentially worsen the crisis. But he’s not.

Delta Air Lines and American Airlines both acknowledged discussing potential aid from Washington to cope with the coronavirus outbreak, amid a crisis in air travel unlike anything the industry has seen since Sept. 11, 2001.

Delta also announced it is cutting 40 percent of its flight capacity, the steepest in its history.

The news comes two days after President Donald Trump announced a monthlong halt to U.S.-bound passengers from most of Europe, a stoppage that in one blow decimated many of the industry’s most lucrative international routes.

“We are in discussions with the White House and Congress regarding the support they can provide to help us through this period," Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a memo to employees obtained by POLITICO. "I’m optimistic we will receive their support."

A spokesperson for American Airlines also said Friday that the carrier was involved in early discussions with the government.

Airlines have been struggling financially for weeks because of a steep slump in passenger demand as the global pandemic has spread. But Trump’s European travel restrictions pushed them even further into crisis. (Trump said Friday that he may expand the restrictions to include people coming from the United Kingdom.)

"The speed of the demand fall-off is unlike anything we’ve seen," Bastian wrote, noting that bookings are net negative— meaning canceled bookings are more than new bookings — at Delta. "We’re currently seeing more cancellations than new bookings over the next month," added.

On Thursday, an administration official told POLITICO that "Congress really will have little choice to act or face a significant extinction moment for the airline industry."

Trump's economic aides have been studying how the President George W. Bush administration propped up the airline industry after 9/11.

Bastian warned in his memo, though, that the "form and value" of help from the government is unpredictable. "We can’t put our company’s future at risk waiting on aid from our government."

Delta is also eliminating flights to continental Europe for the next 30 days. Bastian also said he would forgo his salary for the next six months.

Nancy Pelosi struck a deal with the Trump administration on a landmark bill that will strike a major blow in the fight against the outbreak of COVID-19. It passed by a vote of 363-40-1. The bill includes the longtime liberal priority of paid sick leave, as well as enhanced unemployment insurance, increased funds for Medicaid, and provisions to ensure food security. She then promptly led the House in passing the bill into law.

So where’s Mitch McConnell and the Senate? Enjoying a long weekend at home. Stunningly, incomprehensibly, Senate Republicans adjourned their business on Thursday afternoon and won’t return until Monday. Democrats have demanded the Senate majority leader come back to address the crisis, but he’s nowhere to be found.

Trump’s inaction has already cost us gravely. McConnell going AWOL at our hour of greatest need will harm us even further. The coronavirus waits for no human. If they had any decency, Senate Republicans would reconvene at once and pass the House’s bill.

But since we know they don’t, it’s on us to replace them with better public servants. Click here to give $1 right now to defeat vulnerable Republicans in key Senate races this November. Our future health depends on it.

Famous 20th century American televangelist Jerry Falwell has a son, Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell Jr. has been tied to the Trump campaign not only as a supporter, but as one of the many guys Trump’s former personal attorney and criminal, Michael Cohen, helped when strange salacious materials began circulating that included Falwell and his wife and a blackmailer. Anyway, Falwell Jr. was on Fox News this morning to talk about how Virginia, now turned “blue” due to an election where Virginians came out and voted for NOT Republicans, was going to hell … for landowners like Falwell Jr.

“The Washington D.C. suburbs now control every Virginia statewide election and that’s the result of the radical government in Richmond. And they're passing all kinds of bills that are just contrary to what the majority of Virginians—not the majority of Virginians, but most Virginians as far as land mass, support,” Fallwell Jr. said on Fox News.

Wow. Just. Wow. Jerry Falwell Jr. believes that democracy must really go way back to ancient Rome, where only landowners could vote on laws. Which makes sense for someone as backward and corrupt as Jerry Falwell Jr., who, you might remember, has been accused of all kinds of corrupt self-dealings. “More than two dozen” Liberty University officials have called his handling of the school’s scholarships and finances dubious, saying, "We're not a school, we're a real estate hedge fund."

What is really happening is that Falwell Jr. and others are trying to secede from Virginia to join West Virginia. The issue being that northern Virginia has been becoming larger, increasingly more racially diverse, and younger. As a result, the more conservative politics of rural communities have begun to feel sad face emoji. Here’s a deal: you get rid of the Electoral College and stop trying to take away people’s voting rights, and we will consider letting you secede from your state. 

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We’ve known for some time that Russia’s authoritarian regime has played a key role in spreading far-right white-nationalist ideology around the globe. We’ve also known for some time that Russian intelligence interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, mainly through disinformation campaigns.

The inevitable next step is apparently here: American intelligence officials, according to The New York Times, now believe that neo-Nazi paramilitary operations such as The Base and its Northwest-based training operations, used to plan and train for terrorist acts in the United States, including possibly during the coming election season, are being underwritten and overseen by Russian intelligence services.

The Times’ report cites seven unnamed intelligence officials who briefed the paper’s reporters on Russia’s updated tactics in interfering with the 2020 election. One of the new tactics appears to involve activating neo-Nazi terrorists, radicalized online and organized through the internet.

The FBI is currently investigating Russian intelligence ties to The Base, which began operating a paramilitary training camp in eastern Washington state last year. Several members of The Base were arrested in January just prior to a planned right-wing gun rally in Richmond, Virginia, where they reportedly intended to wreak violent havoc.

The Guardian revealed in January that the founder of The Base was a man named Rinaldo Nazzaro, originally from New Jersey, who now makes his home in Russia and appears to have at least peripheral connections to Russian intelligence. From there, he’s been able to organize The Base under the nom de plume “Norman Spear,” though he has apparently made several trips to the U.S. to secure the rural Washington property.

From a foreign-intelligence perspective, these kinds of operations are primarily intended to sow chaos and fear—to which a common human response is to embrace authoritarianism and its surety. Such responses become acute in the event of real terrorist violence.

“One of Russia’s goals is weakening institutions and the weaponization of race is a way they can do that,” Laura Rosenberger, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told the Times. “A divided America is a weaker America. When we are unable to solve our challenges together, Russia is more able to flex its power around the world.”

Russian intelligence operatives have been forced to adapt their tactics because social media companies are now on the lookout for the ad-fueled disinformation efforts that cropped up in 2016, according to the report. Instead, they’re now manipulating spaces that are more difficult to monitor and to mask their operations, including message boards like 4chan, private Facebook groups, and closed chat rooms.

The story cites FBI agent David Porter’s remarks at a recent election security conference: “We see Russia is willing to conduct more brazen and disruptive influence operations because of how it perceives its conflict with the West … To put it simply, in this space, Russia wants to watch us tear ourselves apart.”