Bloomberg is reporting that Trump is preparing to order all U.S. meat packing plants to either re-open or remain open.

Trump plans to use the Defense Production Act to order the companies to stay open as critical infrastructure, and the government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance, according to the person.

The order sets the stage for a showdown between America’s meat giants, which have been pressing to reopen plants, and some local officials and labor unions who’ve called for closures in a bid to prevent the virus from spreading. The president himself has long agitated for Americans to return to work and restore an economy crippled by social distancing measures.

Trump must be worried he won’t be able to get an overcooked steak or hamburger whenever he wants one.

Farmers are dumping all kinds of food, including crops, milk, eggs, and livestock, because the supply chains are screwed, and in response the Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Purdue, has provided more happy talk than help. Many expect big food shortages down the road, and there there are long lines at food pantries now. But Sonny Purdue tells us not to worry. Even so, Trump will see to it that meat packing workers — a considerable percentage of whom are immigrants — risk their lives to keep the meat coming.

Meanwhile, Trump lawyer and alleged Attorney General Bill Barr has sent a directive to federal attorneys to watch out for states going too far with their pandemic restrictions. What “too far” means is open to interpretation, I suppose. Barr has been under pressure from conservatives to get more involved in ending the pandemic restrictions to get the economy going.

Speaking of wackjobs, an Illinois county circuit court judge has issued a restraining order exempting one Illinois legislator from having to adhere to a stay-at-home order.

As some Republicans seeking to reopen the economy launch a full-court press against stay-at-home restrictions, one GOP lawmaker in Illinois scored an unusual legal victory on Monday — for himself.

State Rep. Darren Bailey apparently became the only person in Illinois, besides essential workers, who is now exempt from Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order after a judge in southern Illinois granted a temporary restraining order blocking the state from enforcing Pritzker’s order against him.

Now, Bailey is evidently free to roam wherever he pleases, but he said Monday that was not the main reason he sued the governor.

“The governor was just clearly overreaching his authority and his powers,” Bailey, a farmer who represents a rural district in southern Illinois, told The Washington Post.  …

… In Bailey’s quest against Pritkzer’s order, the lawmaker argued that the governor’s continued extensions of the stay-at-home order, recently extended through May, were illegal. He charged that the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act restricted the governor’s emergency powers to 30 days from the day he declared a disaster, which was March 9, without allowing extensions. The state sought a continuance of the case.

Here’s the especially odd part:

No, I haven’t found out why Rep. Bailey is uniquely harmed by the stay-at-home orders and requires special privileges to not be bound by them. Gov. Pritzger is appealing the ruling, obviously.

See also The Pandemic, the Constitution, and Civil Liberties.

It does strike me that there’s a lot of magical thinking going on out there among Republicans. They are still trying to will away the pandemic with their mind-beams rather than deal with the reality of it. There is reason to believe that ending restrictions prematurely will cause a resurgence of infections and death, which is not going to help the economy. On the other hand, it might be that sparsely populated parts of the country wouldn’t have that problem. The medical science people are still figuring out how this virus works. Without being able to test people, we’re flailing around in the dark.

Republicans, however, are certain the economy has to be re-opened now, because otherwise they are going to have to consider more stimulus spending. And you know the drill — all of a sudden, they care about deficits. So, they see the re-opening of the economy as imperative. But they may be opening Pandora’s box and letting the nasties out.

At Politico, Ben White writes that Trump faces the risk of a coronavirus cliff.

Republicans are trying to pull off a high-wire act over the next three months: Reopen the economy enough to get most jobless Americans back to work and off the public dole, while resisting another giant stimulus package.

If they fail, they’ll face a coronavirus cliff — an even deeper collapse in spending and sky-high unemployment in the months before Election Day. That could both damage President Donald Trump’s reelection prospects and put the party’s Senate majority at serious risk. …

… Republicans are currently betting that efforts to reopen states will be successful and the nearly $3 trillion already allocated by lawmakers — the largest federal rescue in American history — will be at least close to enough to start bringing the unemployment rate down and sending economic growth back up.

In other words, the priority is to get the economy working again so it doesn’t mess with their election chances. However, IMO, you have to deal with the virus first. All the mind-beams and happy talk in the world won’t do a damn bit of good if the rate of infections and deaths keep climbing. Economists keep saying that it’s not an either-or; meaning it’s not a choice between dealing with the virus or reviving the economy. The economy will not recover as long as the virus is spreading around out there. You have to deal with the virus.

See also Gabriel Sherman, Inside Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s Two Months of Magical Thinking. The reason we’re in this mess is that Trump refused to deal with the virus.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, shared Trump’s view that the media and Democrats were hyping the crisis for political purposes. And for both of them, the biggest worry was how the response to the coronavirus might impact the health of the economy. According to sources, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a fierce China hawk, and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a former China-based Wall Street Journal reporter who’d covered the 2003 SARS pandemic, argued to officials in mid-January that the White House needed to shut down incoming flights from China.

Kushner pushed back. “Jared kept saying the stock market would go down, and Trump wouldn’t get reelected,” a Republican briefed on the internal debates said (a person close to Kushner denies this). Kushner’s position was supported by Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow. Trump sided with them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump minimized the threat in his first public comments. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC. (The White House and Treasury Department deny Mnuchin and Kudlow were against closing flights.)  …

…Navarro and Pottinger finally convinced Trump to stop the flights when they showed him that more than 400,000 people had entered the U.S. from China since early January. “Trump was stunned by the sheer scale,” a Republican briefed on the meeting told me. “Navarro banged on the table enough to get the flights stopped.” On January 31, Trump barred travel from China. Even then, it was a half measure: the ban only applied to non-Americans who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days. American citizens could come and go.

Trump saw this as the end of the story—he’d taken strong public action, built his China Wall. Now, he looked forward to hitting the campaign trail and trumpeting the booming stock market. “He just wanted to hold rallies and watch television,” a former West Wing official said. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump told Sean Hannity during a pre–Super Bowl interview on February 2. He held a half dozen rallies over the next month.

Do read the entire piece; it’s fascinating. Of course, we now know that the daily presidential intellligence brief that Trump famously doesn’t read carried warnings about the virus beginning in January. So you had practically the whole planet sending warnings to Trump to deal with the virus, and except for the January 31 travel ban he ignored it all until the stock market tanked. He seems to have believed that if he just ignored it, the virus would go away.

Republicans seem to be making the same mistake. And I wonder, if the meat packing plants continue to be covid-19 hot spots, if we’ll even still have hamburger? If not, would Republican legislators volunteers to work in them? Not likely.