Trump has been talking about a new task force to design a plan to “re-open” America. Fox News announced — yesterday, I believe, that this would be the task force:

And the Internet ran over with snark and derision. But it turns out that the members of the task force — which Trump had said he would announce today, or maybe this week, or sometime — haven’t been chosen yet. The White House is also still struggling to define precisely what the task force will be called and what exactly it will do.

The details of the committee have already changed several times in recent days, one official told CNN. Who will participate and what they will look to do remains fluid even though Trump said he will formally announce the council Tuesday.

“It’s a mess right now,” someone in close contact with the White House said.

And then there’s this:

Trump did not offer much clarity during Monday’s briefing.

“We’re actually calling it a number of committees with the most prominent people in the country, the most successful people in the various fields, and we’ll be announcing them tomorrow,” Trump said.

“We’ll have a transportation committee. We’re going to have a manufacturing committee,” the President added. “We’ll also have religious leaders committee. We have a great group of religious leaders. Committees with religious leaders.”

“I will call them committees,” he added, “ultimately we’re going to make decisions.”

Yes, just what we need to bring clarity to a chaotic situation — a whole mess of committees. I don’t expect any of these committees to be formed, but talking about them gave Trump, well, something to talk about, so that he can sound like someone in charge.

It’s clear that Trump understands very little about anything, except maybe the basics of grift and fraud. He was born with a ton of money and has gone through life throwing it around and pretending to be in charge. His one great accomplishment is that he made himself into a marketable brand. When the ventures carried out with his money and in his name were successful, he took credit. When they failed, he blamed others. And that’s basically how he’s pretending to run the country.

Greg Sargent:

President Trump’s wild gyrations and reversals on coronavirus become a lot more intelligible when you realize he is motivated at bottom by a simple, unchanging imperative: Trump wants to be perceived as taking charge of the situation, without being held accountable for the horrible consequences of the bad decisions he has made along the way.

If you are the head of a private business with no board of directors to answer to, you can get away with that, I guess. As Sargent points out, though, while Trump claims to “call the shots” he expects the states to fend for themselves without his involvement, which seems contradictory. “As former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara put it, Trump is basically arguing that ‘my authority is total but my responsibility is zero.'” Nice work if you can get it. Sargent continues,

The truth is, there’s little about the pandemic restrictions that are new; they are just new to most of us, because they haven’t been used for a long time. During the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, for example, many U.S. cities closed schools, churches, theaters and other entertainment venues, and banned public gatherings in general. Just exactly what is happening now.

Enforced quarantine orders were common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A lot of those old-time epidemics were deadly — typhoid, diptheria, cholera. Cholera was especially feared; two pandemics in the early 19th century killed approximately 150,000 Americans, a big chunk of the population at the time. We don’t remember this stuff because vaccines and better public sanitation made the need for quarantines rare, until now. If you are old enough to remember the 1950s, you might remember local closings, especially of theaters and swimming pools, during polio outbreaks. But that’s about it.

The issue of how these restrictions square with constitutional rights has been debated and written about since the 19th century also. Very generally, the authority of the federal government to restrict commerce and gatherings during an epidemic is is said to be found in the commerce clause — Article I, Section 8, making this a power of Congress. But note that our current federal government hasn’t officially closed anything; it has only made recommendations.

It has been left to states, counties, and cities to enact restrictions officially. These levels of government have broader authorities to use police powers to protect the public during emergencies. “The public health authority of the states derive from the police powers granted by their constitutions and reserved to them by the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” it says here. Again, there is a ton of legal precedence and case law going way back to support states and cities using police powers during a public health emergency. It’s not new.

These powers do have some limits, it says here:

Under the 5th and 14th Amendment’s rights of Due Process and Equal Protection, public health regulations used to impose such conditions can’t be “arbitrary, oppressive and unreasonable.”

There are precedents where courts have ruled that states or local governments didn’t meet a burden of proof to justify a quarantine. For example, in 1900 courts ruled against the city of San Francisco when it tried to inoculate and then quarantine Chinese residents against the bubonic plague when the courts had doubts that plague conditions existed.

But when plague conditions clearly do exist, state and local governments can close businesses and break up your block party until those conditions no longer exist. This is not unconstitutional.

Next comes the end of the restrictions, and that also has constitutional considerations. Trump has been making noises about re-opening the economy. The glitch in his plans is that he isn’t the one who closed the economy. It was governors and mayors who closed the economy. And nobody who has any understanding of the constitution thinks Trump can override governors and mayors to open it again. But Trump disagrees.

….It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2020

To this tweet, Elura Nanos at Law & Crime responded,

A more meaningless serving of word salad has hardly existed. Here we have a word salad with too much mayo which has been left out overnight from a Fourth of July picnic. This is a Fifth of July salad. It’s not even palatable.

Whatever Trump thinks “opening up the states” actually means, the legal reality is that any such authority does not rest in his itty-bitty hands. Not even a jar opener can help him here. …

… If we’re talking in broad strokes, one arena that always falls clearly within the ambit of state authority are matters of public health and safety. That’s why local cops patrol your local streets and why you report crimes to local law enforcement. It’s why it’s the state board of health inspects restaurants. What’s considered “safe” varies from state to state, and the laws reflect local differences. Individuals can bring challenges to those laws if they appear to violate the guarantees of the United States Constitution – and those challenges are decided by courts. What does not happen is the president stepping in to nullify state safety laws with which he disagrees. In matters of health and safety, the president cannot pull rank – because he simply does not outrank state officials on those matters.

Trump can make all the noises he wants about “opening” the economy. If the governors of enough states say no — especially California and New York — the economy will mostly be closed.

From Bloomberg News:

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin, said on Twitter that “the president has no formal legal authority to categorically override local or state shelter-in-place orders or to reopen schools and small businesses.”

“No statute delegates to him such power; no constitutional provision invests him with such authority,” Vladeck said.

Representative Justin Amash, a former Republican who is now an independent and voted for Trump’s impeachment, said in a tweet that the president is “flat-out wrong.”

“Put down the authoritarianism and read the Constitution,” he said.

A spokesman for Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Mike Faulk, said that “respectfully, the president’s claims are false. The states have the authority when it comes to stay-home orders.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Trump could probably decide when schools and businesses should re-open but noted that the president has effectively delegated those decisions to governors.

“You want to shift the responsibilities in the relationship?” Cuomo said in a news conference on Monday. “Fine, I’m open to that. Explain to me what they do, what I do. Open what, open it when, open it how?”

Also:

Later Monday, six states in the U.S. Northeast, including New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, said they would jointly develop a plan to reopen schools and businesses after the outbreak subsides, while California, Washington and Oregon said they would join together on their own framework.

Here’s more about the northeast effort:

Gov. Cuomo joined the governors of the Northeast Corridor: namely, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Delaware on Monday to announce a regional effort to reopen the economy in a “coordinated way” amid the coronavirus crisis. …

… Each state will name a public health official, an economic development official and the chief of staff for each governor to a working group that will share information, resources and “intelligence” about an economic path forward.

Since the U.S. has — in effect — no national leadership, it’s going to be up to states to coordinate a safe return to “normal.” What will probably happen is that as soon as Trump announces a re-opening, a bunch of red states will end restrictions and promptly suffer a resurgence of the pandemic — which is beginning to happen in China right now.

At Washington Monthly, Martin Longman points out that people rebelling against the pandemic restrictions as gubmint tramplin’ on thur rahts tend to support dear leader Donald Trump, which suggests submission to authority. So which is it? Are we rebels, or are we sycophants?

In Donald Trump And His Fake Rebels, Longman points to the famous Bundy family, who had an Easter gathering on the ranch in defiance of stay-at-home orders. “Our goal is to get enough people together and secure our rights,” one Bundy said.

Longman:

It seems like there are a lot of people, all of a sudden, who want to do the “Live Free or Die” thing. But most of them appear to be doing it as part of an effort to reopen the economy or to defend Trump’s initial assurances that COVID-19 is no worse than the seasonal flu. Some are even getting retweeted by the president. …

…The right seems particularly apoplectic about restrictions put in place by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, perhaps because they want to dirty her up in case she joins Biden’s ticket.

On Twitter, there’s no shortage of incredibly “brave” people who are suddenly born rebels fancying themselves as defenders of liberty. When Hunter S. Thompson wrote his book about the Hells Angels back in the mid-1960s, he said, “The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. ‘Yeah, I guess I am,’ said one. ‘But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.’”

Right now, that’s a better description of the president and his supporters than the Angels.

You can be opposed to authority and devoted to freedom, or you can be an idiot.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, October 7, 1918. Philadelphia canceled indoor sports but not outdoor sports, resulting in the deaths of a lot of outdoor-sport athletes. https://phillysoccerpage.net/2020/03/19/philadelphia-soccer-and-the-1918-spanish-flu-epidemic/

The pandemic has hit the U.S. Postal Service hard. It is expected to run out of money in September. Republicans rejoice; they’ve been wanting to privatize the USPS for a long time, and if it fails they’ll be in position to do exactly that.

David Atkins:

Donald Trump loves to talk about what a “great American company” FedEx is, and conservatives would love to eliminate the postal service and give all of its operations to private shipping companies and private equity. Of course, long gone would be the days of sending a letter from coast to coast in a few days for a fraction of a dollar, but since when was that sort of thing a concern for Republicans? It’s just like with libraries. If the Postal Service didn’t already exist and you proposed it, it would be considered a ridiculous and wasteful socialist fantasy. In the modern era, Republicans would make sure it never came into being. Mainstream Democrats would means-test it so that everyone would have to fill out tax statements in triplicate to make sure that no one making over a certain amount got a free mailbox.

Ain’t it the truth? And thank you, Benjamin Franklin, founder of the USPS and first postmaster general.

Since the 1970s the USPS has functioned as a “self-funded, independently operating public sector entity,” it says here. So it’s providing a vital service without taking money out of the budget, except under extraordinary circumstances. But Republicans can’t stand it if money is changing hands somewhere and one of their own isn’t getting a slice of it. They want a completely privatized, for-profit system. They want to turn the mail into something like our overpriced and inefficient health care system. Be afraid.

Matt Yglesias provides more complete background on the issue of the postal service versus Republicans in The debate over a post office bailout, explained at Vox. In recent years Republicans in Congress have enacted several provisions to hamstring the USPS and drive it into the red, so they can kill it. But I want to skip ahead to the other reasons powerful forces are moving toward destroying the postal service.

Donald Trump wants to destroy the postal service because Amazon has been using it to deliver packages. And he hates Amazon because he hates Jeff Bezos because Bezos owns the Washington Post. Seriously. Back to Matt Yglesias:

Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the power of the government to punish Amazon financially unless the Post changes its coverage of him. Facebook seems to have paid attention to this message and deliberately altered its editorial practices in order to try to ensure more favorable regulatory treatment from the Trump administration. The Post, which is run by professional journalists with ethics, has refused to do the same. Adding to the tension between the parties is the fact there’s currently litigation underway exploring allegations that Trump’s highly irregular cancellation of a major military contract with Amazon was motivated by partisan payback.

In the context of that feud, Trump has pushed the Postal Service to start raising the prices it charges Amazon.

New York Magazine’s Josh Barro has dug into the substance of the parcel pricing controversy and finds that Trump’s contention that the Postal Service could improve its financial situation by doubling what it charges Amazon is false. The key issue is that because of USPS’ universal service obligations, it can’t drastically reduce its real estate footprint or the number of trucks it sends driving around the country. The reason it gives Amazon good rates is that the facilities it’s using would otherwise be half-empty. Raising prices without making any other operational changes could lead to Amazon looking elsewhere for delivery services, which would leave the post office in even more desperate financial circumstances.

So it is that Trump’s desire to stick it to Jeff Bezos aligns with the Republican goal of privatizing the postal service so that some collection of old white people somewhere can make a fortune off it, after raising prices, busting the postal workers union, and closing a lot of post offices in rural areas that can’t be run profitably.

And then comes the push to establish universal vote-by-mail, which Republicans also oppose on the theory that making voting easier helps Democrats. Although in the case of vote by mail, that’s not necessarily true. I’ll come back to that. David Atkins writes that destroying the post office to end vote by mail in the midst of a pandemic is an act of pure evil worthy of a James Bond villain.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not real, especially given the current administration. Even if it’s not intentional, the combined effect of both acts of bad faith would certainly be convenient for deeply unpopular conservatives whose only chance of holding onto ill-gotten power is to thwart democracy itself.

I don’t know why Atkins might assume it’s not intentional. But let’s go on.

One part of this controversy that doesn’t seem to occur to Trump or congressional Republicans is that rural America is dependent on the postal service far more than urban America. Only the USPS maintains delivery service of mail and packages to every part of the U.S. Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times,

Critics of the USPS say that there’s enough capacity from UPS, FedEx and other parcel firms to make USPS delivery unnecessary. But that’s plainly untrue. Because of the Postal Service’s mandate to provide universal delivery across the United States, no matter where, the commercial firms often rely on the Postal Service to deliver their packages to the last mile, especially when the last mile is in some remote, trackless waste.

Yet there’s a more fundamental flaw in the argument, voiced by the task force, that the USPS is on an “unsustainable financial path.” That might be so if it were a private company, but it’s not. It’s a government service, and among the virtues of a government service is that it shouldn’t have to turn a profit — the service it provides to all citizens no matter where they live can’t be done profitably. But why should it?

In other words, one of the first acts of a privatized, for-profit postal service would be to close low-volume rural post offices that can’t be run profitably. This would end not just mail delivery to a lot of Americans but also jeopardize a lot of rural package delivery, or else run up the prices for FedEx and UPS. Most likely rural folks would have to drive an hour or two to a private delivery hub to pick up mail and packages. Or maybe some mom-and-pop local enterprises would offer package pick-up and delivery services for a fee.

And it seems to me this change would have some nasty implications for the U.S. economy, especially in the low population density states that already tend to be poor. Oh, and vote Republican.

Returning to the vote-by-mail issue — by elminating all mail delivery everywhere I suppose Republicans could kill vote by mail. Could they do that? Would states be able to resort to UPS or FedEx for ballot delivery? I’m not sure. Republicans probably are practically salivating over the thought of urban Democrats jammed into long lines for a diminished number of polling places. But if mail delivery is privatized, it’s mostly rural, mostly Republican-voting areas that would be most hurt.

It’s also the case that the pandemic is moving into rural areas in Republican states pretty fast right now. By November the blue states probably will be well past bending the curve and will have returned to a loose approximation of normal, although of course we can’t let our guard up until most of us are vaccinated, and that won’t be this year. And it’s possible red states, especially those that were slow about stay-at-home orders, are going to be slammed by the pandemic a lot harder and a lot longer. It’s possible that by November red state voters will be more nervous about mingling at a polling place than blue state voters. It’s possible Republicans are setting up conditions that would discourage their own voters from voting. I don’t know that any of that will happen, but it’s possible.

David Atkins writes that Democrats need to go on offensive to save the USPS.

Any future assistance on legislation to Trump and McConnell over the coming year should be predicated on both saving the Postal Service and ensuring access to mail-in voting across the country. An election in which one side is lulled into complacency about a pandemic and has lots of polling places available, while the other is rightfully concerned for the public good and being crushed by long lines and crowded locations, is no true election at all. It’s a mockery of democracy and cannot be allowed to stand.

However, as I’ve said, it’s possible that by November the situation will have changed, and Republican voters will no longer feel complacent about crowding into polling places, while Democratic-leaning urban and suburban voters will be more willing to show up to vote. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

A couple of Republican congressmen, Ken Buck of Colorado and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who is also chair of the House Freedom Caucus, write for the Washington Examiner that it’s a damn shame about all those deaths but — jeebus, people, the economy! After pointing out that not as many people have died as the administration’s artificially inflated estimates (that they falsely attribute to Dr. Fauci) said, the congressmen declare we must all go back to work.

It is tragic that thousands of people in the country have died or may yet succumb to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. But we also must remember that millions of people have had their lives and livelihoods permanently altered because of the government response to this virus. While our government may make promises and help make things better once the hysteria subsides, there is nothing our leaders will be able to do to make everything completely right again….

… Birx also recently indicated that we should not open up the country yet because there might be a second time around for the virus. Has she considered the economic destruction she is content with wreaking on the nation? One wonders if she has thought about the emotional toll — the suicides, the increase in domestic and child abuse, drug and alcohol dependence, and a host of additional societal pathologies. Has she considered the loss of life-savings, businesses, and capital?

The headline of this, um, opinion — Is Dr. Fauci Helping or Hurting?– was already a rallying cry others on the right.

Biggs and Buck, both members of the conservative Freedom Caucus and staunch allies of President Trump, join others on the right in criticizing public health officials on the administration’s coronavirus task force. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator on Fox News, said that Fauci “shouldn’t be making economic decisions.”

And, of course Fauci isn’t making economic decisions. He’s making scientific recommendations, which he is well qualified to make.

Along similar lines, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has announced plans to allow businesses to reopen with an executive order that would lift the coronavirus lockdown.

Abbott said Texas, which would be the world’s 11th largest economy it were an independent country, could find a balance between personal safety and economic security.

“We will focus on protecting lives while restoring livelihoods,” Abbott said on Friday at a news conference.

“We can and we must do this. We can do both, expand and restore the livelihoods that Texans want to have by helping them return to work. One thing about Texans, they enjoy working and they want to get back into the workforce. We have to come up with strategies on how we can do this safely.”

Abbott said details of the executive order would be available next week and it is expected to provide businesses with a list of guidelines on how to safely reopen.

See also How many missed? Texas is second-worst in the nation for COVID-19 testing in the Houston Chronicle.

The economy may very well be screwed for years to come. But the economy can’t be re-started at a time when shopping can prove fatal, and businesses are being forced to close because the employees are dropping dead. It won’t work, righties. We’d all like it to be otherwise. But reality is what it is. As hard as you might try to override reality with ideology — and many of us get away with doing that most of the time — sometimes reality will push down all your beliefs and demand to be recognized.

Right now is one of those times.

I read in Vox that one of the strongest predictors of social distancing behavior is attitudes toward climate change. In other words, if you think climate change is a big hoax being perpetrated by pointy-headed liberal academic science types because they’ve figured out a way to monetize it, somehow, then you’re likely not going to voluntarily engage in social distancing until you’re hooked up to a ventilator. Of course, these are the same people who think Donald Trump is accomplishing great things.

I would personally be just fine with letting all the yahoos who think social distancing is for pansies to do as they please, as long as we can wall these people off from the rest of us. But righties don’t like that, either. See ‘Take a step back.’ Beshear’s plan to quarantine Easter churchgoers draws fire from GOP.

Of course, there is no one on the planet more averse to reality than Donald Trump. If you read nothing else today (after this blog post) do read He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus in the New York Times. It provides a lot more detail than I’ve seen before as to what’s been going on in the administration while it has bungled the pandemic response.

Trump has been antsy to ease pandemic restrictions and open the economy. He’s making a lot of noise about putting together a pandemic economic council that will advise him about when Americans can go back to work. I mentioned this yesterday; some people are talking up George Laffer to be a member if not the chair, which of course would be a disaster.

After America pretty much hooted at his plan to end restrictions by Easter — this weekend, folks — Trump has been cagey about setting dates. However, the Washington Post reported that “Behind closed doors, President Trump — concerned with the sagging economy — has sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1, according to people familiar with the discussions.”

Since Trump didn’t actually close anything, however, he can’t very well open anything. It’s really up to governors, most of whom aren’t listening to Trump. I am not sure he understands that.

Some fellow writing on Medium predicts that next month we’ll be hit with the ultimate gaslighting campaign, trying to persuade us that the pandemic is over and we can be normal again. Maybe; I’d like to think that if the virus is still spreading on May 1, as it probably will be, good sense will prevail. But this is America we’re talking about, so I’m probably being foolish.

Because so few of us have been tested, we can’t be sure how broadly and how quickly the virus is spreading. Even so, the U.S. currently is leading the world in number of confirmed cases. In fact, approximately one third of all the world’s confirmed cases are in the U.S. right now. Americans are 4.25 percent of the world’s population. Although the curve may be flattening in some places, overall, it isn’t.

It’s also the case that no part of the U.S. is safe from this virus. A month ago many assumed it would stay in the cities, but it didn’t. The peak of the pandemic may yet be months away in some states, but by the end of summer it’s possible that most Americans — urban and rural, blue states and red states — will at least be aquainted with someone known to have caught covid 19. And the red, rural states in general have fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than more liberal blue states.

So there’s a world of hurt ahead of us, both medically and economically, and Donald Trump cannot bluster it away. Sometimes reality can’t be avoided. But damn; Trump is trying. As I wrote yesterday, the Trump Administration is defunding testing now. And he said yesterday that a widespread testing program to assess whether workers can safely return to their workplaces is “never going to happen” in the United States.

All the health experts say that without more widespread testing we will risk a resurgence of the pandemic. But Trump still doesn’t want those numbers to go up. He doesn’t care about the people; just the numbers.

Speaking of numbers — last week the White House released a projection that100,000 to 240,000 people would die nationwide from the coronavirus. Health experts were mystified as to where those numbers came from. Pretty much every epidemiologist on the planet said those numbers were meaningless.

But, you know, the White House didn’t care. It just wanted numbers. Then Trump famously said that if only 100,000 people died he will have done a “very good job.”  And then MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, bless him, stated the obvious —

The most cynical interpretation of all this, one I can’t quite bring myself to accept, is they rolled out the model showing 100k deaths after they knew it would be less than that so they could anchor everyone to that # and take a vicotry lap when “only” tens of thousands died. https://t.co/hYiUCHhO5g

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 8, 2020

— which of course is exactly what’s going on. But Hayes got ripped for speaking the truth.

Anyway, today Trump was jubilent because only 18,000 Americans officially have died from the coronavirus so far.

After a word on the upcoming the Easter holiday, global oil production and the border wall with Mexico, Trump nearly celebrated the potentially massive death toll.

“Tremendous progress is being made,” he said.

Compared to the White House’s previous projection that at least 100,000 people could die from the disease, “I think we will be substantially under that number,” Trump said.

“Hard to believe that if you had 60,000 — you can never be happy — but that’s a lot fewer than we were originally told and thinking.”

Chris Hayes was exactly right. And in many places the death toll is still climbing pretty fast. An emotionally normal person would not be celebrating.

I noted in the last post that the U.S. federal stockpile of medical protective gear is almost empty as coronavirus spreads. And everybody is screaming for ventilators. But Trump seems to have his own private stash.

Josh Marshall:

As we work to find out the scope and goals of the White House’s seizure of medical goods across the United States, a simpler pattern is coming into view: the White House seizes goods from public officials and hospitals across the country while doling them out as favors to political allies and favorites, often to great fanfare to boost the popularity of those allies. The Denver Post today editorialized about one of the most egregious examples. Last week, as we reported, a shipment of 500 ventilators to the state of Colorado was intercepted and rerouted by the federal government. Gov. Jared Polis (D) sent a letter pleading for the return of the equipment. Then yesterday President Trump went on Twitter to announce that he was awarding 100 ventilators to Colorado at the behest of Republican Senator Cory Gardner, one of the most endangered Republicans on the ballot this year. As the Post put it, “President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives.”

We don’t know if the ventilators sent by Trump were part of the shipment that was seized. But there have been reports from several sources of the federal government seizing shipments of medical equipment, and nobody knows what’s happening to it. I mentioned this in a post a couple of days ago. And see Are the Trumps Engaged in Profiteering?

Back to Josh Marshall:

For all the confusion, what is clear is that the federal government is demanding that states, localities and hospital systems find their own supplies while systematically interdicting those they do purchase and rerouting them in other directions while providing no explanation of what standards are being used to distribute them. At the same time, Republican officeholders keep turning up announcing windfalls of medical supplies courtesy of the President. In many cases, like Gardner, they’re Republicans within blue or purple states.

Josh Marshall again, from another post today:

This morning I heard from a board member of a regional private hospital system who said these seizures aren’t just happening. They’re commonplace. Seemingly bordering on routine. To paraphrase this person’s account it’s searching high and low everywhere to find supplies and on those rare occasions when you strike gold the feds are likely to jump in and grab your stuff anyway. Hearing this my sense – not the source’s words – is that it’s almost like FEMA and whatever other agencies are doing this are using these desperate buyers as their involuntary lead generators. Let them find the stuff and when you see a shipping order surface, grab it.

I was struck by something in this Paul Waldman column, quoting Washington Governor Jay Inslee, about shortages of medical supplies:

I’ve assumed Joe Biden would be the nominee for several weeks now, so it wasn’t that much of a letdown when Bernie Sanders announced he was ending his campaign. Yes, it’s too bad that an absolute mess of a nomination process has given us just about the least-suited nominee for our political moment from among the field that started out. A damn shame. But let’s go on.

I suspect Biden will win — or, at least, that Trump will lose — barring unforeseen events. Let us not forget that Trump won the electoral college with only 80,000 votes in three states. Trump hasn’t expanded his base, and he’s not going to get all of his original voters back. Current polls have Biden slightly ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, states that were critical to Trump’s win in 2016.

It’s no time to be complacent, of course, especially considering the tricks Republicans are going to pull to suppress the vote.

Trump’s approval numbers improved in mid-March as the pandemic crisis heated up, but now they are tumbling back to earth. Quinnipiac released a new poll today:

A plurality of voters gives the president a failing grade on the way he has communicated information about the coronavirus to the American people:

25 percent give Trump an A;

17 percent give him a B;

14 percent give him a C;

12 percent give him a D;

31 percent give him an F.

Dr. Anthony Fauci received the highest approval rating, followed by “your state’s governor.” Who did worse than Trump? Congress.

Right now there are still large parts of the country — mostly rural, mostly southern and midwestern, mostly Trump voting — that aren’t fully accepting the seriousness of our situation. But that is changing fast.

A new wave of coronavirus cases is spreading deep into rural corners of the country where people once hoped their communities might be shielded because of their isolation from hard-hit urban centers and the natural social distancing of life in the countryside.

The coronavirus has officially reached more than two-thirds of the country’s rural counties, with one in 10 reporting at least one death. Doctors and elected officials are warning that a late-arriving wave of illness could overwhelm rural communities that are older, poorer and sicker than much of the country, and already dangerously short on medical help.

It appears that just as the urban areas will begin to see fewer new cases, the rest of the U.S. will be seeing more and more cases. And rural America especially is not equipped for this. Hospitals are far apart. A majority of rural counties don’t have a single ICU bed.

“We’re behind the curve in rural America,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who said his state needs hundreds of thousands of masks, visors and gowns. “If they don’t have the protective equipment and somebody goes down and gets sick, that could close the hospital.”

Rural nurses and doctors, scarce in normal times, are already calling out sick and being quarantined. Clinics are scrambling to find couriers who can speed their coronavirus tests to labs hundreds of miles away. The loss of 120 rural hospitals over the past decade has left many towns defenseless, and more hospitals are closing even as the pandemic spreads.

Coronavirus illnesses and deaths are still overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and suburbs, and new rural cases have not exploded at the same rate as in some cities. But they are growing fast. This week, the case rate in rural areas was more than double what it was six days earlier.

Meanwhile, Trump’s “leadership” of the coronavirus continues to consist of temper tantrums, blame, and shilling hydroxychloroquine. I agree with Paul Waldman that the real reasons for Trump’s fixation on the unproven coronavirus therapy have more to do with politics than profit.

The most important factor is that he’s desperate, he wants to come out of this a hero and it’s the only drug he’s heard of that might give him the opportunity.

The election is seven months away. We’re facing a public health crisis that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, and the economy has been put into a medically induced coma. Even if our social distancing measures are successful and we can restart somewhat normal life in a couple of months, it may take years for the economy to fully recover.

And even before the pandemic, Trump’s chances at reelection were probably 50-50, given his historic unpopularity and the steady demographic shifts that have made the country even younger and more diverse than it was four years ago when he squeaked out an electoral college victory despite getting 3 million fewer votes than his opponent. …

…If Trump can claim that he personally defeated covid-19, then he might just win. If hydroxychloroquine somehow turns out to be an effective treatment, he can point to all the time he spent promoting it while others were skeptical and say, “I did it, America. I saved all your lives, because I’m a genius and the so-called experts are idiots.”

There’s a lot about Biden that is objectionable, but the two factors Republicans will try to smear him with — that he suffering dementia and HUNTER BIDEN MADE MONEY IN UKRAINE are not likely do the same damage as the damn emails. One, Joe Biden can still speak in complete sentences, a skill that eludes Trump. Two, besides the fact that I think the Hunter Biden claims are old and tired, the self-dealing adventures of Ivanka, Jared, Junior, and Eric make Hunter seem a model of financial rectitude. And I dare Republicans to make anything of the recent accusations of sexual assault, given Trump’s history in that area.

So, while I have no enthusiasm for Biden whatsoever, neither am I too concerned that he’s a weak candidate compared to Trump. Biden’s strength is that he can exude empathy and nice-guyness, which may be just the thing people will be hungry for after four years of Trump. Second, I think by November a majority of Americans will vote for a bleeping gerbil to get rid of Trump. Maybe not a big majority, but a big-enough majority.

I can’t even.

Today in Wisconsin, people are risking their lives to vote, and the U.S. Supreme Courtis okay with this.

Paul Waldman:

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers attempted to postpone the state’s primary scheduled for Tuesday, issuing a last-minute executive order after failing to get the Republican-controlled state legislature to agree to a delay. Because the state had been deluged with absentee ballot requests — causing some voters not to get their ballots in time — a federal judge had ordered the state to accept ballots postmarked for an additional six days. Republicans sued to get that ruling overturned and to force the election to go on as scheduled.

This Vox article provides more background on the Wisconsin debacle. Back to Paul Waldman:

Why were they so eager to have the election in the middle of this pandemic? The key race was for a seat on the state supreme court, which will help them solidify their conservative majority, which is in turn vital to maintaining the system of minority rule in Wisconsin. That includes the extraordinary partisan gerrymander of state legislative districts engineered by Republicans, a gerrymander so brutally effective that in the 2018 state assembly elections, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes but Republicans won 63 of the 99 seats.

Republicans know their voters are more likely to have already voted absentee or live in less-populated areas where they can vote safely at a less-crowded polling place. Democrats, on the other hand, are being forced to literally risk their lives to vote. In Milwaukee, a city of 600,000 people, the number of polling places was reduced from 180 to five.

Late Monday, the state Supreme Court ruled that the governor did not have the authority to postpone the election. And then the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the previous decision that allowed six additional days for the absentee ballots. Only ballots postmarked by Tuesday can be counted. So right now people are standing in five-hour-long lines in the middle of a pandemic to try to vote.

Back to Paul Waldman:

This is a very ominous sign for what will happen in November. There will be battles across the country over how the upcoming election will be conducted — whether it will be fair, whether everyone will have access to the ballot and whether we’ll be able to trust the result.

And the Supreme Court will be there to put a thumb on the scales for the Republican Party.

Mark Joseph Stern, in Slate:

On Monday, by a 5–4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court approved one of the most brazen acts of voter suppression in modern history. The court will nullify the votes of citizens who mailed in their ballots late—not because they forgot, but because they did not receive ballots until after Election Day due to the coronavirus pandemic. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, the court’s order “will result in massive disenfranchisement.” The conservative majority claimed that its decision would help protect “the integrity of the election process.” In reality, it calls into question the legitimacy of the election itself.

See also Leah Litman, The Supreme Court’s Wisconsin Decision Is a Terrible Sign for November, in Atlantic.

And this takes us to the larger question — thanks to Trump appointees, much of the federal judiciary has been larded with loyalist party hacks who are years away from retirement. Dealing with this is going to be a huge problem.

In other news:

CNBC:

President Donald Trump has removed the lead watchdog overseeing the $2 trillion coronavirus package, just days after the official, Glenn Fine, was appointed to the role.

The move came as Trump pursued similar action in recent weeks against independent inspectors general across the federal government.

CNN:

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly resigned on Tuesday, a day after leaked audio revealed he called the ousted commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt “stupid” in an address to the ship’s crew, according to a US official and a former senior military official.

So, the news isn’t all bad.

People lined up to vote outside Riverside High School in Milwaukee on Tuesday.Credit…Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Reuters