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Donald Trump promised to Make America Great Again, and with four million confirmed infections, and tens of millions of undetected cases, we are indeed the greatest incubator of coronavirus the world has ever seen. USA! USA!
- Here’s a quick rundown: Coronavirus is now spreading so fast in the United States that it has outstripped the ability of LabCorp, one of the world’s largest clinical laboratory companies, to increase its capacity to process tests. In other words, the days-long delays between tests and results, which have already made tracking the virus nearly impossible, are likely to lengthen. The situation is so dire that leading experts and others on the frontlines now say the only solution is for the whole country to start from scratch and return to lockdown—a step that would confirm President Trump completely squandered the months Americans sacrificed in the hope that he would take steps to protect them from the virus.
- Rather than do anything to save the country from the pandemic, he, along with his Republican allies in Congress, seem intent on accelerating its spread. Under his influence, Senate Republicans have focused almost exclusively on a) protecting reckless employers from liability for infecting workers and customers, so they can open their doors more quickly, and b) herding American children back into schools, which remain largely unprepared to keep them or their teachers and families safe from contagion. (Republicans are not focused on protecting millions of Americans from losing their homes by sending them relief money, but they reportedly are considering ways to protect Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel from competition.)
- The school situation in particular is about to get very thorny for Trump. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has updated her ‘deal with it’ message to parents concerned about sending their children into plague zones, and now hopes to address their fears with the ghoulish lie that children are “stoppers of the disease.” (Wall of children, anyone?) One child who apparently lacks this magical power is Donald Trump’s own son, whose school won’t be returning to full-time (or possibly even part-time) in-person instruction in the fall. This may explain why as part of the Great Tone Change of July™, Trump has acknowledged that some schools “may need to delay reopening for a few weeks.”
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In the face of these mounting crises, Trump has ordered a surge of government resources into states—not for testing or tracing or school retrofitting, but to beat and gas protesters.
- Trump now claims he will deploy up to 75,000 federal agents into cities that don’t need or want the support, and suspect, rightly, that Trump merely intends for them to provoke violence and then pretend the violence is a symptom of local Democratic policy failures. It’s seems likely that he made this number up and also that the secret police he does deploy will have a hard time reviving the Portland playbook of gassing moms and snatching people off the street into unmarked cars, because it has proved horribly unpopular, has drawn backlash from mayors, governors, and officials in his own administration, and, uh, is probably illegal.
- On the other hand, when has the law ever stopped Trump? He continues to defy a Supreme Court order to fully reinstate DACA, and it turns out his administration based its decision to punish New York for welcoming immigrants by kicking New Yorkers out of TSA’s Global Entry program on a pile of lies, and then told those lies in court.
Trump has fucked up the government’s COVID-19 response so badly that it has turned the Rio Grande Valley into a giant death panel, and made the only thing he cares about—large gatherings where people worship him—literally impossible. Even in parts of the country that genuinely do worship him. It may dawn on him that he stands no chance of getting re-elected unless things get better, and Democrats in Congress should use that fact to make him sign an emergency rescue package that protects Americans and their democracy.
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Huge day for all the newsletter-heads out there: We have MERCH! Treat yourself to the brand new What A Day newsletter tee at the Crooked store—you survived another day, you earned it.
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The Trump administration tried to block the release of a Netflix documentary about ICE until after the election through intimidation and threats. Two filmmakers embedded with ICE for two-and-a-half years to make the series Immigration Nation, but when agency officials saw the rough cuts, which include ICE officers forcing their way into immigrants’ homes and mocking them in custody, they turned hostile. One official pressured them to delay the series release, warned them that the federal government would use its “full weight” to veto scenes it didn’t care for, and stressed that it was their “little production company” that would face consequences, not Netflix. The filmmakers were told that the anger over their project came all the way from the top of the administration.
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- The late John Lewis will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol next week, followed by an unprecedented public viewing on the East Front Steps. He’ll also make a final journey from Selma to Montgomery in commemoration of the Bloody Sunday march, and lie in state in the Alabama Capitol.
- The Pentagon’s UFO program (now the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force) remains underway, and will start releasing some of its findings to the public. Former Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) says he believes the government has materials from UFO crashes in its possession, and, uh, he’s seen the intelligence.
- A judge ruled that Seattle media companies must comply with a subpoena for unpublished photos and video from a May 30 protest that turned violent.
- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on America’s allies to take a hard line against China: “if the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.” Anyway, China has ordered the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, in retaliation for the Chinese consulate ordered closed in Houston, and the Justice Department has charged four Chinese researchers with visa fraud.
- Stephen Miller denied that his grandmother died of COVID-19, despite the fact that her death certificate lists “COVID-19” as the cause of death. Miller’s uncle David Glossier told Mother Jones that he blamed the Trump administration for his mother’s death, and the well-adjusted souls at the White House responded thusly: “His grandmother did not pass away from COVID. She was diagnosed with COVID in March and passed away in July so that timeline does not add up at all.”
- Dr. Anthony Fauci threw out the first pitch at MLB’s opening game on Thursday night, and, uh, the important thing is that he had fun out there.
- President Trump said he will throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium next month, so buckle up for an even weirder throw followed by weeks of speeches about how the pitcher’s mound was slippery. (And potentially a tantrum, if the players take a knee.)
- Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is having a normal one.
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The 2020 presidential election may hinge on voters understanding that the mail is slow as hell. In the 2016 election, more than 73,000 absentee ballots were rejected after arriving too late to be counted. This year an unprecedented number of voters will rely on mail-in ballots, as the Postal Service flounders amidst a lack of funding and sustained attacks from the Trump administration: The number of ballots that don’t arrive in time could be larger than the the election margin.Twenty-four states currently allow voters to request absentee ballots less than a week before election, setting voters up to be disenfranchised. The Postal Service has said it cannot guarantee a specific delivery date for your mail-in vote, and recommends voters allow “at least one week” each way for ballots in the mail. Request it early, send it back early, and make sure everyone in your life (plus maybe a few extra people) knows to do the same.
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More Than A Vote, a group founded by LeBron James, announced that it will donate $100,000 to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to help pay off the outstanding court fees of people convicted of felonies so they’re able to vote.
In true poetic justice, new polling research suggests that President Trump’s response to June’s Black Lives Matter protests could very well cost him the election.
Virginia has removed Confederate monuments from its state capitol.
Los Angeles artist Michael Gittes created and donated 1,800 paintings for frontline workers at a Brooklyn hospital hit hard by the coronavirus crisis.
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