What A Day: The Birx of Being a Wallflower

With coronavirus outbreaks beginning to surge in the midwest and the first schools to reopen already activating their emergency protocols, President Trump has finally realized it’s time to shake up his approach and start yelling at a different public-health expert.
 

• A few school districts have already begun reopening for in-person classes, and it’s going about as swimmingly as you’d expect. A middle-school student in Indiana tested positive for COVID-19 on the very first day of class, sending the students and teachers who had interacted with that person into a 14-day quarantine. Someone at a Mississippi high school also tested positive during the first week back, and in Georgia, 260 employees in the state’s largest school district have been “excluded from work” after testing positive or being exposed. 
   
• Those incidents make a compelling case for the rest of the country to fall in line with the hundreds of school districts that have rolled back their plans to reopen, but naturally, the president had this arbitrarily capitalized appraisal of the situation on Monday morning:  “Cases up because of BIG Testing! Much of our Country is doing very well. Open the Schools!” Anyway, the country’s doing so hot and tests are so bullshit that the White House has now implemented mandatory random testing for its employees. 
   
• Having reverted fully back into This Is Fine mode, Trump publicly lashed out at Dr. Deborah Birx for the first time after she acknowledged that This Is Not, In Fact, Fine. Birx warned in a Sunday CNN appearance that the virus is in “a new phase” and “extraordinarily widespread,” even in rural areas. She also suggested that people who live with vulnerable family members start wearing masks at home. In response to that incontestable fact and potentially life-saving recommendation, Trump called Birx’s interview performance “Pathetic!” Another entry for the New Tone scrapbook. 

Meanwhile, millions of Americans in desperate financial straits are waiting for the federal aid that Republicans have held up for months. 
 

• White House officials and Democrats are still locked in a stalemate over the next coronavirus stimulus package, including how to extend the expired federal unemployment payments. (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is off finding more judges to bully into retirement, or whatever.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has now come out in favor of an automatic stabilizer for unemployment benefits—so that they would phase out automatically, but only as the economy improved—which would have been neat to include in the stimulus bill the House passed in May, as many Democrats proposed at the time. 
   
• Trump has accused Democrats of “slow-rolling” the talks and told reporters that he’s considering issuing an executive order to address the expired federal eviction moratorium, something it’s not clear he has the power to do. It’s almost quaint to note at this point, but over the weekend, as negotiations continued and millions of renters confronted the looming prospect of losing their homes, Trump was out golfing at his own private club.
   

The administration’s coronavirus response has been a breathtaking pileup of predictable, avoidable disasters. Nearly five months in and despite the benefit of amassed international experience, Trump has us hurtling towards the next set: school-centered outbreaks, mass evictions, and perpetually hobbled testing. The good news is, with 91 days until the election, and 169 until the inauguration, we are closer to the end of this nightmare than to the beginning—but only if we get to work. 

Crooked has a new pod coming out! Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, will host Missing America, a new limited series about how the U.S. under Trump has stopped leading the free world and started trying to dismantle it. In this absence of this leadership, a host of political diseases are sweeping the plane— nationalism, authoritarianism, sectarianism, and disinformation take shape like never before.

Ben speaks to inspiring leaders and activists from around the world about what’s happening in their countries, and how they’re fighting hard to take up the slack in America’s absence. Learning from their examples and advice, we’ll discover what the US must do — at home and abroad — to confront these challenges. The first episode drops next Tuesday, August 11th. Listen to the trailer and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. 

President Trump has bypassed the Senate to install an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist as head of policy at the Pentagon. On Sunday, Retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata withdrew from consideration to become undersecretary of defense for policy, a role that requires Senate confirmation. The Senate Armed Services Committee had canceled Tata’s confirmation hearing at the last minute last week, after lawmakers from both parties “raised serious questions about this nominee.” Rather than find a qualified, non-insane nominee that the Senate could confirm, Trump went ahead and installed Tata in an identical temporary position as the official "performing the duties of" the deputy undersecretary of defense policy. 

• Scientists are worried the Trump administration will pressure the FDA to start rolling out a vaccine as an October surprise, even if it hasn’t been proven safe and effective.
   
• The Manhattan District Attorney’s office suggested it’s investigating Trump and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud in a court filing arguing that Trump’s accountants must fork over his tax returns. 
   
• Corruption, Part II: House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) has subpoenaed four aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, accusing them of stonewalling an investigation into Trump’s firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. 
   
• Corruption Episode VII (The Foreign Interference Awakens): The House Foreign Affairs Committee has also opened an inquiry into reports that the U.S. ambassador to Brazil told Brazilian officials how to help Trump get re-elected. The ambassador, Todd Chapman, reportedly made clear to Brazilian officials that they could boost Trump’s election chances in Iowa if they lifted tariffs on ethanol. 
   
• The Finance Menace (a Corruption prequel): Deutsche Bank has opened an internal investigation into the longtime personal banker of Trump and Jared Kushner, Rosemary Vrablic, over a real estate transaction between Vrablic and a company part-owned by Kushner.
   
• The Republican National Convention in Charlotte, NC, will reportedly be closed to the press, an unprecedented restriction that Republicans have chalked up to social-distancing guidelines. COVID-19: not bad enough to keep kids out of school, but just dangerous enough to ban reporters from the Republican nominating process. (Maybe it’s a mercy? A journalist who covered Trump’s trip to Florida last week has tested positive.)
   
• Victorina Morales, an undocumented immigrant who spoke up about working at Trump’s New Jersey golf resort, has been placed in removal proceedings and could face deportation.
   
• Fox News ratings “fell off a cliff” when the network began broadcasting John Lewis’s funeral, in a crystalline representation of what Fox News has done to Fox News viewers.
   
• The NASA astronauts launched by SpaceX returned safely to Earth on Sunday. Or, you know, as safe as anyone can be on Earth these days.

Microsoft will move forward with negotiations to buy TikTok, after President Trump threatened to ban the app in the U.S. on Friday. The company’s chief executive met with Trump at the White House over the weekend, and with his apparent blessing to pursue the deal, Microsoft said it would complete the discussions one way or the other by September 15. Microsoft promised to “ensure that all private data of TikTok's American users is transferred to and remains in the United States.” Trump reportedly agreed to forego a TikTok ban and let an American company buy it instead after his advisers convinced him that an executive action would be a political and legal nightmare. 

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Nevada lawmakers passed a bill to send all voters mail-in ballots for the November election. 

Illinois has launched a $5 million ad campaign to encourage people to wear masks. 

Iowa Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield raised $132,000 with a viral video of her dog Ringo, after Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) accused her of “hiding in the basement” with him. 

Look what you’ve done!