Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. What we have in executive branch is the opposite. A lack of preparation meeting a disaster. “The federal government is only now playing catch-up, as thousands of new cases of coronavirus are confirmed and the death toll steadily increases every day.” Vox: The Trump administration’s botched coronavirus response, explained.

+ “Chu was not threatened by the government, like Li had been in Wuhan. But she was just as effectively silenced by a rule-bound bureaucracy that was insufficiently worried about the pandemic—and by officials at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who may even have felt political pressure not to take this disease as seriously as they should.” A must-read from Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic: The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff. And Derek Thompson from yesterday. America Is Acting Like a Failed State.

+ “The administration’s struggle to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak has been marked by infighting and blame-shifting, misinformation and missteps, and a slow recognition of the danger. Warring factions have wrestled for control internally and for approval from a president who has been preoccupied with the beating his image is taking.” Infighting, missteps and a son-in-law hungry for results: Inside the Trump administration’s troubled coronavirus response.