Pande-mic Drop
“Infighting, turf wars and a president more concerned with the stock market and media coverage than policy have defined the Trump White House. They have also defined how it has handled a pandemic.” (Oh, and Jared…) NYT: Inside the Coronavirus Response: A Case Study in the White House Under Trump. Early on, Trump “told aides to consider each day as an episode in a television show.”
+ WaPo: On Fox News, suddenly a very different tune about the coronavirus. (They’re still lying, but differently.) Not scared enough this week. Try this on for size: “Trump, meanwhile, has long looked to Fox News and its personalities for guidance and approval, a dynamic that may have been pivotal this week after host Tucker Carlson reportedly visited with the president in person to urge him to take the coronavirus seriously.”
+ The main manifestation of the ineptitude has been the absence of tests. Here’s an interesting series of articles to help understand how we got here. The New Yorker: What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S. WaPo: Flawed tests, red tape and resistance to using the millions of tests produced by the WHO. And from GQ: Inside the Race to Solve America’s Coronavirus Testing Crisis.