“Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner – the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world. People often observed during Trump’s first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. ‘Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,’ says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment. ‘America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.'” Financial Times (outside the paywall) with a clear overview of the disastrous performance by Trump, and what that means for America.

+ The visible failures at the top will mean that an election already expected to go low has already passed the Mariana Trench on the way down. The latest examples: Beavis suggesting that Joe Biden is a pedophile, and Butthole claiming that the coronavirus concern is all made up to take “away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time. You watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.” (Eric is underestimating himself. He is the Trump family’s greatest tool.)