“‘We need to take away children,’ Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: ‘If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.’ Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.” The crisis before Covid: We Need to Take Away Children. There are plenty of Americans who read the words of Jeff Sessions and nod enthusiastically. Thomas B. Edsall in the NYT: If Trump Loses the Election, What Happens to Trumpism? “We don’t know whether these people used to be Republicans or Democrats or whether they were just on the outside of politics. But we know that they are Trump supporters now, and they are the people who actually favor things like the child separation policy at the southern border.”

+ Speaking of the family separations at the border, the architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, is the latest Trump official to test positive for Covid-19. This creates a matchup of two diabolical pathogens: one, a freakishly rare mutation that infected our world and mercilessly destroyed countless lives in innumerable ways; the other a virus called Covid-19. (I suppose we now know that the virus can travel from bat to human and back to bat.)