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“If we’re out there handing out masks and gloves, and we’ve got Covid, then they’re contaminated,” said Mr. Reaves, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The concern over the health and safety of FEMA employees comes as the agency is already stretched thin by three years of major natural disasters.

The virus, however, is forcing the agency to rethink that approach. It has urged its staff to work from home when possible, and distance themselves from their colleagues when it isn’t. FEMA has also restricted the number of disaster victims who are allowed inside its field offices at once, and has made it easier for states to shelter victims in hotels or other settings where they don’t have to be crammed together.

“FEMA has taken every precaution recommended by the C.D.C. to protect all employees,” Ms. Litzow added, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mr. Reaves said that at least two other people who worked in the office had since told him that they were self-isolating out of concern that they were exposed.

Some FEMA officials had grown concerned over how crowded its headquarters had become since President Trump tapped the disaster agency to lead his administration’s response to the coronavirus.

FEMA’s communications office did not say if any employees are self-isolating because they have symptoms.

The office also didn’t comment on its decision to decline the union’s request to find out which offices have had confirmed cases.

In its letter to the union, the agency suggested that providing that information could violate employees’ privacy. At some FEMA locations, the agency said

The timeline for FEMA funding is tight. The president has to declare an emergency or national disaster, and affected organizations generally have to request public assistance within 30 days. In their lawsuit, the three Texas churches requested expedited relief, arguing that they only have until that 30-day deadline—September 26—to win protection “against FEMA’s discrimination.”

ut the problem is that “this seems to be policy that is made disaster by disaster.” Even if the president directs FEMA to do something, the agency could later face lawsuits for doing so. In this case, critics could argue that such funding violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Constitutionally speaking, “the real question comes down to whether this is framed as a public-safety, emergency-relief action or whether it’s framed as helping a church get a new building,” said Richard Garnett, a professor of law and political science at the University of Notre Dame. “Nobody thinks it’s unconstitutional for a fire truck to put out a fire at a church, and clearly there aren’t different Establishment Clause rules for fires and floods. But are there different rules for putting out fires and repairing a building after it burns?”

As the churches say in their lawsuit: “Mold will not wait for litigation process to spread through the churches’ buildings; storm and flood debris will not stop rotting while the government processes their claims.”

Previous administrations have also dispatched FEMA to help process migrants during surges in border crossings. However, the Biden administration cannot use disaster aid funding to support the processing of migrants in Texas after they cross the border without the consent of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. States must request the funding from the federal government.

The agency will help provide basic care as criticism mounts over the treatment of the increasing number of young migrants who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border.

In Inslee’s telling, this has resulted in a double whammy: a shortage of supplies and a lack of coordination of availability of parts. This could be mitigated by a much more robust and coordinated response via the Defense Production Act

As coronavirus cases recede in the coming months, if anything, more testing will be required. That’s because when people reassemble, it will be urgent to jump on cases in which people again show symptoms, and test them, to avoid a second wave.

“As we want to reopen our schools, as we want to reopen our industries, the amount of testing we need will actually increase,” Inslee said. “In the second wave, we have to have testing, a resource base, and a contact-tracing base that is so much more scaled up than right now. It’s an enormous challenge.”

“What we need now, what won World War II, was a quartermaster,” Inslee said. “That’s how you win wars. That’s what we need — a quartermaster.

Recently, Trump was directly confronted with glaring evidence of this. His own administration released a report documenting urgent shortages faced by hospital administrators around the country, who offered constructive suggestions on how the federal government can help save American lives.

In response, Trump lashed out in a rage, and pretended those problems are simply nonexistent.

A review of federal election data showed that a founding partner in HBC Investments, one of the two Texas firms that backs Whitefish Energy Holdings - had donated $2,700 to Mr Trump's presidential campaign, as well as $20,000 to a group that supported the White House bid. According to election data, the investor also gave $30,700 to the Republican National Committee in 2016 - after Mr Trump became the party's presumptive nominee.

When will power be restored?About 18% of customers have electricity as of Tuesday, according to the Pentagon.The Puerto Rican governor's goal is to have 30% restored by 30 October, 50% by 15 November and 95% a month later.

And they contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt. Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce

But in an interview Thursday night with Sean Hannity, the president played down the need for ventilators.“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he said, a reference to New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appealed for federal help in obtaining them. “You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

The shortage of ventilators has emerged as one of the major criticisms of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. The need to quickly equip hospitals across the country with tens of thousands more of the devices to treat those most seriously ill with the virus was not anticipated despite the Trump administration’s own projection in a simulation last year that millions of people could be hospitalized. And even now, the effort to produce them has been confused and disorganized.

“Ventec and G.M. have been working at breakneck speed to leverage our collective expertise in ventilation and manufacturing to meet the needs of the country as quickly as possible and arm medical professionals with the number of ventilators needed to save lives,” said Chris O. Brooks, Ventec’s chief strategy officer.The only thing missing was clarity from the government about how many ventilators they needed — and who would be paid to build them.

Last week, General Motors, Ventec Life Systems and a coalition of business executives called StopTheSpread.org issued a statement saying that Ventec would “leverage G.M.’s logistics, purchasing and manufacturing expertise to build more of their critically important ventilators,” including some portable units.By Sunday, Mr. Trump appeared to suggest on Twitter that a deal had been completed to mass-produce the ventilators, even though it was unclear who would pay to equip the General Motors plant or how long that process would take.

The initial projection, one senior administration official said, was that after three weeks of preparation it could produce an initial run of 20,000 ventilators, or about two-thirds of what Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York recently said his state alone needed to cover the influx of coronavirus patients expected in two weeks, if not sooner.That number then shrank to 7,500 ventilators in the initial run, or maybe 5,000, an apparent recognition that auto transmissions and ventilators had very little in common. Those numbers are in flux and so are the Trump administration’s because the White House cannot decide how many ventilators it wants.

Targets have changed by the hour, officials said, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, which approves the use of medical devices, and the White House try to figure out how many ventilators to request and how much they should cost.

The $1.5 billion price tag comes to around $18,000 a ventilator. And the overall cost, by comparison, is roughly equal to buying 18 F-35s, the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet.

He was essentially ordering the company to do something it had already arranged to do: G.M. announced earlier on Friday that it was moving forward with an emergency joint venture with a small manufacturer, Ventec Life Systems, even in the absence of a contract from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In a late-afternoon news conference, Mr. Trump said, “Now it turns out we will have to be producing large numbers.” He said that over the next 100 days, “we will either make or get, in some form, over 100,000 additional units,” more than three times the nation’s annual production.

Mr. Trump’s announcement at his coronavirus task force’s daily briefing came on a day of intensive criticism of the administration’s slow response and lack of leadership in a pandemic that has now resulted in over 1,500 deaths in the United States. More than 100,000 people here have been infected with the coronavirus, according to a New York Times database. The United States is the only country so far to hit that milestone.

Much of the criticism has focused on the absence of sufficient stockpiles of basic materials like masks and ventilators, and especially on the lack of urgency in organizing increased production and distribution.

Officials in more than 200 American cities, large and small, report a dire need for face masks, ventilators and other emergency equipment to respond to the coronavirus outbreak, according to a survey released on Friday.

More than 90 percent — or 192 cities — told the conference that they did not have an adequate supply of face masks for police officers, firefighters or emergency workers. In addition, 92 percent of cities reported a shortage of test kits to diagnose who has contracted the virus — a problem Mr. Trump has said in recent days was all but solved — and 85 percent said they did not have a sufficient supply of ventilators available to health facilities.

Roughly two-thirds of the cities said they had not received any emergency equipment or supplies from their state, the report said. And of those that did receive state aid, nearly 85 percent said it was not enough to meet their needs.

In total, the conference tabulated that cities needed 28.5 million face masks, 24.4 million other items of personal protection equipment, 7.9 million test kits and 139,000 ventilators.

In New York, the epicenter of the virus in the United States, doctors and nurses have reported that they were being forced to experiment with putting several patients on a single ventilator — a largely untested, unapproved practice that state authorities are now permitting in an effort to keep alive older adults or immunocompromised patients who could not breathe on their own.

“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” Mr. Trump said Thursday night, discussing an urgent request from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York. “You know, you’re going to major hospitals sometimes, they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?”

Mr. Trump’s abrupt change on the need for ventilators appeared to be in response to news reports that his administration had decided at the last minute not to announce a $1.5 billion contract with G.M. because of concern about the high cost and slow delivery of the machines.

Because Mr. Trump played down the severity of the coronavirus for much of January and February, and into the beginning of March, the White House got a late start in assessing how much equipment would be needed.

The White House had been preparing to unveil the G.M.-Ventec joint venture this week, and had hoped to announce that upward of 20,000 ventilators would be available in weeks, and that ultimately 80,000 would be produced. But the company complained that FEMA would not commit to spending the $250 million or so it would take to retool the factory.

Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.

Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.

The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.

Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.

Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.

Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”

If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.

It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.

In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.

In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.

It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.

As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”

Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.

The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”

So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”

In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.

“The governors, locally, are going to be in command,” he said on the same day Mr. Pence spoke of federalism’s virtues. “We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job.”

The vacuum left by the federal government forced states to compete for scarce equipment like ventilators, driving up their price and benefiting shady middlemen while causing fatal delays.

Unwilling to take the blame for shutting down the economy when he thought there was little public support for the move, he sparred with governors like Mr. Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan while also hiding behind them.

The next task was undertaking the vast production and allocation of masks, other protective gear and ventilators. Instead of centralizing this task, President Trump said from the White House lectern, “Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.” He added, “You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

he shifted to using the governors for partisan gain. Last Friday, Mr. Trump said they “should be appreciative, because you know what? When they’re not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps. They’re not appreciative to FEMA.” He then said he told Mr. Pence not to call those who were unappreciative.

he made his point: Governors who criticized the president would put their states at risk of getting short shrift from the federal government.

Colorado, Maine and Massachusetts, led by two Democrats and a Republican critic of the president’s pandemic policies, received only small fractions of what they asked for while Florida got the delivery it requested — twice over.

Last week, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers wrote to the National Governors Association asking for uniform directives with a single definition of “essential” businesses that can operate.

Mayors can assist, as the U.S. Conference of Mayors did last week by surveying its members and telling the public that almost 90 percent of cities did not have enough test kits or masks and other protective equipment for health care workers.

the governors, with their direct responsibility for the welfare of their citizens, have urgent reason to band together and do better.

Then came the Feb. 5 argument.

In mid-March, Trump declared the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency. As a result, control of the stockpile shifted again — from HHS to FEMA.Since then, FEMA’s administrator, Peter Gaynor, has been asked frequently how many supplies have been shipped to states and how allocation decisions are being made.

New York is conducting more testing per capita than countries such as South Korea, which may partially explain the spike in numbers.

“We need to be smarter about this … we need the federal help and we need it now,” he said, calling on Donald Trump to utilise the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force companies to produce medical equipment and provide them the necessary financial support to do so. So far, the administration has relied on volunteer efforts that Cuomo said were not appropriate for the urgency of crisis.

“What happens to New York is gonna wind up happening to California, and Washington state and Illinois. It’s just a matter of time. We’re just getting there first,” Cuomo said. “Look at us today … where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”

Speaking later in the day, the vice-president, Mike Pence, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) had sent New York 2,000 ventilators and plans to send 2,000 more on Wednesday.

With cases surging, Cuomo said new projections estimate his state will need 140,000 hospital beds once the crisis reaches its apex, which could happen within 14 to 21 days instead of in May as previously forecast.

uomo’s urgent message comes as a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the US has the potential to become the next global hotspot for the pandemic. The country already has more than 46,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases, resulting in close to 600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

He also rejected the suggestion, floated by the president in recent days, that advice from public health officials could be rowed back in a matter of weeks to protect the US economy, saying that sensible steps in both areas could be made now without increasing risk to more vulnerable people in society.

The outbreak has led to a dramatic change in America’s social fabric: as of Monday, the New York Times estimated that more than 158 million people in 16 states would soon be under strict orders to stay at home – approaching half of the population.

The shift in messaging came after James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, predicted unemployment could reach 30% nationwide, according to Bloomberg News, and as negotiations for a coronavirus stimulus package dragged on for days in the US Senate. For weeks, suddenly jobless workers have been imploring the government for help, and Trump is staring down what could become a historic recession during an election year.

Even still, medical experts have cautioned against such an abrupt restart to the economy while the virus continues to spread exponentially. “You can’t call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you’re willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths,” Arthur Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at NYU School of Medicine, told the New York Times. “Can’t we try to put people’s lives first for at least a month?”

“If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest,” Cuomo said. “No American is going to say, accelerate the economy at the cost of human life, because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

The sharp acceleration in cases – just two weeks ago the official number was less than 2,000 – has led to the WHO warning that the US is overtaking countries such as Italy as the global hotspot for the virus.

early one in 10 Americans have no health insurance, while a widespread lack of sick pay across the country has forced many ill people into work despite the risk of spreading the virus.

the US response has been hobbled by the administration’s rejection of standard WHO testing kits, instead opting to develop its own, which turned out to be faulty.

Muddled messaging from the White House, where Trump has often contradicted the sombre warnings of his top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, has done little to Americans stop congregating on beaches or in shopping malls.

The true scale of infection in the US is almost certainly far worse, with a severe lack of testing having stymied efforts to contain Covid-19 once it emerged near Seattle

Authorities in New York are scouring the world for the ventilators, masks and gowns needed for an unfolding public health emergency that is expected to peak in the next three weeks.

The apex of this pandemic is higher and sooner than we thought,” said Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor who has garnered praise for his handling of the crisis. “I will turn this state upside down to get the hospital beds we need.”

Cuomo also condemned Fema and the Trump administration again, saying: “You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators? What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You’re missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude.”

The number of cases was higher in New York, he said, “because it started here first because we have global travelers coming here first. Because we have more density than other places. You will see this in suburban communities across the country. We are just a test case. We are just a test case. And that’s how the nation should look at it. Where we are today, you will be in three weeks or five weeks or six weeks.”

Trump has signaled that he is prepared to wind down restrictions at the end of a 15-day window in an attempt to bolster the economy and a sagging stock market.

On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.

The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault

That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too

Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him

The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time.

The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.

The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.

sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying.

Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.

It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.

This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China

Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.

If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.

Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today.

Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.

Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.

At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”

The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight.

Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut

The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.

Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists.

That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”

Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego

During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.

For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years

The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth.

The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.

On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”

on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early

Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.

So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.

Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.

The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.

s the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.

Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.

The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.

Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead

Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.

He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining.

Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump.

Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.

Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.

rump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.

Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.

Part of the anomaly is surely attributable to jaw-dropping lack of empathy for people who do not look like them (e.g. poor immigrants, minorities) and to rank partisanship (President Barack Obama’s support for Solyndra is bad, but Big Ag subsidies are fine). The anti-government syndrome is fueled by a refusal to look at the particular beneficiaries of government help and the obsession with generalized, usually grossly inaccurate data. Illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs! (They’re not.)

When something like Harvey comes along, however, the light ever so briefly goes on (sometimes) for the anti-government types. Suffering is visible, the need impossible to ignore. And when the tragedy is in deep-red Texas, not deep-blue New Jersey or New Orleans, suddenly the wonders of government become clear to them.

(Then-Rep. Mick Mulvaney, who now heads the Office of Management and Budget, opposed a large Sandy relief package without offsets, while both Texas senators tried to block the Sandy relief bill on the grounds that it was extraneous spending.) The crew that cheered Trump’s proposed 11 percent cut to FEMA (government is bad!) will support billions of dollars in Harvey relief (my people are suffering!).

Empathy requires one to put oneself in others’ shoes — to understand their needs and concerns that do not affect you. That seems to be beyond their abilities. It seems the essence of their philosophy boils down to: Government is good only when it’s abusing people you don’t like and when it’s helping your own.

When this happened during the Trump administration, his staffers and cabinet members were harassed, heckled and even forced out from restaurants in protest. Time magazine went so far as to run a cover showing a towering Trump looking down upon a crying Hispanic little girl.

this is a crisis, and one of Biden's making

Over and over, the reporters were told the same thing -- these migrants were coming to America because Biden told them they could.

Biden issued a 100-day moratorium on most deportations, which a federal judge blocked, and ended the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" rule.

If there was one bright line dividing the Democratic and Republican parties in last year's election -- and in the actions of the last two chief executives -- it was immigration. Biden ran against Trump's so-called "racist" policies and pledged to reverse his immigration restrictions and border security measures. The message was sent loud and clear: with Trump gone, the border is open.

Now in office, laughably, Biden and his Department of Homeland Security secretary are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Biden's first crisis as President is at hand

Murray acknowledged the bill would likely not pass in the GOP-controlled Senate

Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.

The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects

But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.

The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”

it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.

“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”

Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.

“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life

how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.

It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”

“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

“we’re all in this together.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels

Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“Seriously, it is not reversible.”

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.

If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.

If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt

“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.

“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”

“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one

Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”

It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.

Cascading Disasters

Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.

Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.

as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves

A Lifetime of Clues

For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”