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Trump’s announcement came as the U.S. death count crossed 2,100, more than double the level from two days ago.

The United States has now recorded more than 122,000 cases of the respiratory virus, the most of any country in the world.

CDC warns residents of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut against non-essential travel

Since the virus first appeared in the United States in late January, Trump has vacillated between playing down the risks of infection and urging Americans to take steps to slow its spread.

Trump said on Saturday afternoon that he might impose a ban on travel in and out of New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut,

He offered few specifics.

Critics promptly called the idea unworkable, saying it would cause chaos in a region that serves as the economic engine of the eastern United States, accounting for 10 percent of the population and 12 percent of GDP.

The CDC later warned the states’ residents against non-essential domestic travel for 14 days.

It was the latest reversal for Trump, who has been reluctant to order U.S. companies to produce much-needed medical supplies, despite the pleas of governors and hospital workers.

Tests to track the disease’s progress also remain in short supply, despite repeated White House promises that they would be widely available.

Though Trump has apparently opted not to impose checkpoints on highways and airports leading out of New York, some states have imposed limits of their own.

New Yorkers arriving in Florida and Rhode Island face orders to self-isolate if they intend to stay, and the governors of Pennsylvania and West Virginia have asked visiting New Yorkers to voluntarily self-quarantine.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu on Saturday asked all visitors to his state who don’t come for work reasons to voluntarily self-quarantine.

New coronavirus cases in China leveled off after the government imposed a strict lockdown of Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease.

Any travel restrictions, voluntary or not, might be too late.

“The garnishment came with no warning. You don’t know until your bank account is locked and your money is gone,” said Walker, who didn’t receive the order of garnishment in the mail until 24 March, after money was taken from his account, and he has already started to fall behind in paying bills.

“Unlike the rest of my bills that I can see, the debt collection agency doesn’t send you one. You can’t arrange to auto-pay and they don’t send anything showing what you paid. It’s like they are set up to make you fail. With the coronavirus they shouldn’t be allowed to harass and garnish bank accounts while Americans are in this crisis.”

“Garnishment is a really important issue, especially for low-income, economically vulnerable families, the exact workers being laid off in the US right now,”

He noted it is still unclear if any federal stimulus checks will be subjected to wage garnishment, but warned courts can freeze bank accounts over debt, making these funds inaccessible if they are deposited.

“It’s $350 to $400 a month. I don’t deny I owe this money because they saved my life, but it is detrimental to my health now because I don’t have the money for what I need. I have no money for groceries – I’m only paying my rent and utilities, there’s no money left over,” Johnson said.

Among the Americans still experiencing wage garnishment through the coronavirus pandemic are those who have defaulted on their federal student loans. About 45 million Americans owe more than $1.7tn in student loan debt. According to an analysis by Student Loan Hero, between July 2015 to September 2018, 18 private student debt collection agencies contracted by the US Department of Education added $171bn to their debt inventory, and collected $2.3bn during the same period through wage garnishments.

“The Department of Education has not decided to do anything, as far as I know, to ease the burden from the coronavirus,” said McKinnon. “They took my tax return also, in the middle of this epidemic. It’s heartless.”

She noted the federal stimulus relief package for the coronavirus pandemic is supposed to increase social security income by $200, but that she will still be receiving less than she would before the garnishment. “Even though I paid for years and I’ve tried to utilize their system to take care of my student loans they still decided to garnish my already-below-poverty-line social security income,” Tavares added.

There are more than 52,000 cases in New York.

The state has about half of the total confirmed Covid-19 cases in the entire US.

Mr Cuomo also said he would sue nearby Rhode Island if the authorities there continued targeting New Yorkers and threatening to punish them for failing to quarantine. Skip Twitter post by @RyanWelchPhotog

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded by saying that quarantining the state of New York would be "preposterous" and "anti-American".

"If you said we were geographically restricted from leaving, that would be a lockdown."

He added later: "I don't know how that can be legally enforceable. And from a medical point of view, I don't know what you would be accomplishing.

The CDC then published a statement urging residents of those three states to "refrain" from all non-essential domestic travel for 14 days.

On Friday, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo deployed National Guard troops to stop cars with a New York licence plate, to remind them of their state's advice that they quarantine

Soldiers are going door-to-door in coastal vacation communities to ask if any residents have recently visited New York City.

The president is eager to reopen much of the country and has privately raised concerns that an ailing economy could hurt his chances of being re-elected.

Governors and health professionals have repeatedly warned of a lack of testing across the country. The U.S. has conducted more than 3 million tests since the start of the outbreak. Some experts have said there should be millions of tests a week before Americans can return to work.

President Trump is failing because he has abandoned our commitments to favoring problem-solving over ideological posturing and to acting nationally in the face of looming catastrophe.

Instead of rallying the resources required for a nationally organized testing program, Trump told the nation’s governors that the federal government will “be standing alongside of you.”

Having thrown the burden of resolving the crisis on those governors, Trump might at least have encouraged his own supporters to back off their reflexive opposition to a gradual and considered approach to economic recovery

it’s no accident that one of the United States’ great contributions to philosophy is William James’s theory of pragmatism. Our bias is toward ideas that work and innovation by way of trial and error.

Why? “They seem to be protesters that like me,” he said gleefully.

Considering this lack of leadership, what would a William James pragmatist do?

Virtually everyone except for Trump and his apologists understands the obvious: Reopening the economy requires, first, a national commitment to a robust testing program fully backed by the federal government

“Even if the government-imposed social distancing rules are relaxed to encourage economic activity, risk-averse Americans will persist in social distancing, and that behavior, too, will restrain the hoped-for economic rebound,

Those who shout for opening the economy in the name of freedom don’t think much about the freedom of workers to protect themselves from a potentially deadly disease. And employers do not want to find themselves facing legal liabilities for infected employees.

If the economy is substantially reopened without adequate testing, said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, the most vulnerable would include “low-wage workers, women, people of color, immigrants, and the elderly.” They are “concentrated in the riskiest jobs, with the least financial cushion, and the least likely to have employer-provided benefits or protections,”

“Bernie’s still being given a bit of a free pass by the national media,” he says. “I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our party.”

Here’s a guy who has been a kind of stalwart of the National Rifle Association, a man who said immigrants steal our jobs right up until he ran for president,

Of course, much of the energy that delivered such victories was determinedly progressive, akin to or directly supportive of Sanders and his transformative effect on the liberal cause. But O’Malley is as much a pillar of the party as Sanders is not.

e smiles. “Do you want me to speak more frankly?”

Some such stories, he says, feature in another manuscript, written with the guidance of the late Richard Ben Cramer, the author of What It Takes, “the definitive book about the 1988 presidential race” in which Hart flew so high then fell. Its title is Baltimore: A Memoir and a piece of it is out there on the web. Some want O’Malley to rewrite it, he says, to tie his own story more closely to the idea he was the model for the mayor of Charm City played by Aidan Gillen in The Wire, David Simon’s groundbreaking HBO series. He’s not keen.

Such focus seems timely: with the federal government in Trump’s sclerotic grip, cities in particular have begun to take a lead. On climate change, for example, some US mayors have reacted to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal by saying they will simply pursue its aims themselves.

The Gonzaga gathering, O’Malley says, is a friendly one, a chance for the old boys “to ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How’s your wife? How’s your kids? What are you up to?’

“We recognized each other from the Sunday shows and having served together. We shook hands … but it was not a moment for me to simply say, ‘Hey, how’s work?’ I know how work is with him.

om Perez, once the Maryland secretary of labor, ended up in the role but O’Malley supported a young mayor from the Republican heartlands: Pete Buttigieg, now a challenger in the presidential primary.

But in an echo of the frustrations of 2016, O’Malley criticises the way the DNC has run the primary, particularly the way debate qualifications based on polling data and donor numbers – changed this week – have kept the likes of the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (“a friend” to whom O’Malley has donated) and the Montana governor Steve Bullock firmly out of the spotlight.

I was out there rattling the tin cup, from county square to county square.”

“All of that’s part of the process. But at the end of the day, we have to nominate someone who can defeat him and who can bring our country together and govern.”

respiratory viruses are dependent on close social networks and are going to spread much more efficiently in crowded, densely populated urban areas.”

Of the states that have taken the fewest actions to restrict public gatherings or limit restaurant service on a statewide basis—such as Texas, Missouri, and Alabama—almost all have Republican governors,

almost all of the states that took the earliest and most dramatic statewide action, such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Illinois, have Democratic governors.

The huge differences between Republicans and Democrats extend not only to assessments of Trump’s response to the outbreak but also to its underlying level of danger and the need to change personal behavior. If anything, there’s considerable evidence that those gaps are widening.

A national Gallup poll released Monday, for instance, found that while 73 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents said they feared that they or someone in their family might be exposed to the coronavirus, only 42 percent of Republicans agreed

That 31-percentage-point difference dwarfed the gap in February, when slightly more Republicans (30 percent) than Democrats (26 percent) said they were concerned.

In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Tuesday, just over half of Republicans said the threat from the virus had been exaggerated, compared with one in five Democrats and two in five independents.

In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday, Republicans were only half as likely as Democrats to say that they planned to stop attending large gatherings, and just one-third as likely to say that they had cut back on eating at restaurants

the tendency of GOP voters and officials to downplay the risk partly reflects Trump’s initially dismissive messaging about the crisis. But it may also relate to a deeper ideological suspicion of scientists, the media, and subject-matter experts within the federal government.

“This is something we’ve gone through a while here among Republicans,” Kabaservice says. “The feeling increasingly is that experts and the media are all part of this elite class that is self-dealing and is looking down on less-educated and less-fortunate people, and [that] they can’t be trusted to tell the truth.”

“That dynamic … has been reinforced” by the emergence of the “conservative media ecosystem,” which unstintingly presents “elites” as a threat to viewers.

She believes that U.S. communities will experience the coronavirus in contrasting, but complex, ways: While the disease will probably spread more rapidly in urban areas, she says, more of the population there is young and healthy.

while outbreaks may not be as pervasive in rural America, they could still prove very damaging because the population is older and has less access to quality health care.

Mortality rates, she says, will ultimately hinge on how rigorously communities minimize interaction by practicing social distancing. “It is all about individuals closing all of their social networking,”

if the outbreak becomes more widely dispersed over time, it may be tougher for even the most conservative governors to resist action—or for Trump to escape consequences for his initially dismissive response.

Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has quickly become one of the most familiar faces in the nation. Besides his own willingness to take increasingly stringent actions to avoid the spread of Covid-19, Cuomo has been extremely effective when speaking to the public. When it comes to strong leadership, public presentation matters.

When Ohio only had five confirmed cases, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine warned that the true number could be significantly higher and moved swiftly to shut down schools, cancel gatherings of 100 or more and ban visitors to nursing homes and assisted living centers.

Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before.

focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.

Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak

Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, say the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.

without substantial federal funding, states’ efforts will only go so far

The next failure is already on its way, Frieden said, because “we’re not doing the things we need to be doing in April.”

In recent days, dozens of leading voices have coalesced around the test-trace-quarantine framework, including former FDA commissioners for the Trump and George W. Bush administrations, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and top experts at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Harvard universities.

On Wednesday, former president Barack Obama weighed in, tweeting, “Social distancing bends the curve and relieves some pressure … But in order to shift off current policies, the key will be a robust system of testing and monitoring — something we have yet to put in place nationwide.”

And Friday, Apple and Google unveiled a joint effort on new tools that would use smartphones to aid in contact tracing.

What remains unclear is whether this emerging plan can succeed without the backing of the federal government.

“It’s mind-boggling, actually, the degree of disorganization,” said Tom Frieden, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. The federal government has already squandered February and March, he noted, committing “epic failures” on testing kits, ventilator supply, protective equipment for health workers and contradictory public health communication.

Experts and leaders in some states say remedying that weakness should be a priority and health departments should be rapidly shored up so that they are ready to act in coming weeks as infections nationwide begin to decrease

In America, testing — while still woefully behind — is ramping up. And households across the country have learned over the past month how to quarantine. But when it comes to the second pillar of the plan — the labor-intensive work of contact tracing — local health departments lack the necessary staff, money and training.

In South Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore, variations on this basic strategy were implemented by their national governments, allowing them to keep the virus in check even as they reopened parts of their economy and society

In a report released Friday, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials — which represents state health departments — estimate 100,000 additional contact tracers are needed and call for $3.6 billion in emergency funding from Congress.

“We can’t afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission,” he said in the interview.

Unless states can aggressively trace and isolate the virus, experts say, there will be new outbreaks and another round of disruptive stay-at-home orders.

“All people are talking about right now is hospital beds, ventilators, testing, testing, testing. Yes, those are important, but they are all reactive. You are dealing with the symptoms and not the virus itself,”

The nonprofit Partners in Health quickly put together a plan to hire and train 1,000 contact tracers. Working from their homes making 20 to 30 calls a day, they could cover up to 20,000 contacts a day.

Testing on its own is useless, Nyenswah explained, because it only tells you who already has the virus. Similarly, tracing alone is useless if you don’t place those you find into quarantine. But when all three are implemented, the chain of transmission can be shattered.

Until a vaccine or treatment is developed, such nonpharmaceutical interventions are the only tools countries can rely on — besides locking down their cities.

to expand that in a country as large as the United States will require a massive dose of money, leadership and political will.

“You cannot have leaders contradicting each other every day. You cannot have states waiting on the federal government to act, and government telling the states to figure it out on their own,” he said. “You need a plan.”

When Vermont’s first coronavirus case was detected last month, it took two state health workers a day to track down 13 people who came into contact with that single patient. They put them under quarantine and started monitoring for symptoms. No one else became sick.

He did the math: If each of those 30 patients had contact with even three people, that meant 90 people his crew would have to locate and get into quarantine. In other words, impossible.

Since 2008, city and county health agencies have lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce. Decades of budget cuts have left the them unable to mount such a response. State health departments have recently had to lay off thousands more — an unintended consequence of federal officials delaying tax filings until July without warning states.

In Wuhan, a city of 11 million, the Chinese had 9,000 health workers doing contact tracing, said Frieden, the former CDC director. He estimates authorities would need roughly one contact tracer for every four cases in the United States.

“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,” he said. “It’s an enormous challenge.”

Gov. Charlie Baker (R) partnered with an international nonprofit group based in Boston

“You will never beat a virus like this one unless you get ahead of it. America must not just flatten the curve but get ahead of the curve.”

The group is paying new hires roughly the same salary as census takers, more than $20 an hour. As of Tuesday — just four days after the initial announcement — the group had received 7,000 applicants and hired 150.

“There’s a huge untapped resource of people in America if we would just ask.”

“There needs to be a crash course in contact tracing because a lot of the health departments where this is going to need to happen are already kind of flat-out just trying to respond to the crisis at hand,”

Experts have proposed transforming the Peace Corps — which suspended global operations last month and recalled 7,000 volunteers to America — into a national response corps that could perform many tasks, including contact tracing.

On Wednesday, the editor in chief of JAMA, a leading medical journal, proposed suspending the first year of training for America’s 20,000 incoming medical students and deploying them as a medical corps to support the “test, trace, track, and quarantine strategy.”

The national organization for local STD programs says $200 million could add roughly 1,850 specialists, more than doubling that current workforce.

Technology could also turn out to be pivotal. But the invasive nature of cellphone tracking and apps raises concerns about civil liberties.

Such technology could take over some of what contact tracers do in interviews: build a contact history for each confirmed patient and find those possibly exposed. Doing that digitally could speed up the process — critical in containing an outbreak — and less laborious.

In China, authorities combined the nation’s vast surveillance apparatus with apps and cellphone data to track people’s movements. If someone they came across is later confirmed as infected, an app alerts them to stay at home.

In the United States, about 20 technology companies are trying to create a contact tracing app using geolocation data or Bluetooth pings on cellphones

They heeded clear warnings.

in January, the federal government began bringing back Americans from affected areas of China, many to military bases in California. Newsom told me that working on the issue got him and the state’s other top officials thinking seriously about what was to come.

They trusted the experts.

Again, obvious, and again, so rare: These leaders understood the limits of their own knowledge, and when faced with tough choices, they deferred to the experts.

“When I’ve made decisions that I’ve regretted,” DeWine said, it was often because “I didn’t have enough facts, I didn’t ask enough questions, I didn’t ask the right people.”

They moved forcefully but incrementally.

They knew they couldn’t ask it all at once; they would have to prepare the public, over weeks, for a new reality.

“We had the benefit of enlightened business and community leaders,” Inslee said, referring to Microsoft and other large Seattle-area companies.

Smith, of Microsoft, echoed this sentiment: “Too often, people in the tech sector think that they can find the answer to anything, because they’ve been smart and successful — and I thought it was of fundamental importance that we not think that we’re as smart as the experts, and so we turned to the public health experts in King County and listened to them on Day 1.”

In that vein, there was something else very unusual in the places that moved first, too — actual bipartisanship. DeWine worked with Ohio’s biggest cities, many run by Democrats, to impose social distancing; Inslee and Newsom had to consult with many Republican officials

“It’s the science of the lifeboat,” Inslee told me. “When you’re all in the same lifeboat, there just isn’t room. When you’re in the middle of a storm, you got to keep the lifeboat afloat.”

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When asked if the the state legislature’s session – suspended since 12 March – would also resume, the governor told WGAU’s Tim Bryant lawmakers were “waiting to come back until it’s a safe environment to do so, and have the proper protocols where, you know, we can make sure that that’s not a dangerous situation for anyone that would need to be at the Capitol”.

Critics say he is making decisions with politics uppermost in his mind, stirring a rightwing base in the hope of retaining power – much like Donald Trump.

The opposing sides taken by the owners of Manuel’s – and many others like them in Georgia – and the state’s Republican leaders, backed by a few rightwing protest groups, are a microcosm of the controversy starting to play out across the US as some states push to reopen their economies in the face of dire warnings by many healthcare professionals.

Many of the governor’s critics say his decision to allow certain businesses to reopen will affect minority communities disproportionately, giving the dispute a racial tinge in a region already rife with such issues.

“This virus has disproportionately impacted the lives of black and brown people. We cannot and will not stand silently by and watch the premature opening of businesses that are mostly in the African American communities,” the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus (GLBC) said in a group statement.

“Our first concern is ensuring the safety of our employees and patrons. While we obviously want to reopen, and we have an incentive to do so as business owners, we do not want to contribute to the spread of the virus,” he said in a statement to the Guardian.

“We’re asking people to continue to not travel or run errands unless they need to. Certainly they can go to these establishments that I just talked about and other ones that are necessary,” he added about soon-to-be open nail salons and bowling alleys.

The United States has tested about 4 million people over several months. A new Harvard report says we need to be testing more like 5 million every day. But because our federal government is failing so miserably in that effort, the rest of us are left to do what we can to at least try not to get this thing in the first place. That means staying away from other people. And it means hoping our states, cities and municipalities will step up and fill the leadership vacuum left by the White House. Because this is less a problem of people than leadership: Overwhelming majorities of Americans under lockdown orders are complying with them. Overwhelming majorities of Americans support the restrictions. But we know that many people will, understandably, trust what our leaders tell us -- and too many of our conservative leaders are not earning that trust.

Especially in times of crisis, civilians need intelligent, thoughtful leadership. We need leaders who understand they are not experts on everything under the sun, and that leading with a narrow and reactionary ideology is no way to govern. We need leaders who will take pains to understand the scientific consensus, make difficult choices when necessary and lead with the truth. Unfortunately, the US doesn't have that at a federal level -- and several red states don't have it at a state level, either. And we're all paying the price for this long-time GOP malfeasance.

Trump's initial failure was to downplay the seriousness of the crisis. But his management of the situation ever since then has raised questions about the extent to which the President has appreciated the multi-front challenge facing the United States and the world.

Similarly, Trump urged governors on Monday to seriously consider reopening schools, CNN reported. But he didn't appear to have considered implications of millions of kids gathering, spreading the virus and infecting older, more vulnerable family members in a manner that could fuel the pandemic. His comment was consistent with an apparent conclusion that the worst of the pandemic has passed and that the virus, which scientists say is lying in wait for reopening, is simply gone.

"Many very good experts, very good people too, said this would never affect the United States," Trump told CNN's Jim Acosta on Tuesday. "The experts got it wrong. A lot of people got it wrong and a lot of people didn't know it would be this serious."

Any normal President who made a prediction that a miracle would sweep a pandemic away, only to see it infect a million Americans over a couple of months, would be politically shattered.

"There are big believers in testing, and then there are some governors that don't feel as strongly about it at all," Trump, said Monday.

"The only reason the U.S. has reported one million cases of CoronaVirus is that our Testing is sooo much better than any other country in the World. Other countries are way behind us in Testing, and therefore show far fewer cases!," Trump tweeted.

There are no guarantees another president of either party would have done a better job in this time of testing than the unconventional Trump.But it's almost certain that he or she would have made a far greater show of mastering the details and would -- even for their own political protection if nothing else -- have done far more to prepare the country for the trial ahead.

Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.

The push is intertwined with Republicans’ extraordinary national drive to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, with legislative and legal attacks on early voting, absentee balloting and automatic voter registration laws.

The new legislation across the country would systematically remove the checks that stood in Mr. Trump’s way, injecting new political influence over electors, county election boards and the certification process. In doing so, the Republican effort places a few elected officials who refused to buy into the lies and falsehoods about the election in its cross hairs.

If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.“It will give the State Election Board the authority to replace a limited number, it appears, of county election superintendents, and that can be a very partisan tool in the wrong hands,” said David Worley

State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment. In a hearing on the bill this month, he defended the provisions, saying, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected, because we decide our own boards of elections and those of the counties we are elected from.”

A new law in Iowa restricting access to voting also targeted county election officials. In addition to barring them from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications, the bill introduced criminal charges for officials who fail to follow the new voting rules.

“We can be fined heavily now, removed from office,” said one of those officials, Travis Weipert, the Johnson County auditor. “And instead of just saying, ‘Don’t do it again,’ they brought the hammer down on us.”

One bill gives the Legislature the authority to approve the state election manual, an essential planning document that is drawn up every two years by the secretary of state. It had previously been approved by the governor and the attorney general.The effort has been roundly criticized by election officials in the state.

Republicans are also introducing measures to give them more electoral oversight in some states, like Michigan and New Jersey, that have Democratic governors who would most likely veto such bills.

It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said the state would open vaccinations to those 40 and older starting Monday, adding that a mask mandate would stay in place for at least another 30 days.

Alaska, Mississippi, Utah and West Virginia are the only states where all adults are now eligible to receive shots, but many more have announced plans to expand eligibility on or before May 1, a goal set by President Biden.

In Connecticut, which is among the most-vaccinated states in the country, Gov. Ned Lamont said Thursday that all residents 16 and above would be eligible beginning April 1.

State officials said they expected California to start receiving 2.5 million doses a week in the first part of April, and more than three million by the second half of the month, a major increase from the current pace of about 1.8 million doses a week.

The governor has repeatedly said that short and unpredictable supplies have been to blame for what has been criticized as a confusing and chaotic vaccination process that has left many poorer communities to lag behind.

Florida, more than most states, has emphasized age, rather than occupation or other risk factors, in its approach to vaccine eligibility.

The number of new virus cases reported in Florida has been hovering around 4,600 a day in recent weeks, a level that health officials say is still too high, even though it has fallen significantly from a peak earlier this year.

The state’s efforts to reopen its tourism industry has not been without problems. In Miami Beach, local officials have been overwhelmed with spring break revelers who have ignored safety precautions like mask wearing and social distancing.

Georgia State Patrol spokesman Lt. W. Mark Riley told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Cannon "was advised that she was disturbing what was going on inside and if she did not stop, she would be placed under arrest." Cannon's arrest warrant alleges that she "stomped" on an officer's foot three times as she was being apprehended and escorted out of the property, the AJC reported.

Several videos posted online show arresting officers were told repeatedly that Cannon is a state lawmaker.As she is being pulled away, Cannon identifies herself as a Georgia state lawmaker and demands to know why she is being arrested.

Other officers then arrive to block onlookers from interfering. They eventually bring a shouting Cannon backwards outside and into the back of a Georgia State Capitol patrol car.Cannon is 5 foot 2, according to her arrest record. Her arrest by several larger, white law enforcement officers and the image of her being brought through the Capitol prompted widespread condemnation on social media overnight. And her arrest prompted comparisons to civil rights and police brutality protests from this summer as well as those of the 1960s

Georgia's Constitution says lawmakers "shall be free from arrest during sessions of the General Assembly" except for treason, felony or breach of the peace.Cannon was charged and brought to a local jail. By 11 p.m. she had been released, according to her attorney Gerald A. Griggs, who spoke to a group of reporters and supporters outside the jail.

Griggs told the crowd that Cannon sustained bruising from her arrest. He was joined outside the jail by Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who visited Cannon in jail. He told the group that he is also Cannon's pastor.

The senator questioned what made Cannon's actions "so dangerous" that warranted her arrest.

Our society’s sickness may be particularly acute in Trump worship, but the affliction is more general. The stink of failure hangs over the liberal and cosmopolitan as well the populist and provincial, the “cuomosexual” parts of the media as well the conservative. And as we hopefully approach the end of this particular emergency, it’s not only Trump’s enablers but a much wider range of leaders and authorities who should feel shame at the stark and shocking number of the dead.