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Men and women, for the APA, are not intrinsically or naturally different: “When researchers strip away stereotypes and expectations, there isn’t much difference in the basic behaviors of men and women.” As you keep reading, you begin to realize just how saturated psychology has now become with critical gender theory, and its profound rejection of anything we might call “nature.”

Because biology has no influence on sex and gender at all, and testosterone is thereby irrelevant in understanding the psychological nature of men (it is never mentioned in the report), everything is a social construct, and social constructs — a function of patriarchy and white supremacy — can be changed. “If we can change men,” one psychologist tellingly admits, “we can change the world.” If this sounds more like a political project than a guide to therapy, you’re not wrong

What is TMI? The definition varies throughout the document

Here’s one such definition: “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” Just weigh that list for a minute — and how expansive it is. Men are exhibiting a dangerous ideology when they seek to “achieve” things, when they risk their lives or fortunes, when they explore unfamiliar territory — and these character traits are interchangeable with violence

As you read the guidelines, you realize that the APA believes that psychologists should be informing men that what they might think is their nature is actually just a set of social constructs that hurt them, murders thousands, and deeply wounds the society as a whole.

There are indeed issues that men today need a help with, and emotional repression is definitely part of it. Aspects of maleness — aggression without virtue, glorification of violence, difficulties with communication and collaboration — are worth understanding better if men are to grapple with an economic and social environment where they are increasingly being left behind.

When you think of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill and Barack, you see the same thing: They both have charisma and, yes, likability, that they deployed to get elected and reelected. That’s how Kennedy beat Nixon; it’s how Reagan defeated Carter. And this is not a gendered thing

When I think back to the modern Democrats who lost, they all have something in common. They regard their unlikability as a kind of achievement, proof that they can win on substance alone, that the media is obsessed with trivia, and that most people are dumb and easily bamboozled.

Congress is now considering amending the 1995 Congressional Accountability Act, the law governing how harassment cases are handled on Capitol Hill, after seven members have either resigned or said they would not seek reelection in the wake of sexual harassment allegations. Attorneys who handle these cases say most staffers take no action because they fear it could hurt their careers.

For nine months, Packer was Hastings’s policy adviser on the commission staff. Then he promoted her to a foreign post in Vienna. Her salary more than doubled, to $165,000 from $80,000, court records show.

In February 2010, Packer said she sought help from the office of Rep. Christopher H. Smith, (R-N.J.), who served with Hastings on the commission, and was referred to the Office of Compliance. The office was established by the Congressional Accountability Act as a place for legislative branch employees to file workplace claims, including sexual harassment allegations. Packer filed a formal complaint against Hastings on Aug. 9, 2010. Under the law, she had to agree to up to 30 days of confidential counseling to get advice on her rights and options for pursuing a complaint. Counselors in the Office of Compliance are forbidden under the law from advocating for the victim in sexual harassment cases, including making lawyer referrals.

Officials say they have worked to make the process easier for employees. “It is not required that the employee attend,” said Barbara Childs Wallace, chair of the Office of Compliance Board of Directors, at a congressional hearing in November. “It is not required that they sit in the same room with the person they are accusing, of sexual harassment, for instance.”

House Employment Counsel attorneys Ann Rogers and Russell Gore did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. Gloria Lett, the lead attorney in the Office of House Employment Counsel (OHEC), said she was bound by confidentiality and could not discuss the case.

By spring 2014, the discovery phase of the case was ramping up, meaning both sides would be forced to hand over emails and other documents that might be critical in the case. Key witnesses, including Hastings and Packer, would be required to testify under oath.

Given that he started in such a strong position with those blue-collar whites, even after that decline he still holds a formidable level of loyalty among them—particularly men and those over 50 years old.

What’s more, he has established a modest but durable beachhead among African American and Hispanic men, even while confronting overwhelming opposition from women in those demographic groups.

A massive new source of public-opinion research offers fresh insights into the fault lines emerging in Donald Trump’s foundation of support.

Mark Blumenthal, SurveyMonkey’s head of election polling, calculated Trump’s average approval rating over the last year among groups of voters segmented simultaneously by their race, gender, education level, and age.

That extra level of detail, not available in conventional polls because their samples are too small, offers a more precise picture of Trump’s coalition.

The SurveyMonkey results put Trump’s total approval rating for 2017 at 42 percent, with 56 percent disapproving. That’s slightly higher than, but within range of, other major public surveys.

In the 2016 election, exit polls found that Trump’s best group was whites without a four-year college degree; he carried 66 percent of them. But his approval among them in the 2017 SurveyMonkey average slipped to 56 percent. In 2016, whites with at least a four-year college degree gave Trump 48 percent of their votes. But in the 2017 average, just 40 percent approved of Trump’s performance, while a resounding 60 percent disapproved.

Iranians aren’t “finally” waking up and “getting wise,” as Trump suggests. Instead, Iran has a dynamic and active civil society, which has created and embraced opportunities for reformation and progress for decades. From active participation in elections to various reform and protest movements, Iranians have tried to make their voices heard.

But far from empowering the Iranian people, the Trump administration’s response to the protests serves to undermine their efforts. In 2009, upon request from the U.S. government, Twitter delayed a temporary shutdown to allow Iranians to use the platform for organization and communication. Today, the Trump administration should similarly work with social media platforms and media outlets to facilitate the flow of communication into and out of the country.

And if Washington is viewed as actively interfering in Iranian affairs, it’ll at best deter Iranians from joining the movement and making their voices heard, and will at worst help the hardliners, undermine the protesters, and facilitate the crackdown against them.  

The gold trade helped boost Turkey’s flagging export numbers at a moment when those numbers might have hurt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chances for reelection. Zarrab, who became fabulously wealthy by taking a percentage from every transaction (he later estimated his take at $150 million), even received a reward for his efforts from a Turkish trade association in 2015, with Erdogan applauding from the audience.

track record of identifying and exposing Iran’s malign activities.

In the end, the trial ran long. With the judge calling for the prosecution to wrap things up quickly, I managed to avoid taking the stand. Atilla testified in a last-ditch self-defense, and the jury began its deliberations on December 20.

All eyes are now on the United States government and whether it issues a fine against Halkbank, particularly now that it has proven in a court of law that the bank engaged in a massive, illegal financial scheme.

Fine or no fine, it’s hard to envision tranquil U.S.-Turkish relations going forward.

And now that Zarrab has finally clarified a few things about the Iranian role in his scheme, one troubling question lingers: Why did the U.S. government continue to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran in 2013 and 2014 while Treasury was warning Halkbank about enormous sanctions violations? We may never know. Then again, from the documents I viewed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see other sanctions busters come in the DOJ crosshairs—creating new and uncomfortable challenges for our existing alliances and diplomatic agreements. Perhaps other future indictments will tell us more.

His theatrical outbursts at committee hearings — “I want indictments!” he bellowed during one hearing into overspending — grabbed headlines. He spearheaded the effort to hold Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, and he claimed that the Obama administration’s refusal to cooperate with Congress was “proof” that President Barack Obama knew about the botched gun-running program “Fast and Furious.”

When I asked Wednesday about Gowdy, Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, was grudging: “We now live in a kind of alternate universe when individual Republicans get massive praise just for acknowledging the obvious and restating basic facts.”

In a recent CNN interview, Gowdy complained about the partisan atmosphere, saying “it really is just about winning” and criticizing Republicans whose objective was “not to do good for the country.” To Politico, he lamented that “there is more civility in a death penalty case than there is in some congressional hearings.

one core divide on the right: between those who see the social, cultural, and demographic changes of the last few decades as requiring an assault and reversal, and those who seek to reform its excesses, manage its unintended consequences, but otherwise live with it. Anton is a reactionary; I’m a conservative

there is a place where conservatives and reactionaries find common cause — and that is when the change occurring is drastic, ideological, imposed by an elite, and without any limiting principle.

On immigration, for example, has the demographic transformation of the U.S. been too swift, too revolutionary, and too indifferent to human nature and history?

Or is it simply a new, if challenging, turn in a long, American story of waves of immigrants creating a country that’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope?

If you answer “yes” to the first, you’re a reactionary. If “yes” to the second, you’re a liberal. If you say yes to both, you’re a conservative.

If you say it’s outrageous and racist even to consider these questions, you’re a card-carrying member of the left.

In a new essay, Anton explains his view of the world: “What happens when transformative efforts bump up against permanent and natural limits? Nature tends to bump back

But what are “permanent and natural limits” to transformation? Here are a couple: humanity’s deep-seated tribalism and the natural differences between men and women

— but you will never eradicate these deeper realities.

That kind of left-radicalism will generate an equal and opposite kind of right-reactionism. And that’s especially true if you define the resisters as bigots and deplorables, and refuse to ever see that they might have a smidgen of a point.

I’d say that by any reasonable standards in history or the contemporary world, America is a miracle of multiracial and multicultural harmony. There’s more to do and accomplish, but the standard should be what’s doable within the framework of human nature, not perfection

More to the point, the attempt to eradicate rather than ameliorate these things requires extraordinary intervention in people’s lives, empowers government way beyond its optimal boundaries, and generates intense backlash.

if you decide to change the ethnic composition of an entire country in just a few decades, you will get a backlash from the previous majority ethnicity; and if you insist that there are no differences between men and women, you are going to generate male and female resistance.

The left is correct that Americans are racist and sexist; but so are all humans

This is not to say that some of the resisters are not bigots, just that no human society has been without bigotry, and that many others who are resistant to drastic change are just uncomfortable, or nostalgic, or afraid, or lost

I’m a multicultural conservative. But when assaulted by the slur of “white supremacist” because I don’t buy Marcuse, my reactionism perks up. The smugness, self-righteousness, and dogmatism of the current left is a Miracle-Gro of reactionism.

Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.

Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked.

n the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump.

None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention,

Leftists have to decide at some point: Do they want to push more conservatives into Michael Anton’s reactionary camp or more reactionaries into the conservative one? And begin to ponder their own role in bringing this extreme reactionism into the mainstream.

That might all be true. But, of course, it also posits that Trump is entirely unfit to carry out his job and lacks the capacity to adhere to an oath that requires him to put the nation’s interests above his own

It would mean Republicans are keeping in power and urging the reelection of a dangerous, unfit and deeply damaged personality because they are afraid of him or afraid of his base, which has imbibed the lies perpetrated by right-wing media.

So which is it: Is Trump guilty or just unfit? Do vulnerable Republicans insist they have not heard a damning case or that abuse of power (verging on megalomania) is not impeachable?

But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?

These are the questions that have always preoccupied political theorists. But now they are not so theoretical.

As the current crisis shows, the primary fact that underpins political existence is that some people get to tell others what to do.

At the heart of all modern politics is a trade-off between personal liberty and collective choice. This is the Faustian bargain identified by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, when the country was being torn apart by a real civil war.

As Hobbes knew, to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and death over citizens. The only reason we would possibly give anyone that power is because we believe it is the price we pay for our collective safety. But it also means that we are entrusting life-and-death decisions to people we cannot ultimately control.

The primary risk is that those on the receiving end refuse to do what they are told. At that point, there are only two choices. Either people are forced to obey, using the coercive powers the state has at its disposal. Or politics breaks down altogether, which Hobbes argued was the outcome we should fear most of all.

Autocratic regimes such as China also find it hard to face up to crises until they have to – and, unlike democracies, they can suppress the bad news for longer if it suits them. But when action becomes unavoidable, they can go further. The Chinese lockdown succeeded in containing the disease through ruthless pre-emption.

The rawness of these choices is usually obscured by the democratic imperative to seek consensus. That has not gone away. The government is doing all it can to dress up its decisions in the language of commonsense advice.

But as the experience of other European countries shows, as the crisis deepens the stark realities become clearer

This crisis has revealed some other hard truths. National governments really matter, and it really matters which one you happen to find yourself under.

In a democracy, we have the luxury of waiting for the next election to punish political leaders for their mistakes. But that is scant consolation when matters of basic survival are at stake. Anyway, it’s not much of a punishment, relatively speaking. They might lose their jobs, though few politicians wind up destitute. We might lose our lives.

for now, we are at the mercy of our national leaders. That is something else Hobbes warned about: there is no avoiding the element of arbitrariness at the heart of all politics. It is the arbitrariness of individual political judgment.

Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices.

We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.

Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, and is being experienced similarly in many different places, the impact of the disease is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments.

Some democracies have managed to adapt faster: in South Korea the disease is being tamed by extensive tracing and widespread surveillance of possible carriers. But in that case, the regime had recent experience to draw on in its handling of the Mers outbreak of 2015, which also shaped the collective memory of its citizens

It is easier to adapt when you have adapted already. It is much harder when you are making it up as you go along

In recent years, it has sometimes appeared that global politics is simply a choice between rival forms of technocracy

In China, it is a government of engineers backed up by a one-party state. In the west, it is the rule of economists and central bankers, operating within the constraints of a democratic system

This creates the impression that the real choices are technical judgments about how to run vast, complex economic and social systems.

But in the last few weeks another reality has pushed through. The ultimate judgments are about how to use coercive power.

These aren’t simply technical questions. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. And the contest in the exercise of that power between democratic adaptability and autocratic ruthlessness will shape all of our futures.

our political world is still one Hobbes would recognise

Speaking from his home in Delaware, where aides built a basement television studio, Biden took pains not to overtly politicize the coronavirus spread. He even said he would welcome a strong approval rating for Trump, if it pushed the White House to provide needed assistance to cities and states.

His aides have rushed to adapt to the rapidly-changing environment, installing the television studio, launching a podcast and increasing his visibility -- all from his Delaware basement as he, like much of America, is working from home.

"People see 2016 as this crazy fluke, which it was in many ways," Mook said. "But that's missing the bigger point that Trump has a way of owning what we're talking about and grinding in a set of doubts about his opponent. He projects his greatest weaknesses on his opponent -- and I see that happening again."

The events of the coming weeks could shape the race for months to come, several Democratic strategists say, arguing the party cannot afford to cede this moment to Trump or allow Republicans to derisively define Biden while he is striving to put the crisis above politics.

"This is why it's so difficult to beat an incumbent president. Never underestimate the reach, the power and the strength of a Rose Garden strategy," said Rhoades, who also worked on President George W. Bush's reelection campaign in 2004. "I'd rather own the problem and be in charge and take action to fix it than be the person on the sidelines screaming fire."

A campaign once thought to be waged over the future of health care, economic fairness and America's place in the world is now revolving around something else: The administration's response to coronavirus and the economic collapse. How the nation recovers by November will be a key metric for voters.

While presidential campaigns often do not end on the same issues in which they began -- in 2008, for example, a campaign driven by opposition to the Iraq war ended on the economic crash -- it's almost certain the coronavirus outbreak will be a central issue in the 2020 race.

One of the biggest unknown factors, he said, is whether traditional campaigning will resume by summer or fall or if the candidates will turn to alternatives. A century ago, a handful of presidents relied on "front-porch campaigns," where they declined to do big rallies and won by simply staying close to the White House.

For now, the campaign is not playing out in critical battleground states across the country, but rather with Trump at his post in the White House briefing room and Biden settling into his television studio in the basement of his home, about 120 miles away in Delaware.

The lack of enthusiasm for Cuomo nationally was reinforced by how lukewarm his support was in his home state. When matched up against other political figures from New York early in 2019, just 17% said Cuomo would make the best president in a Quinnipiac University poll.

Cuomo's 2018 reelection performance was not what I would categorize as strong.

this is New York state in a very good year for Democrats nationwide.

Sometimes, though, the traits that make others perceive you as a bad leader in one context can make you be seen as a strong one in another context. One of the biggest negative adjectives normally prescribed to Cuomo is that he is "heavy-handed." That's exactly the leadership style that can work very well during a crisis.

The progressive Working Families Party endorsed his rival Cynthia Nixon of "Sex and the City" fame. Cuomo won that primary by a little over 30 points, though pre-election polling indicated that he likely lost among self-identified very liberal Democrats.

The 2018 election also marked the second time in a row where he faced a primary challenge from the left.

Giuliani's reaction to the 9/11 attacks made him a hero to many, as Cuomo's actions regarding the coronavirus pandemic has made him one to many. Of course, Giuliani wasn't ultimately able to transfer that popularity into winning higher office;

His 2008 presidential bid floundered

What happens eventually with Cuomo's political future is anyone's guess. For now, Cuomo is getting more plaudits than he has in a long time.

But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.

Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration

“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.”

The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in volume toward the end of January and into early February, said officials familiar with the reports. By then, a majority of the intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who have read the reports.

The surge in warnings coincided with a move by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) to sell dozens of stocks worth between $628,033 and $1.72 million.

A key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis

At the State Department, personnel had been nervously tracking early reports about the virus. One official noted that it was discussed at a meeting in the third week of January, around the time that cable traffic showed that U.S. diplomats in Wuhan were being brought home on chartered planes — a sign that the public health risk was significant

Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president.

Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market

On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus

Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argued that the administration needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost the president his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.

Trump was dismissive because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.

By early February, Grogan and others worried that there weren’t enough tests to determine the rate of infection, according to people who spoke directly to Grogan

But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other countries.“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.”

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted five days later. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

But earlier that month, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services delivered a starkly different message to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a classified briefing that four U.S. officials said covered the coronavirus and its global health implications. The House Intelligence Committee received a similar briefing.

Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response — who was joined by intelligence officials, including from the CIA — told committee members that the virus posed a “serious” threat, one of those officials said.

he said that to get ahead of the virus and blunt its effects, Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives, the official said. “It was very alarming.”

Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China, despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.

Some of Trump’s advisers told him that Beijing was not providing accurate numbers

Rather than press China to be more forthcoming, Trump publicly praised its response.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

Trump on Feb. 3 banned foreigners who had been in China in the previous 14 days from entering the United States, a step he often credits for helping to protect Americans against the virus. He has also said publicly that the Chinese weren’t honest about the effects of the virus. But that travel ban wasn’t accompanied by additional significant steps to prepare

As the first cases of infection were confirmed in the United States, Trump continued to insist that the risk to Americans was small.“I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine,” he said on Feb. 10

That observation applies to a lot of issues that are authentically important. The integrity of democracy matters. Enforcing the law against power holders matters. Defeating corruption matters.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden speak to Americans for whom the fat-envelope/thin-envelope decision means little, if it means anything at all. It’s not accident or name recognition that explains why they lead the field. They are both being carried by something big and real. The challenge for the person who will succeed in beating Trump in 2020 is not merely to ride that force, but to guide it.

If the Oval Office is to be cleansed of Donald Trump, it will not suffice to defeat Sanders’s candidacy. The ultimate winner will have to plagiarize from his campaign, copying not Sanders’s literal ideas, but his themes: the practical over the theoretical, the universal over the particular.

He has delivered lavish benefits to rich cronies, while breaking faith on his promise to build new roads, bridges, and airports.Now Trump seems to be plotting cuts to Medicare and Social Security if reelected.  Those are the points of vulnerability. Listing them is easy. Pressing them is hard—because to press them successfully, candidates must first establish an emotional connection with the voters they hope to sway

But it’s easier to concentrate on those issues when you have good health insurance and a job that provides a stable middle-class livelihood—including the possibility of a college education for your children. And too many Americans lack those things.

The same CNN poll that showed Sanders tied with Biden among Democrats showed that Biden still leads Sanders 45–24 on electability. That seems a shrewd intuition.

Possibly the CNN poll is an outlier. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday found Biden holding steady, with a narrow lead over a surging Sanders, largely due to his 51–15 percent lead among black voters

And when they make mistakes, as they will, who is most likely to recognize an error, admit it and move to fix things rather than wasting time trying to shift the blame?

Who can rapidly take in a lot of information on an unfamiliar subject, cope with the many uncertainties and deliver a final decision that’s likely to be right? Not certainly, because no one is ever right all the time, but most likely?

Which candidate do you think can allow expert civil servants to do their jobs, without unnecessary micro-management or political interference — but can also set priorities, quickly resolve the inevitable turf battles and communication lapses, and clear away obstacles?

Can the candidate focus the policy response on empirical data and pragmatic action, rather than looking for the solutions that best please the base or fit ideological priorities?

Finally, can they lead? When they go on television to reassure America, will most Americans feel comforted?

Whatever your answer to those questions, don’t focus on health policies. The next president is bound to face some major crisis during a term or two in office, but it’s unlikely to be a health crisis

instead of focusing on detailed policies that will probably be overtaken by events, think about who can be flexible enough to deal with novel problems, yet rigid enough to keep an administration full of ambitious zealots, plus a bureaucracy full of turf-protective civil servants, all moving in roughly the same direction.

before you vote, it would be a good idea to close your eyes and picture the candidate you’re supporting thrust onto the front lines of an epidemic, or a really bad earthquake, or a massive terrorist attack. Be honest with yourself, because you’ll never have to defend your answer to anyone else: Would they actually do what needs to be done?

The answer to that question probably matters more than to any other you could ask.

Plagues destroy so much — but through the devastation, they can also rebuild and renew.

I suspect that those who think COVID-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s reelection prospects are being, as usual, too optimistic. National crises, even when handled at this level of incompetence and deceit, can, over time, galvanize public support for a national leader. As Trump instinctually finds a way to identify the virus as “foreign,” he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses, and in a time of fear, offer the balm of certainty to his cult and beyond. It’s the final bonding: blind support for the leader even at the risk of your own sickness and death.

in emergencies, quibbling, persistent political opposition is always on the defense, and often unpopular. It requires pointing out bad news in desperate times; and that, though essential, is rarely popular.

the huge sums now being proposed by even the GOP to shore up the economy and the stock market at a time of massive debt, as well as the stark failures of our public-health planning, could make an activist government agenda much more politically palatable to Americans. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,”

if a public-health catastrophe doesn’t bring home the need for effective universal health care, what could?

This virus is also an opportunity for the left to move away from its unpopular woke identity obsessions toward a case for structural economic change fitting for the scale of the epidemic

Maybe our comparative loneliness saved us some lives this time, and this plague’s “social distancing” will permanently and tragically entrench an American way of life that has already stripped so many of community and connection

in this sudden stop, we will also hear the sounds of nature — as our economic machine pauses for a moment and the contest for status or fame or money is canceled for just a while. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Pascal said

I learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus.

The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what you can’t.

the World Health Organization is now warning that a major acceleration could turn the United States into the next coronavirus global epicenter.

What Trump is really proposing here — and what Patrick is justifying — is a further washing-of-hands of responsibility for this whole affair.

the current Trump/Patrick line is that we should risk millions more dying, even though we’d only be guessing that relaxing social distancing would help the economy, when in fact the mounting deaths would take their own economic toll.

the very indeterminate nature of this guesswork — by Patrick and Trump alike — is what captures an essential truth about Trump’s handling of this whole disaster.

Trump plainly wants to ward off the coming economic downturn — no matter the cost — because he fears for his reelection

We don’t have to choose between unbearably high mass death totals and an economic collapse that dooms the American experiment. The government can send people money in sufficient sums and fortify the welfare state to save them from personal economic calamity, while bailing out small and large businesses with tight conditions that sagely protect taxpayers and working people.

That directive becomes exponentially more irresponsible and dangerous, because Trump is advocating a course of action that will result in many more cases while also refusing to do everything possible to marshal the needed supplies for dealing with that coming tidal wave.

“A crisis allows them to mobilize the country in ways that ordinary times do not. It’s not like a crisis allows you to become a great leader, but it offers the chance. It also offers the chance for great difficulty.”

Trump now concedes that a recession may hit. But even his former advisers offer a more ominous forecast. Kevin Hassett, who chaired Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, told CNN on Monday that the chances of a global recession are “close to 100 percent.” Next month, the U.S. economy could show a loss of 1 million jobs, he said

We are in a recession right now,” Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign adviser whom the president had (controversially) considered for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, told me. “The economy is at a complete standstill right now. This changes everything politically and economically.”

For now, Trump has bigger problems than reelection. A rich irony underlies his challenge. The disease’s trajectory hinges, in part, on the competence of the same state leaders with whom Trump has tussled. He needs Cuomo, Inslee, and California Governor Gavin Newsom to delive