Trump Wants a Backlash. Can He Whip One Into Shape?

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES

The public response to the demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd is now beginning to take shape more clearly along familiar ideological lines. 

he New York Times-Siena College poll of 1,337 registered voters conducted June 17-22, for example, found that among Democrats, 89 percent had a favorable opinion of Black Lives Matter, including 74 percent whose views were “strongly favorable.”

In contrast, 36 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Black Lives Matter, with 12 percent strongly favorable. Fully half of Republicans hold an unfavorable view of the movement, compared with 8 percent of Democrats.

When voters were asked by the NYT-Siena pollsters to choose between two statements about the George Floyd protests — either “I support the demonstrations because they’re mainly peaceful protests with an important message” or “I oppose the demonstrations because too many have turned to violent rioting” — Democrats supported the protests 82-15, while Republicans opposed them, 68-25.

 

What these numbers tell us is that the demonstrations, and the electorate’s reaction to them, will play a key role in the 2020 election.

In a June 12 survey, Pew Research reported that “Republicans and Democrats have vastly different views on the factors underlying the protests”: 80 percent of Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party say that “anger over Floyd’s death after his arrest by police and tensions between Black people and the police have each contributed a great deal to the protests.”

At the same time, “much smaller majorities (59 percent) of Republicans and Republican leaners say anger over Floyd’s death contributed a great deal” and that “tensions between police and Black people (57 percent) contributed a great deal” to the protests.

An even wider gap emerged in partisan responses to a question asking whether “longstanding concerns about the treatment of Black people in the country” contributed a great deal to the protests. 84 percent of Democrats agreed compared with 45 percent of Republicans.”

Republicans also took a far more negative view of the motivation of the many large groups of diverse protesters. 82 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “some people taking advantage of the situation in order to engage in criminal behavior” was a major factor in the protests, more than double the 39 percent of Democrats who agreed.

There is a range of perspectives among scholars over who the protesters are, especially the white participants.

Joel Kotkin of Chapman University and the author of “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism,” and Michael Lind of the University of Texas and the author of “The New Class War,” take divergent positions.

In an article posted on June 10, “The Rebellion of America’s New Underclass,” Kotkin wrote:

The underlying causes of our growing civic breakdown go beyond the brutal police killing of George Floyd. Particularly in our core cities, our dysfunction is a result of our increasingly large, and increasingly multiracial, class of neo-serfs.

Kotkin elaborates: “Today’s serf class consists of the permanently marginalized — like the peasants of feudal times, these people are unlikely to move to a higher station,” and this class encompasses

many of our young people, white and otherwise, who appear to have little or no hope of attaining the usual milestones of entry into the middle class — gaining a useful and marketable skill, starting a small business, or buying a home or other property.

In a June 2 essay, published on the Tablet website, Lind sketches out another group of protesters he sees as a key component of the new metropolitan left:

The children of the white urban elite — some of them downwardly mobile for life, some of them just going through the underpaid intern phase of professional careers — have colonized rowhouses where workers once lived and have converted former factories and warehouses into settings for la vie bohème.

Lind continues:

This group of 20- and 30-somethings in the new urban bohemia are the constituency for the new progressive left. Children of the managerial overclass join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and engage in purges and cancellations on Twitter and move to Brooklyn on allowances from their parents.

Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has been conducting detailed surveys of the demonstrators, presented a more nuanced view of the protesters in an email:

First and foremost, protest participants are highly educated. Over 62 percent reported a B.A. or higher at every protest where we surveyed,” although she acknowledges that they “may be feeling economic anxiety since they tend to be entering adulthood during the current economic crisis — the median age of protesters is 30 or younger depending on the day and location.

According to her surveys, conducted by interviewing every fifth person encountered at demonstrations, “more than 60 percent reported voting in primaries earlier this year, double the average for all voters, and many report contacting an elected official in the past year,” a strong signal of political engagement.

Fisher’s data from three days of polling in the District of Columbia showed that 52.9 percent of the protesters were white; 25 percent were Black; just over 10 percent were Asian-American and just under 4 percent were Hispanic. A quarter were 24 or younger.

 In an article posted June 28 at Business Insider, Fisher wrote that in studying the demonstrators:

Every single person surveyed at events in Washington DC, New York City, and Los Angeles over the past month reported that they would be supporting Joe Biden in the election. In fact, not one respondent reported that they would vote for Donald Trump.

There are some red flags for Democrats in Fisher’s data.

Fisher wrote that 60 to 65 percent of the demonstrators agreed with the statement “some level of violence is justified in the pursuit of political goals.” 

“These numbers are in stark contrast to data collected at the March for Racial Justice in 2017,” when just 40 percent agreed some level of violence is justified, she wrote, “suggesting that in less than three years, the people who participate in protests about racial justice in the US have changed their opinions substantially.”

 The views of protesters concerning the legitimacy of violence stand in contrast to the views of voters taken as a whole.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 72 percent of those polled disagreed with the statement “more violent protests and unrest are an appropriate response to the killing of an unarmed man by police,” including a solid majority of Democrats.

An even larger percentage (79), including 77 percent of Democrats, agreed with the statement: “The property damage caused by some protesters undermines the original protest’s case for justice.”

The Times/Siena survey asked voters whether they support or oppose “reducing funding to police departments,” a less extreme step than the call among some demonstrators to “defund the police.”

Nearly two thirds of voters polled, 63 percent, opposed reduction of funding of police departments, including 50 percent who said they “strongly oppose” such actions.

What makes these issues even more potentially polarizing, going into the 2020 election, is that there has been an increase in violent crime, especially homicide and shooting incidents, in the weeks since George Floyd was killed, in some of the cities experiencing sustained protests and anti-police demonstrations. These cities include Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York and Chicago.

Donald Trump is already running ads online and on TV attempting to capitalize on these trends. One spot shows looters and burning buildings while the words “Joe Biden fails to stand up to the radical left” appear on the screen. Another Trump ad that ran on Facebook warned: “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem.”

 Trump’s Twitter feed, in turn, continues to serve as a weapon in his drive to demonize Democrats and the left, Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post noted on June 30:

As the country convulses from incidents of police killings, mass protests and a rapidly spreading pandemic that has led to double-digit unemployment, the president seems most intent on inflaming an already burning culture war, using his Twitter feed to focus on vandalism by protesters and the well-being of statues that have been targeted.

Given the degree of voter polarization — especially in the context of a surging coronavirus and jarring economic upheaval — the outcome of the 2020 election is likely to be determined by factors other than money, perhaps most importantly by the success or failure of the George Floyd demonstrators in retaining unforeseen levels of public sympathy.

So far, Trump’s attempt to focus public attention on the looting, burning and sometimes indiscriminate toppling of statues has been outdone by the emergence of an ever longer list of African-American victims of police brutality, by new videos of police violence, much of it collected by T. Greg Doucette, a lawyer in North Carolina, and by the filing of murder charges on June 17 against an Atlanta police officer in the shooting death of Rayshard Brooks.

For the moment, the electorate appears to be less racist than it was in 2016, and notably less comfortable with racism.

Nonetheless, Henry Louis Gates Jr, a university professor at Harvard and the director of the Hutchins Center for African & African-American Research there, warned in an interview that

Racism has been part of America’s cultural DNA since before the ink dried on the Constitution. Dominant in some and recessive in others, it’s a gene that has mutated over time yet remains part of the inheritance weighing us down, one generation to the next. The damage it has done is systemic and goes all the way down to the cellular level.

Traditionally, it has been the Democratic Party that was most vulnerable to fracture over race, racism, crime and family dysfunction. But this year, as my Times colleague Adam Nagourney pointed out on June 29 in “Trump’s Self-Inflicted Wound: Losing Swing Voters As He Plays to His Base,” the susceptibility to division is also a Republican problem: “Mr. Trump’s focus on his base at the expense of swing voters,” Nagourney wrote, “is almost certainly not enough to win him a second term.”

The key group, Nagourney continued, is the nine percent of the electorate identified in the Times/Siena poll as undecided, but these voters may be out of reach:

They, like much of the country, hold unfavorable views of Mr. Trump’s job performance, and particularly his response to the pandemic and to the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police.

Across the country, significant support has emerged for broad efforts to combat police brutality and racism, but that support is not monolithic. The current tilt in favor of the demonstrators is likely to face concerted, ugly pushback from Trump and his minions — and there are four long months to go before the election.

As coronavirus rebounds, more patients are being hospitalized and capacity is stretched

U.S. Coronavirus Cases Are Rising Sharply, and Deaths Are Slowly Rising.

WASHINGTON POST

Patients suffering from covid-19 are rapidly filling hospitals across the South and West, with Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Nevada and Arizona setting records for hospitalizations Thursday, a sign that the coronavirus pandemic is entering a dangerous new phase.
The coronavirus continued its recent surge across swaths of the United States, with more than 55,000 new cases reported Thursday, eclipsing the record for the largest single-day total that was set Wednesday. Reports of new cases have increased 90 percent in the United States in the last two weeks. 

Deaths, which had declined steadily for several months, also are rising. States reported that 700 people died Thursday of covid-19 — an increase of more than 25 percent compared to the previous seven-day average.

“There’s a lag between confirmed case and hospitalization, and between hospitalization and death. So you look at the numbers and you can see how hospital capacity could quickly become strained in coming weeks,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona.
As hospitals have become overwhelmed, deaths have risen — not just among covid-19 patients who get insufficient care, but among those facing other medical crises who don’t seek care from an overwhelmed system because they think they won’t receive it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that since Feb. 1, about 20,000 to 49,000 more people have died of all non-covid-19 causes than would have been expected.  In Arizona, if hospitalizations push past capacity, patients will be given a score based on life expectancy and underlying conditions.

In Arizona, where the virus appears to be spreading out of control, hospitals rushed to expand capacity and adopted practices similar to those employed at the height of the outbreak in New York City and Italy, including doubling up hospital beds in rooms, pausing elective surgeries and bringing in health-care workers from other states.

Perhaps most chillingly, at the urging of doctors and advisers, state officials this week activated “crisis standards of care” protocols, which determine for hospitals which patients get ventilators and care as the system becomes overwhelmed under the crush of patients.

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A stronger than expected jobs report indicated the June unemployment rate went down to 11.1 percent, from a high of 14.7 percent at the height of the coronavirus shutdowns in April. Whether the unemployment rate continues to decrease is uncertain as numerous states are moving to slow the reopening of their economies or shut down bars and other businesses in a desperate attempt to bring the outbreak under control. Also new data released by the Labor Department showed that 1.4 million people filed unemployment claims for the first time last week, marking the 15th straight week of claims that exceeded 1 million.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, said during a YouTube live stream. that while some countries in Europe locked down around 97 percent of activity to control the virus, even the strictest U.S. restrictions only shut down about 50 percent.

“That allowed the perpetuation of the outbreak that we never did get under very good control,” he said. The United States has been hit worse than any other country in terms of case numbers and deaths, he noted.

Diners at a restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week. The state, which reopened quickly and widely, has sent mixed messages on everything from the use of masks to enforcement of social distancing rules. Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

In few places is that more evident than in Arizona, where bars were packed before some restrictions went back into effect and where Trump held a crowded indoor political rally last week where very few people wore protective masks. Until recent days, cities and counties were forbidden from passing local ordinances requiring masks. After insisting for weeks that hospitals had adequate capacity, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) said for the first time last week that hospitals could reach surge capacity “very soon.”

Banner Health — the largest health-care delivery system in Arizona, with 17 hospitals across the state — said Thursday it is exploring “all options” to increase beds, including repurposing pediatric beds and using spaces in their hospitals not usually used for care.

Other hospital systems said they are enacting similar surge plans. And state leaders are now preparing to reopen a shuttered Phoenix hospital — St. Luke’s Medical Center — as a field hospital.

Brazil tops 1.5 million total infections, just two weeks after reaching a million.

Brazil, which has more coronavirus cases than any country but the United States,  topped 1.5 million total infections on Friday,  just two weeks after reaching a million cases, according to a New York Times database.

But even as the country passed that grim milestone, President Jair Bolsonaro vetoed a measure that would have provided masks to vulnerable groups and required businesses to provide masks to their employees, according to The Associated Press.

Since mid-June, some major cities in Brazil have eased preventive measures. Shopping malls have already reopened in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Beaches are starting to draw crowds again. And Rio allowed gyms and bars to reopen at 50 percent capacity on Thursday, while some hospital systems were close to running out of intensive care beds.

James Baldwin Was Right All Along

The writer and activist has the painful, powerful words for this political moment. America just needs to heed them.

ATLANTIC, RAOUL PECK

Daily Cases in the U.S. Soar Past 55,000 for the First Time. UPDATES

The country set a record for the sixth time in nine days. The Supreme Court granted Alabama’s request to restore voting restrictions during the pandemic. Mike Pence changed his travel plans in Arizona after Secret Service agents set to accompany him tested positive for the virus.

As Florida reported on Thursday more than 10,100 new cases, breaking another single-day record, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez said that he was imposing a countywide curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., starting Friday and until further notice.
Miami-Dade and Broward counties had already announced they were closing beaches for the busy Fourth of July weekend.

NY TIMES

By a 5-to-4 vote, the Supreme Court on Thursday blocked a trial judge’s order that would have made it easier for voters in three Alabama counties to use absentee ballots in this month’s primary runoff election.

In March, Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, postponed the election because of the pandemic. At the same time, the Republican official who oversees the state’s elections, John H. Merrill, Alabama’s secretary of state, expanded the availability of absentee ballots to all voters who concluded that it was “impossible or unreasonable to vote at their voting place.”

But Mr. Merrill did not relax two of the usual requirements for absentee voting: submission of a copy of a photo ID with a voter’s application for a ballot and submission of an affidavit signed by a notary public, or two adult witnesses, with the ballot itself.

Four voters and several groups sued to challenge those restrictions, saying that, in light of the health crisis, they placed an unlawful burden on the right to vote. Making a copy of a piece of identification, for instance, may be difficult and dangerous during the pandemic, they said.

 

Officials in Alabama, which has more than 40,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 1,000 deaths, have dismissed that concern.

In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, state officials said an order by an Alabama judge — which, among other things, blocked election officials in two counties from enforcing the ID requirement for voters who are disabled or 65 or older — had come too close to the election and threatened its integrity.

In their brief, the state officials discussed ways in which voters could safely comply with the witness requirement.

In response, lawyers for the voters said the state had offered no good reasons “to justify the application of the witness or photo ID requirements to high-risk voters in the middle of a pandemic.”

The mayor and the governor sow confusion about reopening New York City’s schools.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that New York City schools would open in some form come September — only for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to describe the mayor’s announcement as “premature.”

The lack of coherent communication from the state and the city about the nation’s largest school system sowed further confusion among public school parents eager for clarity about the coming school year. Some private schools are also are likely to follow the public school path.

The mayor said that students and teachers would be required to wear masks, that schools would get daily deep cleanings, and that each school would welcome the maximum daily number of students possible, given social distancing and other health requirements.

He cited a recent survey of public school parents finding that 75 percent of them want their children to return to class this year. The survey got 400,000 responses.

On Thursday, the schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, met with principals to discuss plans for reopening. The schools will be able to reopen only with buy-in from unionized teachers and staff members.

Here’s What Recovery From Covid-19 Looks Like for Many Survivors

Continuing shortness of breath, muscle weakness, flashbacks, mental fogginess and other symptoms may plague patients for a long time.

Hundreds of thousands of seriously ill coronavirus patients who survive and leave the hospital are facing a new and difficult challenge: recovery. Many are struggling to overcome a range of troubling residual symptoms, and some problems may persist for months, years or even the rest of their lives.

Patients who are returning home after being hospitalized for severe respiratory failure from the virus are confronting physical, neurological, cognitive and emotional issues.

And they must navigate their recovery process as the pandemic continues, with all of the stresses and stretched resources that it has brought.

“It’s not just, ‘Oh, I had a terrible time in hospital, but thank goodness I’m home and everything’s back to normal,’” said Dr. David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. “It’s, ‘I just had a terrible time in hospital and guess what? The world is still burning. I need to address that while also trying to sort of catch up to what my old life used to be.’”

 

It is still too early to say how recovery will play out for these patients. But here is a look at what they are experiencing so far, what we can learn from former patients with similar medical experiences, and the challenges that most likely lie ahead.

There are many. Patients may leave the hospital with scarring, damage or inflammation that still needs to heal in the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver or other organs. This can cause a range of problems, including urinary and metabolism issues.

Dr. Zijian Chen, the medical director of the new Center for Post-Covid Care at Mount Sinai Health System, said the biggest physical problem the center was seeing was shortness of breath,

Some have an intermittent cough that doesn’t go away that makes it hard for them to breathe,” he said. Some are even on nasal oxygen at home, but it is not helping them enough.

Some patients who were on ventilators report difficulty swallowing or speaking above a whisper, a usually temporary result of bruising or inflammation from a breathing tube that passes through the vocal cords

Many patients experience muscle weakness after lying in a hospital bed for so long, said Dr. Dale Needham, a critical care physician at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a leader in the field of intensive care recovery. As a result, they can have trouble walking, climbing stairs or lifting objects.

Dr. Chen said that Mount Sinai’s post-Covid center has referred nearly 40 percent of patients to neurologists for issues like fatigue, confusion and mental fogginess.

“Some of it is very debilitating,” he said. “We have patients who come in and tell us: ‘I can’t concentrate on work. I’ve recovered, I don’t have any breathing problems, I don’t have chest pain, but I can’t get back to work because I can’t concentrate.’” said Dr. Lauren Ferrante, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Yale School of Medicine

“It’s really common for patients to have PTSD after going through this — nightmares, depression and anxiety because they’re having flashbacks and remembering what happened,” 

What makes someone more likely to face recovery challenges?

Studies of people hospitalized for respiratory failure from other causes suggest recovery is more likely to be harder for people who were frail beforehand and for people who needed longer hospitalizations, Dr. Ferrante said.

But many other coronavirus patients — not just those who are older or who have other medical conditions — are spending weeks on ventilators and weeks more in the hospital after their breathing tubes are removed, making their recovery hills steeper to climb.

Another factor that can extend or hamper recovery is a phenomenon called hospital delirium, a condition that can involve paranoid hallucinations and anxious confusion. It is more likely to occur in patients who undergo prolonged sedation, have limited social interaction and are unable to move around — all common among Covid-19 patients.

Studies, including one by a team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, have found that I.C.U. patients who experience hospital delirium are more likely to have cognitive impairment in the months after they leave the hospital.

Ups and downs are common. “It’s absolutely not a linear process, and it’s very individualized,” Dr. Needham said.

Perseverance is important. “What we don’t want is for patients to go home and lie in bed all day,” Dr. Ferrante said. “That will not help with recovery and will probably make things worse.”

 

Patients and their families should realize that fluctuations in progress are normal.

“There are going to be days where everything’s going right with your lungs, but your joints are feeling so achy that you can’t get up and do your pulmonary rehab and you have a few setbacks,” Dr. Putrino said. “Or your pulmonary care is going OK, but your cognitive fog is causing you to have anxiety and causing you to spiral, so you need to drop everything and work with your neuropsychologist intensively.”

Research led by Dr. Needham of Johns Hopkins found that “patients have prolonged muscle weakness that lasts months or longer and that muscle weakness is not just limited to their arms and legs — it’s also their breathing muscles,” he said.

Another study by Dr. Needham and his colleagues found that about two-thirds of ARDS patients had significant fatigue a year later.

Psychological and cognitive symptoms can also linger. About half of the patients in the 2011 Canadian study reported at least one episode of “physician-diagnosed depression, anxiety, or both between two and five years of follow-up.” And a study of patients treated in the 2003 outbreak of SARS, another type of coronavirus, found that a year later many had “worrying levels of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic symptoms.”

What are the consequences?

Among other things, patients may have trouble going back to their jobs. A team led by Dr. Needham found that nearly one-third of 64 ARDS patients they followed for five years never returned to work.

Medication may not be necessary, or may not work, for many issues. Practicing breathing exercises and using a spirometer, a device that measures how much air a person can breathe and how quickly, can improve respiratory issues. Physical therapy can help restore muscle strength, movement and flexibility. Occupational therapy can help people regain the ability to do everyday tasks, like grocery shopping and cooking. Speech therapy can help with swallowing and vocal cord issues.

The Russian President (NOT) Putin: Unread Intelligence and Missing Strategy

High-level clearance is not required to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War. 

NY TIMES

The intelligence finding that Russia was most likely paying a bounty for the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan has evoked a strange silence from President Trump and his top national security officials on the question of what to do about the Kremlin’s wave of aggression.

Mr. Trump insists he never saw the intelligence, though it was part of the President’s Daily Brief just days before a peace deal was signed with the Taliban in February.

The White House says it was not even appropriate for him to be briefed because the president only sees “verified” intelligence — prompting derision from officials who have spent years working on the daily brief and say it is most valuable when filled with dissenting interpretations and alternative explanations.

The administration’s defenses took a new turn on Wednesday, when the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Fox News that the C.I.A. officer who delivered in-person intelligence summaries to the president had not flagged it for his attention.

But it doesn’t require a top-secret clearance and access to the government’s most classified information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War.

There have been new cyberattacks on Americans working from home to exploit vulnerabilities in their corporate systems and continued concern about new playbooks for Russian actors seeking to influence the November election. Off the coast of Alaska, Russian jets have been testing American air defenses, sending U.S. warplanes scrambling to intercept them.

Yet missing from all this is a strategy for pushing back — old-fashioned deterrence, to pluck a phrase from the depths of the Cold War — that could be employed from Afghanistan to Ukraine, from the deserts of Libya to the vulnerable voter registration rolls in battleground states.

Trump “repeatedly objected to criticizing Russia and pressed us not to be so critical of Russia publicly,” his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, notes in his recent memoir. A parade of other former national security aides have emerged, bruised, with similar reports.

Yet the nature of intelligence — always incomplete and not always definitive — gives Mr. Trump an opening to dismiss anything that challenges his worldview.

“By definition, intelligence means looking at pieces of a puzzle,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, who retired this year as the general counsel of the National Security Agency, before the Russian bounty issue was front and center. “It’s not unusual to have inconsistencies. And the President’s Daily Brief, not infrequently, would say that there is no unanimity in the intelligence community, and would explain the dissenting views or the lack of corroboration.”

That absence of clarity has not slowed Mr. Trump when it comes to placing new sanctions on China and Iran, who pose very different kinds of challenges to American power.

Yet the president made no apparent effort to sort through evidence on Russia, even before his most recent call with President Vladimir V. Putin, when he invited the Russian leader to a Group of 7 meeting planned for September in Washington. Russia has been banned from the group since the Crimea invasion, and Mr. Trump was essentially restoring it to the G8 over the objection of many of America’s closest allies.

Said Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who managed the impeachment trial against Mr. Trump. “This is something you ought to know if you’re inviting Russia back into the G8.”

And in this case, there was another element: concern inside the White House about any intelligence findings that might interfere with the administration’s announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban.

After months of broken-off negotiations, Mr. Trump was intent on announcing the accord in February, as a prelude to declaring that he was getting Americans out of Afghanistan. As one senior official described it, the evidence about Russia could have threatened that deal because it suggested that after 18 years of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.

The warning to Mr. Trump appeared in the president’s briefing book — which Mr. Bolton said almost always went unread — in late February. On Feb. 28, the president issued a statement that a signing ceremony for the Afghan deal was imminent.

Russia’s complicity in the bounty plot came into sharper focus on Tuesday as The New York Times reported that American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, according to officials familiar with the intelligence.

The United States has accused Russia of providing general support to the Taliban before. But the newly revealed information about financial transfers bolstered other evidence of the plot, including detainee interrogations, and helped reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees.

Lawmakers on Tuesday emerged from closed briefings on the matter to challenge why Mr. Trump and his advisers failed to recognize the seriousness of the intelligence assessment.

“I am concerned that they did not pursue it as aggressively or comprehensively as perhaps they should have,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee. “There was clearly evidence that the Russians were paying the bounties.”

The oddity, of course, is that despite Mr. Trump’s deference to the Russians, relations between Moscow and Washington under the Trump administration have nose-dived.

That was clear in the stiff sentence handed down recently in Moscow against Paul N. Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, after his conviction on espionage charges in what the U.S. ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, called a “mockery of justice.”

Even Russian state television now regularly mocks Mr. Trump as a buffoon, very different from its gushing tone during the 2016 presidential election.

Coronavirus Live Updates: U.S. Sets New Single-Day Case Record

US reports daily case record of 52,000 after Trump says Covid-19 will 'disappear.' The fifth single-day case record in eight days.

Dire figures follow Anthony Fauci’s warning that the US is ‘going in the wrong direction’

NY TIMES

The United States reported over 52,000 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the fifth single-day case record in eight days, according to a New York Times database. 

North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas hit daily records, with Texas reaching more than 8,000 new infections. In Texas, where some hospitals near capacity, officials have been forced to bring in health care reinforcements from out of state. Ambulances in Houston have been waiting up to an hour to unload patients at emergency rooms, officials said.

“The cases continue to increase in a manner that we just cannot sustain,” said Dr. Mark Escott, interim medical director of the Austin-Travis County Health Authority. “Cases are skyrocketing across the state of Texas.”

As new cases rise, states and localities have reversed course on reopenings. New York City decided not to let its restaurants resume indoor service next week as originally planned. Miami Beach said that it would reinstate a nightly curfew beginning Thursday at 12:30 a.m., extending until 5 a.m., to try to curb the spread. And California shut down bars and halted indoor dining at restaurants in 19 counties that are home to more than 70 percent of the state’s population.

New outbreaks are erupting in the South and West, and areas that have made progress against the virus are showing signs of resurgence. Several Republican-led states that moved quickly to reopen this spring at the urging of President Trump are now reimposing some restrictions.

Arizona, which Mr. Trump visited in May and praised for its reopening plans, is now seeing record numbers of new cases, and Gov. Doug Ducey decided this week to close its water parks and to order bars, gyms and movie theaters in the state to close for 30 days.

And in Florida, which had more than 6,500 new cases on Wednesday, Miami’s biggest public hospital announced that it would stop non-urgent elective surgeries as of Monday. The caseload at the hospital, Jackson Memorial, has doubled over the past two weeks.

“They deny being at the party even though we have their names,” said Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, Rockland County’s health commissioner, speaking on Wednesday alongside Ed Day, the county executive. Credit...Rockland County Government

In Rockland Cty, Party Guests Won’t Talk After 9 Test Positive. Now They Face Subpoenas.

Rushing to contain a coronavirus cluster tied to a big party in a New York City suburb, officials turned to an unusual legal strategy.

On June 17, a crowd of up to 100 people, most of them in their early 20s, attended a party at a home in Rockland County, N.Y., just north of New York City.

The event violated a state order in effect at the time that capped gatherings at 10 people in an effort to slow the coronavirus’s spread.

For local officials, that was just the start of the problem.

The party’s host, who was showing signs of being sick at the time, later tested positive for the virus. So did eight guests. County officials, eager to keep the cluster from growing, dispatched disease tracers to try to learn who else might have been exposed to the virus at the party.

The tracers hit a wall.

“My staff has been told that a person does not wish to, or have to, speak to my disease investigators,” Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, the county’s health commissioner, said on Wednesday. Of those being contacted about the party, she added: “They hang up. They deny being at the party even though we have their names from another party attendee.”

 

Frustrated by the response, county officials on Wednesday took the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to eight people who they believe were at the June 17 party. Those who do not comply and share what they know by Thursday will face fines of $2,000 a day, officials said.

In addition to the June 17 party, in West Nyack, officials said they had learned of two other recent large parties nearby where some guests might have overlapped, heightening the risk of a wider transmission. Both parties were in New City — one on June 20; the other on June 27.

Adding to the urgency of learning as much as possible about how widely the virus may have spread at the parties, officials said, was a tip from people who have cooperated about at least one more large party being planned in the area for the Fourth of July weekend.

Tracking down everyone who has had contact with an infected person is considered crucial to containing the spread of an illness, but the effectiveness of such efforts can be limited.

 

In New York City, where 3,000 disease detectives and case monitors had been hired by last month, early data showed that only about two in every five people who had tested positive for the virus or were presumed to have it shared information about close contacts with tracers.

This is the second time in recent years that Rockland County officials have had to resort to subpoenas to compel cooperation from residents amid a push to halt a disease outbreak. A similar step last year in the face of a measles epidemic proved to be successful, officials said.

How a plan to pool virus tests in the U.S. would work.

Testing for the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, in May. The country reported using batch testing as part of a recent campaign to test all 11 million residents of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in late 2019.Credit...CHINATOPIX, via Associated Press

The Trump administration plans to adopt a decades-old testing strategy that will vastly increase the number of virus tests performed in the United States and permit widespread tracking of the virus as it surges across the country.

The method, called pooled testing, signals a paradigm shift. Instead of carefully rationing tests to only those with symptoms, pooled testing would enable frequent surveillance of asymptomatic people. Mass identification of coronavirus infections could hasten the reopening of schools, offices and factories.

“We’re in intensive discussions about how we’re going to do it,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, said in an interview. “We hope to get this off the ground as soon as possible.”

Given the many advantages, experts said, health officials should have embraced pooled testing much sooner. The United States military has used the technique at its bases worldwide, and has done so since it first tested men for syphilis in the 1940s. Health officials in China, Germany, Israel and Thailand have all deployed pooled testing for the coronavirus.

 

Here’s how the technique works: A university, for example, takes samples from every one of its thousands of students by nasal swab, or perhaps saliva. Setting aside part of each individual’s sample, the lab combines the rest into a batch holding five to 10 samples each.

The pooled sample is tested for coronavirus infection. If a pool yields a positive result, the lab would retest the reserved parts of each individual sample that went into the pool, pinpointing the infected student.

The strategy could be employed for as little as $3 per person per day, according an estimate from economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

By testing large numbers of people at a fraction of the cost, time and necessary ingredients, pooled surveillance could be widely adopted by workplaces, religious organizations, and schools and universities seeking to reopen.

But Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that any testing strategy was unlikely to succeed without additional measures.

“What good is testing if the results take four days to come back and infectious people aren’t isolated in the interim?” he asked. “What good is testing if contact tracing doesn’t identify and warn exposed people quickly?”

Researchers debate infecting people on purpose to test vaccines.

One way to quickly see if a coronavirus vaccine works would be to immunize healthy people and then deliberately expose them to the virus, some researchers are suggesting.

Proponents say this strategy, called a human challenge trial, could save time because rather than conducting tests the usual way — by waiting for vaccinated people to encounter the virus naturally — researchers could intentionally infect them.

Challenge trials have been used to test vaccines for typhoid, cholera, malaria and other diseases. For malaria, volunteers have stuck their arms into chambers full of mosquitoes to be bitten and infected. But there were so-called rescue medicines to cure those who got sick. There is no cure for Covid-19.

For both ethical and practical reasons, the idea of challenge trials for a coronavirus vaccine has provoked fierce debate.

In a draft report published last month, the World Health Organization said that challenge trials could yield important information, but that they would be daunting to run because of the potential of the coronavirus “to cause severe and fatal illness and its high transmissibility.”

The report, by a 19-member advisory panel, provided detailed guidelines about the safest way to conduct challenge trials, recommending that they be limited to healthy people ages 18 to 25 because they have the least risk of severe illness or death from the virus. The virus would be dripped into their noses.

 

But the panel also said its members split nearly in half over several major issues. They were divided over whether trials should be carried out if no highly effective therapy had been identified to treat participants who got sick; over whether studies in healthy young adults could predict the efficacy of a vaccine in older people or other high-risk adults; and over whether challenge trials could really speed vaccine development.

The W.H.O. raises alarm about the Trump administration’s deal to buy up the global supply of remdesivir.

The World Health Organization expressed concern on Wednesday over an arrangement for the United States to buy up almost all supplies of the drug remdesivir through the end of September.

Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the W.H.O.’s health emergencies program, said the agency was trying to verify the details, announced on Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services and the drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences. The deal most likely contradicts the W.H.O.’s policy that treatments and vaccines for the virus should be distributed equitably to the most needy.

“Obviously, there are many people around the world who are very sick with this disease, and we want to make sure that everybody has access to the necessary lifesaving interventions,” Dr. Ryan said.

Remdesivir has been shown to help people recover somewhat faster. On Monday, federal officials announced that more than 500,000 treatment courses would be reserved for American hospitals through September. That accounts for all of Gilead’s projected production in July, and 90 percent in August and September.

“President Trump has struck an amazing deal to ensure Americans have access to the first authorized therapeutic for Covid-19,” said Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services. “To the extent possible, we want to ensure that any American patient who needs remdesivir can get it.”

 

 

 

Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.

Starting as early as 2015, Facebook executives started crafting exceptions for the then-candidate that transformed the world’s information battlefield for years to come.

WASHINGTON POST

Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.

To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.

Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.

The frenzied push-pull was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.

Bowing to pressure, Facebook will start labeling violating posts from politicians. But critics say it’s not enough.

Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.

The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.

Advertiser Exodus Snowballs as Facebook Struggles to Ease Concerns

The social network has tried striking a more conciliatory tone with its advertisers, who object to its handling of hate speech.

NY TIMES

Last Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, attended a virtual meeting with some of the company’s top advertising partners. The brands and agencies, which had started criticizing the social network for its willingness to keep hate speech unaltered and accessible on its site, were pressing for change.

According to five people with knowledge of the discussion, Mr. Zuckerberg’s message to advertisers was clear: We won’t back down.

But over the past week, Facebook’s attitude has changed. Marketing giants like Unilever, Coca-Cola and Pfizer announced that they were pausing their Facebook advertising. That outcry has grown, hitting the company’s wallet.

To contain the damage, Facebook began holding daily calls and sending emails to advertisers to soothe them, advertising executives said. Nick Clegg, the company’s communications chief, made a series of media appearances stressing that Facebook was doing its best to tamp down hate speech. On Monday, Facebook also agreed to an audit by the Media Rating Council over its approach to hate speech.

Yet even as Facebook has labored to stanch the ad exodus, it is having little effect. Executives at ad agencies said that more of their clients were weighing whether to join the boycott, which now numbers more than 300 advertisers and is expected to grow. Pressure on top advertisers is coming from politicians, supermodels, actors and even Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, they said. Internally, some Facebook employees said they were also using the boycott to push for change.

On Thursday, the Joe Biden campaign will circulate a petition and an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, to change the company’s hands-off approach to political speech.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

“Other companies are seeing this moment, and are stepping up proactively,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, citing recent efforts from Reddit, YouTube and Twitch taking down posts and content that promote hate speech across their sites. “If they can do it, and all of Facebook’s advertisers are asking them to do it, it doesn’t seem that hard to do.”

The push from advertisers has led Facebook’s business to a precarious point. While the social network has struggled with issues such as election interference and privacy in recent years, its juggernaut digital ads business has always powered forward. The Silicon Valley company has never faced a public backlash of this magnitude from its advertisers, whose spending accounts for more than 98 percent of its annual $70.7 billion in revenue.

The ad boycott may ultimately deliver more of a hit to Facebook’s reputation than to its bottom line. The top 100 advertisers on Facebook spent $4.2 billion on ads last year, or roughly 6 percent of the company’s total ad revenue, according to data cited in an investor note from Stifel. More than 70 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from small businesses.

Yet the big-name brands that have pulled back are recognizable and may create a trickle-down effect, analysts said. “There’s a greater sensitivity to where brands are investing and what those platforms stand for than ever before,” said Harry Kargman, the chief executive of the mobile advertising company Kargo Global. “They’re effectively voting with their pocketbooks.”

Advertisers began taking action against Facebook’s handling of hate speech about two weeks ago while facing pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Color of Change and other civil rights groups. On June 19, the North Face and REI were among the first brands to join a boycott.High-profile allies quickly joined in. Roughly 10 days ago, representatives for Prince Harry and Meghan reached out to the head of the Anti-Defamation League to ask how they could support the movement, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The couple called C.E.O.s at some of Facebook’s biggest ad buyers and implored them to stop their ad purchases, they said.

Most People With Coronavirus Won’t Spread It. Why Do a Few Infect Many?

Growing evidence shows most infected people aren’t spreading the virus. But whether you become a superspreader probably depends more on circumstance than biology.

NY TIMES

“You can think about throwing a match at kindling,” said Ben Althouse, principal research scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wash. “You throw one match, it may not light the kindling. You throw another match, it may not light the kindling. But then one match hits in the right spot, and all of a sudden the fire goes up.”

If Covid-19 was like the flu, you’d expect the outbreaks in different places to be mostly the same size. But Dr. Kucharski and his colleagues found a wide variation. The best way to explain this pattern, they found, was that 10 percent of infected people were responsible for 80 percent of new infections. Which meant that most people passed on the virus to few, if any, others.

Researchers found many superspreading events. Just 2 percent of people were responsible for 20 percent of transmissions. Now researchers are trying to figure out why so few people spread the virus to so many. They’re trying to answer three questions: Who are the superspreaders? When does superspreading take place? And where?

As for the first question, doctors have observed that viruses can multiply to bigger numbers inside some people than others. It’s possible that some people become virus chimneys, blasting out clouds of pathogens with each breath.

Some people also have more opportunity to get sick, and to then make other people sick. A bus driver or a nursing home worker may sit at a hub in the social network, while most people are less likely to come into contact with others — especially in a lockdown.

A lot of transmission seems to happen in a narrow window of time starting a couple days after infection, even before symptoms emerge. If people aren’t around a lot of people during that window, they can’t pass it along.

And certain places seem to lend themselves to superspreading. A busy bar, for example, is full of people talking loudly. Any one of them could spew out viruses without ever coughing. And without good ventilation, the viruses can linger in the air for hours.

A study from Japan this month found clusters of coronavirus cases in health care facilities, nursing homes, day care centers, restaurants, bars, workplaces, and musical events such as live concerts and karaoke parties.

This pattern of superspreading could explain the puzzling lag in Italy between the arrival of the virus and the rise of the epidemic. And geneticists have found a similar lag in other countries: The first viruses to crop up in a given region don’t give rise to the epidemics that come weeks later.

Many countries and states have fought outbreaks with lockdowns, which have managed to draw down Covid-19’s reproductive number. But as governments move toward reopening, they shouldn’t get complacent and forget the virus’s potential for superspreading.

“You can really go from thinking you’ve got things under control to having an out-of-control outbreak in a matter of a week,” Dr. Lloyd-Smith said.

Singapore’s health authorities earned praise early on for holding down the epidemic by carefully tracing cases of Covid-19. But they didn’t appreciate that huge dormitories where migrant workers lived were prime spots for superspreading events. Now they are wrestling with a resurgence of the virus.

Since most transmission happens only in a small number of similar situations, it may be possible to come up with smart strategies to stop them from happening. It may be possible to avoid crippling, across-the-board lockdowns by targeting the superspreading events.

“By curbing the activities in quite a small proportion of our life, we could actually reduce most of the risk,” said Dr. Kucharski.