America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.

Nationally, new cases have spiked up to around 40,000 per day. That is far above where those numbers were back in February and March, the two worst months of the first wave of the pandemic. Individual states are being hit very hard, and I.C.U. hospital beds are filling up fast. It's gotten so bad that two of Trump's staunchest GOP governor buddies have now gone beyond just "pausing" the reopening schedule and are now moving backwards:

Continue Reading »

What is the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic going to do right in the midst of an election season? That may sound like a rather crass question to be asking right now, so let me clearly state that this is undoubtedly going to involve a whole lot of deaths that probably could have been prevented -- which is an ongoing tragedy for all. We're already north of 120,000 deaths, and the total we eventually reach is going to depend in large part on how big the second wave turns out to be. That represents widespread human suffering on a massive scale. But it's also going to affect the politics of the 2020 election, one way or another, which is what I'm choosing to focus on today.

Many are now quibbling over the terminology, which is kind of pointless. Is it a truly a second wave or merely a second part of the first? Is it "Wave 1.5" or "Wave 2.0," in other words? My answer is a resounding: "Who cares what you call it -- just acknowledge that it exists!" Epidemiologists can split these hairs later, when they look back at all the data. For now, it's obviously a second spike in the caseload no matter what you ultimately decide it should be called. So for simplicity's sake, as far as I'm concerned, it is a second wave plain and simple.

Looking at the seven-day average for the number of new cases reported each day shows this second wave developing in the past week or so. When the pandemic started, we saw a sharp spike up to over 30,000 new cases per day, in February and March. Eventually this started slowly shrinking, until it reached a plateau of around 20,000 cases per day last month. But last month is when many governors decided to reopen their economies. What we're seeing now is -- after accounting for the built-in lag time -- a direct result of all this reopening in May. The problem with that built-in lag time, though, is that we're really only measuring the spread of the virus roughly three weeks ago. And those three weeks have already happened -- meaning nothing anybody does now will have the slightest effect on the numbers for the next two or three weeks. The likelihood is that the spike we're currently experiencing -- as cases rise beyond 30,000 per day once again -- will get even worse for the foreseeable future. And nobody knows where it'll top out. It could just stay where it is now, or it could climb to 35,000 or even 40,000 new cases per day. Nobody really knows.

Continue Reading »

There will be no column today, sorry. Outside life (car repairs) took up all my time today, so I didn't have time to keep up on the news or write. I did see that progressives are doing pretty well as the primary votes get counted in New York and Kentucky, which is likely what I would have chosen to comment on today if I had had the time. In any case, my apologies for the lack of column today.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Have we ever had a president with a thinner skin than Donald Trump? I suppose Richard Nixon almost qualifies; but Nixon was more outright paranoid, which is somehow slightly different. Nixon did believe his enemies (most definitely including the press) were out to get him, but on a personal level he could occasionally take a joke and even be self-depreciating at times. The same simply cannot be said about Donald Trump. His go-to emotion is resentment, and his go-to reaction is to viciously lash out in all directions at the tiniest perceived slight.

Case in point, of course, was Trump's weekend Tulsa rally. He spent almost 15 whole minutes -- one out of every eight minutes he spoke, according to the Washington Post -- ranting about how he had shown quite obvious physical weakness at a speech he had given the previous weekend. He minced his way down a ramp like a toddler learning to walk. He had to use two hands to drink a glass of water -- again, much like a toddler with a sippy cup. What would John Wayne have said about such a performance, one wonders?

Continue Reading »

This is going to be a meta-column, just to warn everyone in advance. It's going to be a column about columns. If you think this will bore the pants off you, then now is the time to seek other content, in other words.

Behind the scenes here, I've been gearing up to kick off my election-year "Electoral Math" series once again. Throughout the campaign, we'll take a look at the polling and try to predict how each state will vote, and thus what the Electoral College vote will be after the November presidential election. These columns will run right up until the day before the election, when I'll attempt to make my final prediction. This will be the fourth run of this column series. I previously wrote these articles for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 campaigns.

This time around, however, many people (Democrats in particular) are what could only be called "twice shy," after getting so badly bitten in 2016. "Polls cannot be trusted," many now conclude, "so why even bother writing poll-watching columns?"

Continue Reading »

As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?

It's no surprise that Trump: The Reality-Show President is on the brink of cancellation. Its fourth season opened with a few plot twists designed to put pressure on Trump, and he hasn't exactly risen to the occasion. First, the writers had Congress impeach him, just to see what he'd do. Then they threw a pandemic at him, which he woefully mishandled for months before realizing the seriousness of the situation. This led to the collapse of the economy, as Trump floundered around. Trump began daily briefings which (if the polls are accurate) is precisely the time when the public began tuning out in a big way. With ratings down, the show's storyline turned to "unrest in the streets," which Trump has handled even worse than the coronavirus pandemic (if such a thing is even possible).

Continue Reading »

To President Donald Trump, today's Supreme Court ruling was not actually about the hundreds of thousands of young people whose legal residence in this country hung on this court case. Instead, it was about one thing and one thing alone, which is pretty much the same thing that everything is about for Donald Trump: himself. After learning of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision denying Trump the ability to strip legal protection from the "dreamers," Trump petulantly took to Twitter to ask: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" Once again, Trump reduced an issue of monumental importance to the level of schoolyard gossip (about him, of course). Maybe if the Supremes really really liked Trump, things would be different? Because that's obviously what it's all about, not all that legal mumbo-jumbo or hundreds of thousands of young people's lives.

Donald Trump is having a very bad week, obviously. He lost two major Supreme Court cases, which gave joy and delight to millions of affected people. He had to move the date of his first rally in months because of a holiday neither Trump nor anyone around him had ever heard of (which celebrates another monumental issue, the end of slavery in this country). John Bolton, whose politics could accurately be described as "to the right of Attila the Hun," is about to start selling his tell-all book to the public, which (as with every single one of all the other tell-all books about Trump) paints the president as a petulant, ill-informed man-baby who is unaware that Finland isn't part of Russia or that the United Kingdom is a nuclear power. Trump staged an executive order signing, which was supposed to somehow show leadership on police reform, but what he signed was so weak that Congress barely even noticed Trump's effort as they moved towards putting together their own bill. Also, Trump is apparently now obsessed with finding and bringing charges against whatever White House aide leaked the fact that he hid in a bunker during a protest outside his front door, because he knows full well how weak it made him look. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be on the brink of a second wave of infections, this time centered mostly in the red states. And for the 13th straight week, more than a million Americans filed for unemployment. No wonder Joe Biden is dominating in each and every poll taken, both nationally and in the battleground states.

Continue Reading »

In the midst of what can only be called a non-traditional presidential campaign, Joe Biden might want to consider breaking another political tradition, by releasing a very early shortlist of possible nominees to his cabinet. Such a move is not without risks, of course, which is one of the reasons why traditionally it just isn't done. But the benefits may outweigh such risks in this particular campaign.

Let's start with the possible drawbacks of releasing an early shortlist. In the first place, it has always been considered "unseemly" to do so before the election is won. It smacks of overconfidence, of counting unhatched chickens. Or, to use a more apt political metaphor, it would be seen as prematurely "measuring the Oval Office drapes" in anticipation of an upcoming redecoration.

Continue Reading »

I have to admit I am seeing the protest movement across America from a rather strange viewpoint. I live in one of the most liberal areas of one of the most liberal states in the country, and here the citizens are deeply grieving... a police officer who lost his life. You can see why this is a rather unique lens through which to view what is currently going on.

The officer in question was a sheriff's deputy who responded to a call about a white van filled with dangerous weapons. He was ambushed and killed by a member of the U.S. Air Force who, after being apprehended, was charged not only with the deputy's murder but also with the earlier murder of the only federal law enforcement officer killed in the recent unrest anywhere in the entire country. This happened during one of the first nights of demonstrations, up in Oakland, California.

Now, my county doesn't see police officers killed very often. The news reported that the last sheriff's deputy to die in the line of fire happened in the 1980s. So this was a big event, and the populace has been memorializing the slain officer ever since -- despite (as mentioned) being an area that could honestly be called "ultra-liberal." We've seen heaps of flowers laid in honor and public mourning by just about everyone, for a brave local police officer.

Continue Reading »

Conservative Republicans just chalked up another big defeat in their continuing losing streak in the culture wars. The Supreme Court ruled today that L.G.B.T. rights are indeed included in Title VII, which mandates equal treatment for all "on the basis of sex." Discriminating against someone because they are gay or transgendered (by firing them, for example) is just as unconstitutional as it is to discriminate against all women (or all men, for that matter). To put it another way, what could be called the final battle of the Sexual Revolution just ended, and the counterculture has now absolutely routed the field of conservatives.

Continue Reading »