| I received my copy of Dan Drezner's hot-off-the-presses "The Toddler in Chief" — the first Twitter thread I'm aware of that became an academic (but highly accessible!) book — just before Donald Trump launched into another marathon press conference Monday afternoon. Over some two hours, he made it increasingly clear that this self-proclaimed wartime president doesn't accept one of the key points of war: that they demand difficult, painful choices of national leaders. Instead, Trump seems to be hoping that some magic solution will make this whole coronavirus mess go away. Also, he also doesn't seem able to focus on one idea for more than a few days at a time. See, again, Drezner's book. After a few days last week where the president seemed to have accepted the seriousness of the pandemic, on Monday he was back to comparing it to the ordinary flu — and deaths from car crashes, to boot. He seems to be turning to crackpot ideas because the people who know what they're talking about won't tell him that all will be well. As the Washington Post put it: Conservatives close to Trump and numerous administration officials have been circulating an article by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, titled "Coronavirus Perspective," that plays down the extent of the spread and the threat. The article, published last week, had predicted that deaths would peak at 500, the milestone surpassed Monday. Emphasis added. It's not that Trump fully buys the argument some conservatives are making that we should choose massive deaths over economic devastation. I just don't think he accepts that he can't slip out of this without anything too bad happening. Unfortunately, the dream that he can somehow get the economy back to health without first defeating the pandemic is just as much of a fantasy as his previous hopes that it was only confined to China, or that a vaccine would emerge overnight, or that new treatments would instantly end the crisis. At least that's what expert after expert after expert tells us (and see more links below). To be sure: Presidents should not always blindly trust whatever they hear from the bureaucracy. They should be skeptical, and seek out multiple sources of information. What they shouldn't do, and what Trump seems to be doing, is ignore all the experts and find some crackpot willing to tell them what they wants to hear, and accept it without any skepticism. As Dave Wasserman puts it, "So basically, looks like we're headed for a partisan confrontation over whether Americans should heed public health/medical experts during an accelerating crisis," with Republican members of Congress and state and local officials split between loyalty to Trump and attempts to keep their constituents healthy. That's a good way to keep the pandemic strong and the economy weak. 1. Excellent Dave Hopkins item on Trump's approval ratings (which appear to be up a bit since he wrote this, for whatever that's worth). Best thing I've seen on Trump approval and the coronavirus. 2. Jeremy L. Wallace at the Monkey Cage on the conoravirus statistics from China. 3. Jane Manners at Made By History on the history of emergency bailouts. 4. Jeffrey Young on the 10th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. 5. Abby Goodnough, Reed Abelson, Margot Sanger-Katz and Sarah Kliff on Obamacare at 10. 6. Marc Lipsitch on the unmeasured spread of the pandemic. 7. And Ezekiel J. Emanuel on beating the coronavirus. | 
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