I keep wandering into magical thinking myself – I see more people out and about and think “Oh it must be getting bet – NO, stupid, people are getting more reckless.” I’m betting we all do that, not least because it’s normally a pretty good indicator. “Lots of people around here, probably not many tigers.” Normally pretty good, but then there can be the unexpected tiger.

The WHO warns us not to think all the tigers will go somewhere else.

Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, WHO emergencies director Dr Mike Ryan warned against trying to predict when the virus would disappear.

He added that even if a vaccine is found, controlling the virus will require a “massive effort”.

…

“It is important to put this on the table: this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away,” Dr Ryan told the virtual press conference from Geneva.

“HIV has not gone away – but we have come to terms with the virus.”

And, as Fauci reminded us at one of the early briefings, there is effective treatment for HIV.

Their stark remarks come as several countries began to gradually ease lockdown measures, and leaders consider the issue of how and when to reopen their economies.

I think the gradually easing idea is magical thinking too. “If we just walk very carefully over the chasm we’ll be fine.” That doesn’t appear to be the case with this virus.

Dr Tedros warned that there was no guaranteed way of easing restrictions without triggering a second wave of infections.

“Many countries would like to get out of the different measures,” the WHO boss said. “But our recommendation is still the alert at any country should be at the highest level possible.”

Dr Ryan added: “There is some magical thinking going on that lockdowns work perfectly and that unlocking lockdowns will go great. Both are fraught with dangers.”

I’m finding magical thinking quite hard to avoid. I keep thinking stupid things like we’ve waited it out, we’ve diluted it, we’ve spread it so thinly that it won’t get us, etc etc – and then I slap myself up the head. I’ll be thinking the same thing an hour later though.

Remember on Monday Trump shouted that the numbers were coming down all over the country? The hell they are.

At a fraught press briefing on Monday, the president declared: “All throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”

Yet county-specific figures show a surge in infection rates in towns and rural communities in red states such as Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and North and South Dakota, according to data tracking by the New York Times.

…

In a 7 May report, obtained by NBC News, the list of top 10 surge areas included Nashville, Tennessee; Des Moines, Iowa; Amarillo, Texas; Racine, Wisconsin; Garden City, Kansas, and Central City, Kentucky – a predominantly white town of 6,000 people which saw a 650% week-on-week increase. Muhlenberg county, where Central City is located, has voted Republican in every presidential election since 2004, with Trump winning 72% of votes in 2016 – the biggest ever victory for the party.

Yet he failed to protect them from the virus. Sad.

Many of the new emerging hotspots, both rural and urban, are in states where governors refused to issue stay-at-home orders, or are following Trump’s advice to relax lockdown restrictions despite public health warnings about the dangers of doing so too soon.

Fake news?

They’re going after Fauci, because of course they are.

Yesterday, Fauci said during the Senate’s hearing that there are serious consequences if cities or states in the United States reopen too quickly: “There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,” he said.

Fauci’s warning contradicts the stance of Trump and Republicans who have been gunning for* a swift reopening to save the economy and took Fauci’s statement as a personal attack.

[*not “gunning for” but advocating for – I can’t offhand think of a parallel metaphor for that]

Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, sparred with Fauci during the hearing yesterday when asking the epidemiologist why schools can’t reopen if children are seeing low virus-related death rate.

“As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end-all,” Paul said. “I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make the decision.”

Rude piece of crap. Of course he’s not, nor does he claim to be. He gets to give the government the best possible medical advice, because that’s his job.

Later, on Fox News, host Tucker Carlson repeated Paul’s criticism of Fauci, saying: “He is not, and no one is, the one person who should be in charge when it comes to making long-term recommendations. This guy, Fauci, may be even more off-base than your average epidemiologist.”

This guy, Tucker Carlson, may be and is an ignorant hack who will say anything, no matter how crazed and mendacious, to prop up Bad Orange Man.

On deck tomorrow:

Rick Bright, former director of a key office in the Department of Health and Human Services, will testify in front of the Senate tomorrow that the Trump administration was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic and there will be dramatic consequences if the US fails to develop a national coordinated response, reports CNN.

Documents of the prepared testimony indicate that Bright plans to tell Congress that he fears “the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged” without a response “based in science”.

“Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be [the] darkest winter in modern history,” Bright is expected to warn.

Let’s not do that. Can we not do that? I’d rather not do that.

Some people think so:

The sun had not been up for an hour when the president of the United States, in his ninth tweet of the day, said MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough might be a murderer.

His exact words?

“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”

This isn’t random person making noise on Twitter, this is a head of state, a head of an all-too-powerful nuclear-armed state.

Many of the 18,000 false and misleading claims in our Trump database feature overheated rhetoric. Few of them rise to these vicious heights.

…

Trump first lobbed this conspiratorial charge at Scarborough in November 2017. The president is referring to the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old aide who worked for Scarborough when he was a Republican member of Congress representing Florida’s 1st Congressional District.

The circumstances of Klausutis’s death have spawned conspiracy theories, but authorities never suspected foul play. Her death is not an unsolved mystery or a cold case waiting for answers. Klausutis’s death on July 20, 2001, was ruled accidental and the police concluded there was no reason to further investigate. A police investigator told The Post in 2017 that authorities had left “no stone unturned.”

The Post gives it 4 Pinocchios and wishes it had more to give. The White House has refused to comment.

Henning Schroeder at The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota:

Before the trophy went to Adolf Hitler, German Emperor and King of Prussia Wilhelm II held the award for Most Hated Man on Earth. And while Hitler’s Third Reich has become the ultimate go-to place for much journalistic handwringing about the horrible times we are living in, in reality it feels like we are still stuck in Wilhelm’s Second Reich — it’s Kaiserzeit in America. Donald Trump and the last German Emperor have a lot in common, the vanity, insecurity, the penchant for bombast and persönliches Regiment (personal rule), to name just a few. In Wilhelm’s case the brakes on his impulsive and egotistical personality came off after he fired Bismarck, the experienced chancellor he inherited from his father, and surrounded himself with sycophantic generals and noble toadies who went along with his imperial fantasies and straight into World War I.

We had a little conversation about that exact parallel a couple of days ago at the Miscellany Room, via What a Maroon:

This popped up in my Facebook memories from two years ago. No one even tried to guess who it was referring to. Any guesses here?

“He believed in force, and the ‘survival of the fittest’ in domestic as well as foreign politics… [He] was not lacking in intelligence, but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk. He frequently fell into depressions and hysterics… [His] personal instability was reflected in vacillations of policy. His actions, at home as well as abroad, lacked guidance, and therefore often bewildered or infuriated public opinion. He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives…, as with asserting his will.”

It was that very Kaiser, child of Queen Victoria’s firstborn Vicky.

I am reminded of those spineless Wilhelmine characters every time I am watching a White House press briefing. It’s not so much the bumbling fool at the microphone who advertises Clorox for healing the nation. That’s to be expected from someone who has been in sales all his life. What’s truly troubling is the backdrop of supposedly educated advisors and cabinet members who gaze at the president nodding their heads like bobble toys every time he opens his mouth. Not much different from Wilhelm’s bootlicking court jesters.

The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a brute like you.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Organizations across Canada that work to help sexually exploited women and girls say the Liberal government has decided not to renew federal funding they rely on, forcing them to close programs.

Megan Walker, executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre, said her organization will have to close its federally funded anti-sex-trafficking program. The program operated for five years and served more than 3,000 trafficked, prostituted, sexually exploited and at-risk women and girls.

So Trudeau is pro-trafficking then?

Under the program, women and girls could access their services immediately, Ms. Walker said. They could drop in to the centre when they needed clothing or to be some place warm, and staff members helped them access health facilities and education. The federal funding also helped public awareness initiatives, with members of LAWC visiting schools and teaching students about the tactics of traffickers, such as luring.

Pro-trafficking and anti-providing services for trafficked women and girls. Sweet.

Sex trafficking has not slowed down because of the pandemic, according to Ms. Walker. She said her agency has received six phone calls from parents whose daughters were lured online to “remove their clothes and masturbate.” The girls’ actions were videotaped and posted on the Internet.

“Trafficking will never slow down,” Ms. Walker said.

But funding will always disappear.

Trump & his Goons want the CDC to fix the death count for them.

President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are pushing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change how the agency works with states to count coronavirus-related deaths. And they’re pushing for revisions that could lead to far fewer deaths being counted than originally reported, according to five administration officials working on the government’s response to the pandemic.

The numbers are too big, Trump explains.

Officials inside the CDC, five of whom spoke to The Daily Beast, said they are pushing back against that request, claiming it could falsely skew the mortality rate at a time when state and local governments are already struggling to ensure that every person who dies as a result of the coronavirus is counted. Scientists and doctors working with the task force, including Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have said the U.S. death-toll count is likely higher than is being reflected in government data sets. And several local officials in hot spot areas said they’ve seen hundreds if not thousands more deaths over the last two months than in the same time period over the last several years. They presume many of those individuals contracted the coronavirus. 

Yebbut the numbers are too big. Make them smaller.

“I don’t worry about this overreporting issue,” Bob Anderson, the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch in CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told The Daily Beast. Anderson’s team is in charge of aggregating, calculating, and reporting coronavirus deaths for the agency. “We’re almost certainly underestimating the number of deaths [in the country].”

What would he know about it?!! They should have Jared Kushner doing the counting.

The pressure being placed on the CDC is yet another tension point between the agency and the White House that has erupted over its handling of the coronavirus. Those tensions have reached a boiling point over the last several weeks as the CDC has worked to publish its guidelines for states working to reopen their local economies. The guidelines, which provide detailed information about how local officials can begin to allow some residents to attend religious gatherings and summer camps, were contested by White House officials who sought to shelve many of the agency’s recommendations. 

Thank god that during the worst pandemic any of us have ever seen we have White House officials who try to bully and silence the CDC.

Once you start a fight, be sure to keep it going forever, because that will make you look Tough and Resolute and Manly despite the weird goldy combover.

The Guardian explains:

At a briefing in the White House Rose Garden, [ Weijia ] Jiang asked the president why he continues to claim – wrongly, as he did again on Tuesday – that the US is performing better than other countries in terms of testing for coronavirus.

“Why does that matter?” asked the reporter, who was born in China and came to the US at the age of two. “Why is this a global competition when, every day, Americans are still losing their lives?”

It was a pissy question, and she asked it in a pissy voice. A round of applause for the CBS News reporter.

“They’re losing their lives everywhere in the world,” Trump said. “And maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me, ask China that question, OK?”

The president called on another reporter but she paused as Jiang interjected: “Sir, why are you saying that to me, specifically?”

And he flounced out of the press briefing.

His comment was condemned as racist by some commentators.

Yes it was.

I hadn’t heard of Orange Man Bad. Apparently it’s a meme about how stupid the libtards are for caring that Trump is bad. A Republican takes issue with that thought.

Amidst this death and destruction the president of the United States has been spending his days pecking around on his iPhone, tweeting that certain cable TV hosts are murderers and dogs and that the husband of his top strategist is a “moonface” loser. Oh, and he claimed—again—that the opposition party and the American media are “The Enemy of the People!”

…

The malignant self-obsession and childish vitriol only scratches the surface of the man’s flaws. His compulsions aren’t hidden or covered up. They are broadcast for the entire country to see, for hours on end, every day, late into the night.

It’s not deniable, so his fans have to embrace it, which is where “Orange Man Bad” comes in.

To these Trump supporters, and cos-play non-supporters, it is only the simpleminded folk who cling to the superstitious belief that a bad man having the most important job in the world is a serious concern. Those of us who are bothered by the insane ravings of a narcissistic imbecile aren’t able to see the big picture.

…

The Orange Man Bad practitioners would argue that they are simply trying to expose the shallowness of Trump’s opposition, the weakness of their argumentation.

To put it another way, pointing out that Trump is bad is too obvious.

Well sure it is, but whose fault is that? His badness is indeed shriekingly obvious, but way too many people voted for him anyway.

[T]he plain fact is that Donald Trump is not just a bad man. He is an avatar for iniquity and immorality and selfishness. He runs the table on the seven deadly sins and demonstrates not a trace of any of the four cardinal virtues. He possesses not a single character trait that you would want your child to fully emulate. He cares about nothing and no one besides himself.

And that’s all we need to know, isn’t it. He literally does care about nothing and no one other than his empty hollow echoing self, we can see him doing it every day, and it’s sickening.

Republican Kentucky senator says uppity black former president should Keep His Mouth Shut.

Last week, remarks by Obama were leaked to Yahoo News that were highly critical about Trump and his administration, seeming to break a convention in US politics that former occupants of the White House rarely criticize their successors.

Does that convention apply to private conversations though? I don’t think so. Obama’s remarks were leaked.

But really that’s beside the point; I wouldn’t think McConnell had more of a case if Obama had made his remarks in an editorial in the Washington Post. Conventions are all very well but Trump is not a normal “occupant of the White House.” It’s not just that he has bad policies, it’s not even just that he has bad policies plus he’s dimwitted and untalented (like Bush and Reagan). It’s a whole lot more than that.

Plus, if we’re talking about conventions, there’s also a convention that the Senate isn’t supposed to ignore a president’s nomination for the Supreme Court on the ludicrous grounds that there will be an election in almost a year. Really though that’s not so much a convention as a constitutional duty.

Asked about Obama “slamming” the administration for its response to the coronavirus outbreak, he said: “I think President Obama should have kept his mouth shut.

“You know, we know he doesn’t like much this administration is doing. That’s understandable. But I think it’s a little bit classless frankly to critique an administration that comes after you.”

Ah, classless. Yes. Unlike the deeply classy Trump, who vomits out public insults hundreds of times a day, who brags about grabbing them by the pussy, who bragged about wanting to fuck his own daughter, who has the ugliest tackiest trashiest pseudo-Versailles living room on the planet – that Trump.

Trump started yesterday’s press brawl by reading a statement, adding his own random remarks. It’s faintly comical how easy it is to pick out the ad libs.

In the span of just a few short months, we’ve developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close.  This is a core element of our plan to safely and gradually reopen America.  And we’re opening, and we’re starting, and there’s enthusiasm like I haven’t seen in a long time.

See them?

In the span of just a few short months, we’ve developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close.  This is a core element of our plan to safely and gradually reopen America.  And we’re opening, and we’re starting, and there’s enthusiasm like I haven’t seen in a long time.

This one made me laugh:

his week, the United States will pass 10 million tests conducted — nearly double the number of any other country.  We’re testing more people per capita than South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Sweden, Finland, and many other countries — and, in some cases, combined.

“and, in some cases, combined” – thus making a nonsense of “per capita” and revealing that he has no idea what it means and wouldn’t understand if you told him.

Later on he tells a straight-up lie about it.

Thanks to the courage of our citizens and our aggressive strategy, hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved.  And we have saved — and if you look at on a per-100,000 basis, we’re at the best part of the pack, right on the bottom.  Germany and us are leading the world.  Germany and the United States are leading the world — lives saved per hundred thousand.

No we’re not. We’re fourth from the top, not anywhere near the bottom. Also, “us are leading the world” ain’t the right way to say that.

He’s upbeat though.

Day after day, we’re making tremendous strides.  With the dedication of our doctors and nurses — these are incredible people, these are brave people, these are warriors — with the devotion of our manufacturing workers, food suppliers, and lab technicians, and with the profound patriotism of the American people, we will defeat this horrible enemy, we will revive our economy, and we will transition into greatness.  That’s a phrase you’re going to hear a lot because that’s what’s going to happen.

Unscripted rah-rahs bolded.

We’re going into the third quarter, and we’re going to do well.  In the fourth quarter, we’re going to do very good.  And next year, I think we’re going to have one of the best years we’ve ever had because there’s a tremendous pent-up demand.  It’s a demand — and I’m feeling it.  I’ve felt things a lot over my life, and I’ve made a lot of good calls.  It’s a demand like I don’t think I’ve ever seen.  There’s a pent-up demand.  There’s a — there’s a spirit of this country like few have seen.  And I think you can say — and we’ve helped a lot of the countries a lot.  Really, a lot.  There’s a tremendous spirit all over the world to beat this terrible, terrible thing.

Fight fiercely Harvard!

Trouble is Coronavirus don’t give a shit. Coronavirus eats you whether you’re a warrior or not, whether you have a tremendous spirit or not, whether you have a tremendous pent-up demand or not, whether you’re transitioning into greatness or not.

Then he brags about the border, and the wall, and how awesome it all is, and how few people are coming in. He doesn’t pause to consider that that could be because of the pandemic as opposed to his overwhelming genius.

The first question was about how the system broke down such that people in the White House tested positive and Fauci had to go into quarantine.

I don’t think the system broke down at all.  One person tested positive, surprisingly, because, the previous day, tested negative.  And three people that were in contact — relative contact, who I believe they’ve all tested totally negative, but they are going to, for a period of time, self-isolate.  So that’s not breaking down.  It can happen.  It’s the hidden enemy.  Remember that.  It’s the hidden enemy.  And so things happen.  But the three tested negative.  The one who tested positive will be fine.  They will be absolutely fine.

Let’s linger for a moment over ” One person tested positive, surprisingly, because, the previous day, tested negative.” Let’s wonder all over again how he thinks that’s supposed to go – that if you test negative one day it’s impossible to test positive the next day? But then how would anyone ever – oh never mind.

Notice also his blithe certainty about the future health of the infected person.

And then there’s this:

I think one of the things we’re most proud of is — this just came out — deaths per 100,000 people, death — so deaths per 100,000 people: Germany and the United States are at the lowest rung of that ladder.  Meaning, low is a positive, not a negative.  Germany and the United States are the two best in deaths per 100,000 people, which, frankly, to me, that’s perhaps the most important number there is.

Uh…no. That’s not right.

Aaron Blake at the Post this morning:

President Trump has made a series of obviously false claims about the coronavirus. But at Monday’s news briefing — the first in weeks in which Trump and coronavirus task force officials took questions — he offered one of his biggest whoppers yet.

After being asked about a mysterious condition affecting children, then having task force member Adm. Brett Giroir correct him that the condition has actually proven fatal, Trump turned to better news. Or at least what he wrongly stated was better news.

He quotes that passage I just quoted.

It’s true that, while the United States has the most confirmed coronavirus cases and the most confirmed coronavirus deaths, it lags behind some Western European countries when it comes to per capita deaths. I wrote about this a week ago, noting that the raw number can be deceiving when it comes to the total impact on countries.

But the United States is nowhere close to having one of the lowest per capita death rates. In fact, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, we rank ninth-highest out of more than 140 countries for which information is available.

We’re near the top of the 140 as opposed to near the bottom. The opposite of what Trump said – what Trump, the president, said on camera to the country and the world.

Pairing the United States with Germany is another puzzling decision. Germany is one of the envies of the Western world when it comes to its coronavirus response, having ramped up testing very early and then dealing with a far less significant outbreak than its neighbors. But putting the United States next to it is ridiculous; Germany has about nine deaths per 100,000 people, as compared with about 24 per 100,000 people in the United States.

Ok but Trump’s granddaddy came here from Germany so that makes it ok.

In Kabul:

Two babies and 11 mothers and nurses have been killed in a militant attack on a hospital in the Afghan capital.

Another 15 people, including a number of children, were injured when several gunmen attacked the Kabul hospital on Tuesday morning, officials said.

Part of the hospital is run by the international medical charity, Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and some of those working there are foreigners.

So God hates women, babies, medical workers, and foreigners.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on The more accurate terminology.

I think it’s important to separate two things.

1) The underlying ruling is, I think, poor. I disagree with the substance of it, and I think a judge should refrain from limiting counsel’s language except in very clear-cut cases.

2) The reaction of the ADF’s counsel is worse. First, it’s shitty advocacy. When a judge tells you to stop saying something because it doesn’t help your case and he considers it uncivil, you STOP SAYING IT. Find another way to make your arguments. The entire point of wanting to use one term instead of another is because you’re an advocate trying to persuade the judge. Persisting in using a term that this judge has told you he does not find persuasive or helpful to your case is just counterproductive. (Even if this ruling extends to an eventual jury trial, it’s still fairly dumb to piss off the judge.) Unless your real goal is to lose the case while preening for the media and your GoFundMe donors or whoever, which seems to be the real purpose behind a lot of public litigation these days, so who knows. I’m just one of those dumb old school litigators who tries to actually win his cases. Second, filing a motion to recuse because you don’t like a judge’s ruling is utter nonsense. It’s something that pro se litigants and hacks do. There are reams of authority that say that you can’t do that. If it’s an appealable order, then appeal it. If it’s not an appealable order, then either take a writ if that’s available, or violate the order so as to create an appealable sanctions/contempt order (good luck with that! better hope you’re right!), or just make your damn case and add it to the grounds for appeal if you lose.

According to this chart the US doesn’t have the highest per capita rate of infections. I stand corrected.

Of course, the number of actual cases in a country is going to be higher than official figures show, with testing rates also varying dramatically. As with all figures relating to confirmed cases, they should be treated with caution.

Sir, sir, what did you mean, sir?

Hours after Trump posted a string of tweets and retweets about “Obamagate” — a new conspiracy theory that holds Obama responsible for masterminding the Russia investigation and railroading former Trump administration National Security Adviser Michael Flynn into a guilty plea for lying to the FBI (never mind that there’s no evidence of investigatory misconduct) — Philip Rucker of the Washington Post called Trump’s bluff.

“In one of your Mother’s Day tweets, you appeared to accuse President Obama of ‘the biggest political crime in American history, by far’ — those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing, and do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?” Rucker asked, during a news conference that was ostensibly about the coronavirus.

The crime of obamagating, duh.

“Uh, Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time,” he began. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.”

So Trump. Let’s do some highlighting.

“Uh, Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time,” he began. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.”

What’s been going on? What happened? What’s gone on? All what information? What terrible things? What is “it”?

He’s the kid who never did the reading, and thinks the teacher won’t notice the string of empty signifiers.

Of course, “Obamagate” does not involve a crime, and there’s no evidence that Obama or his top officials conspired against Trump — quite the opposite. So when Rucker pressed the point by asking what exactly the ostensible crime was, Trump resorted to smears.

“You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”

More to the point, he resorted to yet more empty signifiers. You know; it’s very obvious; read the newspapers. Many words, no content. If he had anything he would say the thing he had. He doesn’t have that thing, he doesn’t have any thing. He has no thing.

Trump reached a new level of horrifying in today’s nightmare “press conference.”

Prevailed? We still have the highest rate of infection per capita on the whole planet, don’t we? Along with the highest number of deaths per capita? If that’s prevailing, what would abject failure look like?

Turns out he meant we have prevailed in testing. We haven’t, of course, but that’s what he meant.

He never says what “the crime” is.

The grand finale:

The Guardian has details on the truth or otherwise of Trump’s “virus going down everywhere!!” tweet:

Trump says “coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere.”

Here’s what we know. Nearly 1,330,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus in the US, more than any other nation on the planet, and at least 79,500 have died, according to a Johns Hopkins database.

…

According to a New York Times database, new cases are decreasing in just 14 states of 50 states. Among them are densely populated states like New York and Michigan, which were among the hardest hit. The list also includes sparsely-populated states like Montana and Alaska.

New cases are still rising in nine US states, including states like Arizona that is pressing ahead with its re-opening on Monday. In the remaining states, the growth rate of new cases has remained relatively steady.

…

On Monday, Trump slammed Pennsylvania, a battleground state led by a Democratic governor, for not moving faster to reopen its economy. In the tweet, he broadened his attack to accused Democrats across the country of intentionally slowing their states’ return to normalcy to hurt his chances of re-election.

It’s all about him. “Never mind whether you die or not, do what it takes to get me re-elected!” All completely normal.

The tweet.

The reality:

US Coronavirus Cases:

1,377,408

Deaths:

81,190

If that’s better, what would worse look like?