I’m taking my own advice and not watching Donald Trump’s coronavirus briefing right now, but apparently our president is bored with all the shutdowns and lockdowns he’s had to endure for the past [checks notes] seven whole days. So how much longer will this stuff last? “I’m not looking at months,” he says, even though nearly every expert says that months are indeed what we have to look forward to. “This is going away,” he says, despite abundant evidence that it’s not going away anytime soon.
Trump says that “other countries are going to do what they have to do,” but that “in our case,” “because of the magnitude of our economy,” we can’t do a quarantine and harm the economy any more than we already have.
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) March 23, 2020
If there’s any silver lining here at all, it’s the fact that it’s mostly governors who have the authority to shut down businesses and enforce quarantines. This is faint comfort for anyone living in a red state, who probably has a governor that slavishly follows Trump’s direction, but at least some of us will still be doing the right thing.