Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Jennifer Senior: Trump’s Brain: A Guided Tour
Why did it take so long to do the right thing?
From the beginning, Donald J. Trump has taken a rather peculiar view of the new coronavirus: If he can’t see the damage it’s doing, it’s not doing any damage.
It was how Trump justified saying nothing to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who blithely kept his state open through April 2. “They’re doing very well,” Trump said of Floridians on March 31. “Unless we see something obviously wrong, we’re going to let the governors do it.” It is how he justifies opening up the country when tests remain in short supply. “You don’t need testing,” he explained on April 10, “where you have a state with a small number of cases.” Tests were necessary only “if there’s a little hot corner someplace.”
Where he could see it, in other words. [..]
One could argue, to some degree, that Trump is simply doing what humans are hard-wired to do. “We believe our eyes before we believe what people tell us,” said Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard social psychologist and author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” when I phoned to ask him about the infuriating persistence of this habit. “The apparatus that sees the world is over 400 million years old. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that comprehends projection models from the C.D.C. — is maybe 2.5 million years old. That’s brand-new, in evolutionary terms. It’s still in beta testing.”
Which is why fighting things we can’t see is so hard, like pandemics and climate change.
Karen Tumulty: We don’t have to find ourselves here again. But first we need the truth.
What went wrong? Could the disaster that the coronavirus pandemic has caused have been prevented? And how can we make sure that nothing like it ever cripples this country again?
Those are the questions to which Americans will eventually deserve a straight answer — the kind that can come only from a credible, independent commission whose mandate is finding out why the government was caught so unprepared.
No doubt President Trump, who is incapable of admitting a mistake and recoils at oversight, will fight the idea. He will howl about hoaxes and witch hunts.
But such fact-finding inquiries have taken place after other national traumas — Pearl Harbor, the John F. Kennedy assassination and, most recently, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And we owe no less to the tens of thousands who have lost a loved one, as well as the countless health-care providers and other essential workers who were called upon to battle a lethal enemy without proper protective equipment.
Whether our broken political system is capable of finding — much less handling — the truth is another question. Partisanship infects every conversation about the virus. Trump has also fostered a climate in which expertise and even simple facts are regarded with suspicion by his defenders.
Realistically, a commission cannot get underway until we have turned the corner on this epidemic. Nor does it seem feasible for one to start until after the November election is behind us.
George T. Conway III, Reed Galen, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson : We’ve never backed a Democrat for president. But Trump must be defeated.
This November, Americans will cast their most consequential votes since Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. We confront a constellation of crises: a public health emergency not seen in a century, an economic collapse set to rival the Great Depression, and a world where American leadership is absent and dangers rise in the vacuum.
Today, the United States is beset with a president who was unprepared for the burden of the presidency and who has made plain his deficits in leadership, management, intelligence and morality.
When we founded the Lincoln Project, we did so with a clear mission: to defeat President Trump in November. Publicly supporting a Democratic nominee for president is a first for all of us. We are in extraordinary times, and we have chosen to put country over party — and former vice president Joe Biden is the candidate who we believe will do the same.
Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee and he has our support. Biden has the experience, the attributes and the character to defeat Trump this fall. Unlike Trump, for whom the presidency is just one more opportunity to perfect his narcissism and self-aggrandizement, Biden sees public service as an opportunity to do right by the American people and a privilege to do so.
David Kay Johnston: No, Trump can’t order the country back to work
Someone, alert the conservatives! The man in the White House asserts unlimited presidential power.
A pair of Donald Trump tweets Monday show beyond all doubt that he has no idea what’s in our Constitution and fashions himself a Sun King on the make, a wannabe dictator.
Trump asserted wrongly last July that thanks to our Constitution “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”
He has said that again and again as this video compilation shows.
Of course, Article II of our Constitution strictly limits what any president can do, basically limiting him to carrying out the will of Congress, the Article I branch of our government. But Trump doesn’t understand that or he doesn’t care.
Now Trump, to be fair, does have some authority to close and open facilities but his role is very restricted. He can shut down national parks, for example. He could close the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which would be understandable considering the way he slithered out of the draft by claiming bone spurs he says he no longer recalls.
But opening up city halls, courthouses, shopping malls, downtown furniture stores and schools?
Trump didn’t shut any of those. Trump has zero authority to declare them open for business as usual. Governors, and in some cases mayors, hold those powers under outer constitutional system.
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