Still searching for the perfect Father’s Day gift? Here’s one idea.

Taking a page from his dad’s playbook, Eric Trump told Fox News that the coronavirus will “magically” disappear — after Election Day.

Said Trump: “They think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every time. You watch. They will milk it every single day between now and November 3rd.”

He added: “And guess what – after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically, all of the sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”

He called it a “very cognizant strategy.”

Jonathan Last: “Brad Parscale has a very keen interest in making sure that his job is portrayed as being a gigantic, all-powerful black box.”

“In 2016, Trump cycled through campaign managers at a rapid clip. The only job security Parscale has comes from convincing Trump that he has built some magical machine which no one else—and especially not Old Man Trump—can understand. Or operate.”

“Creating the impression that the entire Trump campaign will rise or fall with an opaque digital operation is a way to make Parscale un-fireable. Because unlike the 2016 campaign, which was basically about letting Trump be Trump, there is now a great deal of sunk-cost into an operation which is purpose-built to keep the septugenarian boss from understanding how it works. Or even, what it really is.”

“A complete breakdown in communication and coordination within the Trump administration has undermined the distribution of a promising treatment,” Axios reports.

‘The drug, remdesivir, hasn’t made it to some of the high-priority hospitals where it’s most needed, and administration officials have responded by shifting blame and avoiding responsibility.”

The Constitution Party nominated Don Blankenship of West Virginia as its candidate for president on the second ballot, Ballot Access News reports.

Blankenship, a former Republican, failed in his U.S. Senate bid in 2018.

“Big money donors are pressuring Joe Biden to not choose Sen. Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, even while the centrist former vice president tries to appeal to progressive voters,” CNBC reports.

“Biden and his team have heard from many donors in the business community about who they think would be best to be chosen as his vice presidential nominee.”

Said one Biden fundraiser: “I think a lot of the donor base, on board and coming, would prefer almost anyone but Elizabeth. I don’t see him choosing her for veep.”

“There has been so much unnecessary death in this country. It could have been stopped and it could have been stopped short, but somebody a long time ago, it seems, decided not to do it that way. And the whole world is suffering because of it.”

— President Trump, at his coronavirus briefing.

“U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat,” the Washington Post reports.

“But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week.”

“Months after President Donald Trump promised to open FBI files to help families of the 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government, the Justice Department has doubled down on its claim that the information is a state secret,” ProPublica reports.

Wired: “Biden’s victory is, on one level, entirely unsurprising. He is the immediate past vice president, reminding Democratic voters of a time that they would very much like to return to. He led in national polls throughout the race. He performed poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, but it took only one victory in South Carolina for him to consolidate the support of party leadership and build real momentum. But that’s too simple of an explanation. It conflates the Biden candidacy with the Biden campaign. Joe Biden’s candidacy was strong. His campaign wasn’t.”

“There are a few measurable activities that we generally associate with strong campaigns. They identify supporters, raise money, make headlines, frame the debate, knock on doors, make phone calls, and turn people out to vote. Biden’s did virtually none of those things.”

There are primaries in Arizona, Florida and Illinois today. Ohio’s primary was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

After today, the majority of delegates will have been selected.

Results: Joe Biden is projected to win in Florida, Illinois and Arizona.

Leave your reactions in the comments.

“The Trump administration has been working to relax regulations governing America’s nursing homes, including rules meant to curb deadly infections among elderly residents,” the New York Times reports.

“The main federal regulator overseeing nursing homes proposed the rule changes last summer, before the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of nursing homes to fast-spreading diseases. The push followed a spate of lobbying and campaign contributions by people in the nursing-home industry.”

Vice President Mike Pence told NBC News that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.

However on Monday, President Trump himself downplayed the threat saying the “fake news media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything to inflame the coronavirus situation.”

Congressional negotiators on Wednesday clinched a bipartisan emergency $8.3 billion funding package to combat coronavirus, which both chambers are expected to pass by the end of the week, Politico reports.

“Mike Bloomberg is weighing dropping out as early as Wednesday after losing a string of Super Tuesday states where he invested a fortune in advertising,” Politico reports.

Washington Post: “Bloomberg has vowed that the campaign he built will go on even if the candidate himself pulls out, with the goal of boosting whoever the Democratic nominee is. The data program he is assembling, called Hawkfish, would continue its work, aides say, and hundreds of campaign staffers in swing states would continue to work through November.”

Earlier for members: What’s Next for Warren and Bloomberg

“President Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions,” CNN reports.

“Trump’s allies have provided him lists — not always solicited — of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda. The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.”

President Trump has commuted the 14-year prison sentence of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, the Democrat who was convicted of trying to essentially sell President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat for personal gain, the New York Times reports.

“By commuting the sentence, the president would free Mr. Blagojevich from prison without wiping out the conviction. Republicans have advised the president against it, arguing that Mr. Blagojevich’s crime epitomizes the corruption that Mr. Trump had said he wanted to tackle as president.”

Trump also pardoned former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, and financier Mike Milken.

Dan Pfeiffer: “Rather than obsess over 2016, Democrats should focus on 2012—the last year a challenger took on an incumbent. There are more parallels than you’d think: Barack Obama was a president hugely unpopular with the opposing party, but the economy on the upswing; the Republicans had a big field and took a while to coalesce around a consensus choice. In the end, that choice was Mitt Romney—and his campaign misread and misplayed the election in ways that the Democrats desperately need to pay attention to now.”

Pfeiffer’s new book is Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again.

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Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again

• Hardcover Book
• Pfeiffer, Dan (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 304 Pages - 02/18/2020 (Publication Date) - Twelve (Publisher)

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