The Morning Dispatch: Birx Warns of ‘New Phase’ of COVID Transmission

Happy Monday! For transparency’s sake, an update on our GOP Senate tracker since we last emailed you Friday morning: As of Sunday night, 42 of 53 Republican senators have condemned or otherwise thrown cold water on President Trump’s floating of an election delay. We’ve refreshed our full list here.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 44,511 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 6.1 percent of the 725,902 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 392 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday (2,786 over the weekend), bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 154,841.

• The Trump administration and House Democrats remain far apart on the next coronavirus relief package, despite talks between the two sides continuing over the weekend. Negotiators reportedly had positive discussions on Saturday, but White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows conceded they “still have a long ways to go.”

• Tropical Storm Isaias—which may make landfall as a hurricane—is poised to hit the Atlantic coast this week, bringing storm surge flooding, heavy rain, and strong wind gusts from Florida all the way up to New England.

• A wildfire ignited in southern California on Friday, and has since spread to more than 20,000 acres and forced the evacuation of nearly 8,000 residents. As of last night, no injuries had been reported.

• A three-judge panel of a federal appeals court threw out Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence, citing mistakes made by the judge ruling over Tsarnaev’s original case in not sufficiently screening jurors for biases. “Make no mistake,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote. “Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution.”

We Hate To Say It, But the Virus Is Getting Worse

If you’ve paid attention to media coverage of the coronavirus over the last week, you’d be forgiven for feeling a startling sense of déjà vu. The utility of hydroxychloroquine, the reliability of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the feasibility of reopening schools—we’ve been having the same fights since the early days of the pandemic. The impression such squabbles give is that America’s fight against the coronavirus is in a holding pattern—with nagging and often pointless partisan debates consuming far more attention than they should in the middle of a pandemic.

Unfortunately, each day brings new numbers that underscore the unsettling reality: Despite the hope that months of lockdowns would at least prepare us for the next round of fighting against the virus, we’re way out in uncharted waters when it comes to that fight now.

You’d be hard pressed to find a metric that didn’t look grim last month. New diagnoses of the virus accelerated between mid-June and mid-July before seeming to level off again—although that may be due in part to reporting lag. July 1 was the last day fewer than 50,000 new cases were reported across the country; the average over the last few weeks has been closer to 65,000 new cases per day.

Just as troubling, the national test positivity rate—the most useful metric for assessing whether our testing regime is keeping pace with the virus—continues to trend steadily in the wrong direction, as it has since mid-June.

Worst of all, COVID deaths are spiking again as well—an unsurprising occurrence, given that the death rate tends to lag behind the case rate. The CDC reported more than 1,500 coronavirus deaths last Wednesday, the worst single day total since May. More than 154,000 Americans have already died from the virus this year; the CDC believes that number might top 182,000 by August 22, according to a report from the end of July leaked to Yahoo News last week.

Given these numbers, it’s unsurprising that White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx struck a grim tone in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, warning viewers that the pandemic was entering a “new phase” of “extraordinarily widespread” transmission and beseeching citizens to follow public health guidelines in order to slow it down.

“Public health is called public health because it has a public component, and we need all of the public to help us get in control of this virus,” she said. “And that’s why we keep saying no matter where you live in America, you need to wear a mask and socially distance, do the personal hygiene pieces.”

Birx didn’t stop there: So advanced is the pandemic, she said, that “if you’re in multigenerational households and there’s an outbreak in your rural area or in your city, you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you’re positive, if you have individuals in your house with comorbidities.”

TikTok’s Very Long and Crazy Weekend

TikTok, the popular short-video sharing social media app, had quite the turbulent weekend. Hours after Bloomberg first reported on Friday that the Trump administration would force TikTok’s parent company—the Chinese business ByteDance—to divest its stake in the music and video app, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One he would be using emergency economic powers or an executive order to ban the app entirely. As of late Sunday night, we’re back to a sale from ByteDance, with Microsoft looking like the most likely landing place for TikTok.

Let’s back up a bit.

The White House has for months made clear its desire to reduce the presence of TikTok and other Chinese-owned services in the United States, citing concerns over user privacy, censorship, and misinformation. The line between the public and private sectors is often blurred in China, and the governing Communist Party has been known to exert influence through a variety of channels. TikTok—which hired Disney’s Kevin Mayer as CEO in May—has denied these charges, claiming it operates independently. But lawmakers remain skeptical. 

“Here’s what I hope that the American people will come to recognize,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Fox News yesterday. “These Chinese software companies doing business in the United States … are feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party[’s] national security apparatus—could be their facial recognition pattern, it could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they’re connected to.”

As we noted last month, many of these concerns are legitimate. “Most large businesses in China have a Communist Party cell within them,” American Enterprise Institute China expert Zack Cooper told us in mid-July. “It’s mandated. And the cell is somewhat powerful, although it changes depending on the specific company.”

So there are real reasons to be concerned that wildly popular apps like TikTok are not operating in the West as independent entities, but rather as arms of the CCP. The company has had to apologize for deleting videos expressing criticism of the CCP—even when the videos were posted from countries like America—and a November report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found a worryingly close series of links between Bytedance and the CCP.

But TikTok, for its part, has remained defiant in the face of the Trump administration’s threats. “These are the facts: 100 million Americans come to TikTok for entertainment and connection, especially during the pandemic,” read a TikTok statement released Saturday in response to the president’s comments. “TikTok US user data is stored in the US, with strict controls on employee access. TikTok’s biggest investors come from the US. We are committed to protecting our users’ privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform.”

Vanessa Pappas, the company’s U.S. general manager, also released a video statement on the issue. “We’re not going anywhere,” she said.

Microsoft—which both has the necessary cash and lacks the accompanying antitrust concerns of a Google or Facebook—has emerged in recent days as a prospective owner for the app. “Following a conversation between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Donald J. Trump, Microsoft is prepared to continue discussions to explore a purchase of TikTok in the United States,” a Sunday night corporate statement reads. “Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns. It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.”

Microsoft had reportedly paused negotiations on Saturday after Trump signaled his opposition. But enough apparently changed between Saturday and Sunday for talks to resume. Republican sources told Axios that Trump may allow the acquisition to go through in the event that it would result in a “complete separation” from TikTok’s connections to Beijing.

Still, it’s likely that the administration will be cracking down on Chinese technology companies like TikTok in the coming weeks. “I have that authority. I can do it with an executive order or that,” Trump assured reporters when asked how he would force such a separation. An order hasn’t been released yet, but would almost assuredly refer TikTok for a Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) review. The committee, which is helmed by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and was strengthened in a 2018 bill, reviews corporate transactions involving foreign entities for national security concerns. The Trump administration has already relied on CFIUS to block or reverse a handful of Chinese transactions.

Worth Your Time

• Historian Claire Potter’s new book is about the danger political junkies present to the health of our democracy. Using the online shaming of the Covington Catholic students in early 2019 as an example, Potter argues in The Bulwark that similar sagas will keep playing out until we stop prioritizing our partisan addictions over everything else. “Digital media outlets are still shaping stories to create conflict, and mainstream media outlets still lean on social media feeds as tip lines,” she writes. “[These practices] will continue to hurt all of us until we grapple with what digital media has become, what role it plays in our political imagination, and why we are so unwilling to put our responsibility to be informed citizens ahead of the pleasure and excitement of being political junkies.”

• Is the left’s tendency to delegitimize elections that place its opponents into positions of power born out of genuine concern for our democratic institutions, or simply a political tool to write-off unfavorable electoral outcomes? The answer, Sahil Handa argues in his first piece for Persuasion, is some combination of both. “Two things can be true at once,” he writes. “Even though some liberals do have a penchant for paranoia, there really are plenty of right-wing demagogues who seek to dismantle democracy.” Drawing on examples of authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland, Handa urges readers to reserve the label of “anti-democratic” for policies—like holding unfair elections and dismantling the independent press—that directly target democracy. Applying the term as catch-all for every unpopular and even abhorrent action by a political leader “helps aspiring autocrats shift the debate onto their preferred turf—from corruption and democratic malfeasance to immigration, religion, and the culture wars.” For more on this theme, check out last week’s episode of The Argument.

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• David’s Sunday’s French Press revisits the topic of Christian political engagement in light of John Lewis’s death, arguing that the mid-20th-century civil rights movement was one of the best marriages of Christian belief and Christian behavior in American history. He wonders if such a movement would still be possible today. “It is now increasingly clear that the un-Christian de-linking of ends and means is working its dark magic on the United States of America, including on the American church,” David writes. “When confronting lesser evils, our political selves are behaving far worse than we should, and there’s strong evidence that the religious right is now joining the irreligious right on the march down that dark path.”

• In Friday’s G-File, Jonah—somewhat begrudgingly—enters the “burn it down” vs. “save the Senate” debate happening right now among Trump-skeptics on the right, and his answer is sure to disappoint those on both sides of the argument. It doesn’t matter. “Problems without solutions aren’t really problems,” he quotes James Burnham as saying. “Even if the burn-it-down folks are right that the ideal option would be to raze the current GOP and build it anew, they can’t do it.” Be sure listen to this week’s Ruminant too. He expands on these themes, as well as “cancel rent” insanity, “plandemic” insanity, and additional flavors of insanity.

• Democratic political strategist Joe Trippi joined Sarah and Steve on Friday’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast to discuss presidential campaign mechanics, Biden’s veepstakes, and the rise of personality politics.

• Check out Nate’s review of White Noise, a new documentary that provides a behind-the-scenes look into the lives of America’s most avid white supremacists. “Acolytes of the alt-right are often portrayed as larger-than-life supervillains,” Nate writes. “White Noise reveals them to be broken, deeply isolated individuals.”

• On the site, Charlotte Lawson delves into the mysterious and shrouded word of high-end art dealing, an industry that is lightly regulated in the United States. It’s a situation that allows sanctioned Russian oligarchs to have access to the U.S. economy.

• Check your inbox for the latest edition of The Sweep, Sarah’s newsletter about the 2020 campaign. Today she looks at what might happen if, as in New York’s primary in June, many mail-in ballots are rejected, as well as explaining how campaigns create “voter scores” and what they mean. If you don’t receive The Sweep, you can sign up to get it here.

Let Us Know

How did the surge of new coronavirus cases in June and July affect your life and your decisionmaking with respect to the pandemic? Had your community started to tiptoe toward a return to normalcy? Is it still? Has your personal comfort level venturing back out into the world changed?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Nate Hochman (@njhochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.