The Morning Dispatch: The Great Reopening Inches Forward

Happy Monday! As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about—murder hornets are now a thing. You know, murder hornets! Giant insects with “mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins” whose stings are “like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into [your] flesh.” Murder hornets!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Sunday night, there are now 1,158,041 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States (an increase of 25,529/2.3 percent since yesterday) and 67,682 deaths (an increase of 1,314/2 percent increase since yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5.8 percent (the true mortality rate is likely lower, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 7,053,366 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (237,019 conducted since yesterday), 16.4 percent have come back positive. Meanwhile, 180,152 have recovered from the virus (an increase of 4,770/2.7 percent since yesterday). 

• A bipartisan group of members of the House Judiciary Committee has called on Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to testify before the Congress following a Wall Street Journal investigation about the e-commerce giant’s competitive practices. 

• North Korean state media released photos of Kim Jong-un—the country’s dictator—at a ceremony on Friday celebrating the completion of a fertilizer factory. The outing was Kim’s first public appearance in 20 days and worked to quell rumors that he had fallen ill or died. President Trump celebrated Kim’s reappearance, tweeting, “I, for one, am glad to see he is back, and well!”

• Sen. Mitt Romney is calling for hazard pay for health care, grocery store, and other frontline workers in critical industries putting themselves at risk. His plan—dubbed “Patriot Pay”—would pay these employees up to an additional $12/hour through the end of July, with three-quarters of the bonus paid for through a refundable payroll tax credit, and one-quarter of the bonus picked up by the workers’ employers.

• President Trump has nominated a new Department of Health and Human Services inspector general to replace Christi Grimm, who had angered the president last month by reporting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals.

Who’s Coming to the Great Reopening? 

The great American reopening, which began to inch forward in 18 states last week, is further expanding today. Six more states—Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Florida—are beginning to relax at least some of their restrictions, each permitting some combination of retail businesses, beauty parlors, and restaurants to resume operation.

The relaxation orders still contain major stipulations: Florida’s restaurants, for instance, will be permitted to operate at only up to 25 percent capacity for now, and businesses in its hardest-hit counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—can’t reopen yet at all. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the next stage in our coronavirus story, the slow, tentative creep back toward normal-ish behavior, has arrived.

As states continue to open, the biggest question governing how quickly the economy bounces back from its freeze will no longer be one of public policy. After all, state governments can only give permission for economic activity to resume—they can’t actually order people to jump back into the transactional behaviors that constitute the economy in the first place. The big question, then, will be how confident consumers are likely to be in deciding whether to venture back to their workplace or to patronize their favorite businesses.

Those decisions will be influenced by public policy and political leadership, of course, but not entirely so. Individual citizens and families will soon be asked to perform the kind of zero-sum cost-benefit analysis for themselves that politicians and pundits have been squabbling over at the policy level for nearly two months: Can I afford to go back to work and perhaps raise my own chances of getting sick? Can I afford not to?

Two other big factors play a role, too. For one: Everyone’s getting really sick of being inside. Over the weekend, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver used mobility data from Apple Maps to get a sense of where in America people remained pretty much hunkered in place and where they’ve started to move around more. For one, they’re moving around more in red states than in blue ones, which makes sense for two reasons: Red states are largely more decentralized anyway, and GOP officials have in general been much more gung-ho than Democratic ones about moving away from the shelter-in-place status quo. But there was another component that correlated with increased mobility, too: better weather. In places where spring has recently sprung in earnest—as opposed to places that remain reasonably balmy through the winter—people have been much more likely to succumb to the temptation to get out and about.

The other factor: We’re getting to the point where people feel as though lockdowns should be just about over, in terms of their initial assumptions about how long this would go when we locked down in the first place. In one Rasmussen poll conducted at the end of March, only 37 percent of people said they expected the shutdown to last three months or longer, compared to 58 percent who expected it’d be over in either a couple weeks or a couple months—in other words, by now.

Still, experts continue to warn that while the first curve of viral infections has been curbed, the threat has not abated. Even in states that are reopening, many business owners are bracing for an extremely slow ramp-up back to—they hope—the booming economy we were enjoying before. Many restaurants and brick-and-mortar retailers operate with very thin profit margins even in fat times; permission to reopen at 25 percent capacity doesn’t put them back on a path to solvency.

People in some industries glumly anticipate it will be a while before people feel financially stable enough to revisit them at all. Last week, Andrew wrote about the difficulties facing small hospitals and private medical practices thanks to freezes placed on elective surgeries in most states. Many states are now beginning to lift those bans. Dr. Mark Mazow, a Dallas ophthalmologist whom we’ve spoken to before, told us over the weekend that, while elective surgeries resume in his state this week, it’ll be a long time before he’s anywhere close to back to normal.

“Patients are kind of scared to come back right now,” Dr. Mazow said. “They’re still reluctant to come out yet, because of legitimate concerns of a second wave, and it’s going to be going on for a while. And they’re not going to have the money for their own out-of-pocket deductibles, copays, because of their own personal finances. They may have been laid off or may not have benefits anymore. Their 401(k)’s have tanked because of the stock market… Maybe if we’re lucky, in the fourth quarter, we’re gonna be back to closer to normal volumes. But I don’t think anyone really thinks that we’re gonna be having a large volume of patients coming through for routine care anytime soon.”

The Reade Denouement

On Friday morning, Joe Biden directly denied that he sexually assaulted a former staffer in 1993 during an interview with Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC. Pressed several times by Brzezinski during the 15 minute, one-on-one questioning, the former vice president said, “It was 27 years ago, this never happened, and when she first made the claim, we made it clear that it never happened, and that’s as simple as that.” 

A large portion of the interview discussed a complaint that Tara Reade says she filed with the Senate personnel office in 1993. Biden sent a letter to the secretary of the Senate asking her “to establish the location of the records [and] to direct a search for the alleged complaint and to make public the results of this search.” In a statement, Biden said, “there is only one place a complaint of this kind could be—the National Archives.”

Brzezinski repeatedly asked Biden why he was not willing to submit to a search of his own personal Senate records, which he donated to the University of Delaware but are not set to be released until two years after Biden leaves public life. “They could be really taken out of context,” Biden told Brzezinski, while insisting that those papers would not include any personnel records.

Reade was initially scheduled to make her first television appearance and share her side of the story on Fox News Sunday, but she withdrew, citing concerns for her personal safety. “I find it astounding—the hypocrisy that Democrats are talking about women being able to tell their story safely,” she told Fox News on Saturday. “I’m a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat, but yet here I am trying to talk about my history with Joe Biden and I’m just the target of online harassment.”

But additional reporting over the weekend raised doubts regarding key parts of any potential complaint Reade may have filed. In 2019, Reade told the Associated Press that she “chickened out” after going to the Senate personnel office. Pressed about the discrepancy, Reade told the Associated Press she did file a complaint, but it may not have alleged sexual assault or used the term sexual harassment. “I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty and it made me uncomfortable,” she said. “I know that I was too scared to write about the sexual assault … the main word I used—and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment—I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’” 

Reade responded to the AP story by telling Fox News, “We didn’t use [the term sexual harassment] as much back in 1993, so I don’t know but that’s not to say that there isn’t a box that I didn’t check. Until we get that form, we don’t know.”

Also on Friday, the news organization Law & Crime reported that the niece of former Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that she had been sexually harassed by Biden when she was 14 years old at the 2008 Delaware Gridiron Dinner. The report included six sources who went on the record that the accuser told them of the harassment at the time, or shortly thereafter. But subsequent reporting revealed that Biden did not attend the Gridiron Dinner that year or the year prior.

In her Saturday New York Times column, Maureen Dowd summed up the week’s revelations as follows: “In the end, these moments highlight the hypocrisy of both parties. Each case has to stand or fall on its own facts, patterns, corroborations, investigations—not on viewing it only through partisan goggles.”

Worth Your Time

• “Amid social distancing, authorities nationwide are reporting a surge in fatal opioid overdoses. Addiction and recovery advocates say the U.S. is now battling two epidemics at once.” In this sobering piece from The Daily Beast, Kate Briquelet lays out how the upending of the world has taken a heavy toll on the fragile lives of those already suffering from America’s ongoing—and, as of now, largely forgotten—opioid epidemic. 

• Over the weekend, the George W. Bush Presidential Center posted a short video message from the former president urging Americans to stick together during our current crisis. “Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat,” Bush said. “In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.” It’s worth listening to if you haven’t seen it yet. (Your mileage may vary here; while we liked the video quite a bit, the current president apparently did not.)

• It’s clearer than ever now that the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shutdown has done real damage to President Trump’s standing going into this November’s election. As this column from National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar shows, that slip in standing is making itself felt downstream in the GOP ecosystem: Where the party’s previous congressional strategy hinged on candidates embracing the president at all costs, GOP strategists are now leaning toward a different playbook: talking up candidates’ local work to help their communities during the crisis, and avoiding talking about the president’s role in managing it at all. 

Something Fun

We’ve always had a soft spot for Princeton scholar Robert P. George—one of the leading lights of conservative political thought today and, it turns out, a pretty good banjo and classical guitar player. Click and be soothed!

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Sarah and Steve were joined by Fox News’ Bret Baier on the latest Dispatch Podcast to break down the big stories of the 2020 election: Justin Amash entering the fray, Joe Biden’s veepstakes and the sexual assault allegation he’s facing, and, of course, how President Trump is handling the coronavirus response.

• Joe Biden’s Morning Joe appearance last week inspired Friday’s G-File, in which Jonah examines the “take women seriously” argument. “It would be nice if we could reduce people to shorthand categories and judge their factual claims on some formulaic scorecard that has no bearing on specific facts. … But that’s not how a decent civilization operates. By all means, take all women seriously—and men, too—but go only where the facts lead you.”

• Jonah takes on the “binary choice” elections argument in the latest episode of The Remnant before diving into his thoughts on the Reade allegation and our political class of perpetual underdogs.

• “Each person involved in the controversy is of equal worth, a human being created in God’s image,” David reminds us as he writes about Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden in the most recent French Press. So, what if we loved them both? he asks.

• Political and public health leaders emphasized at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak the importance of “flattening the curve” to ensure hospital systems were not overwhelmed. Well, our curves have been flattened, and the direst predictions of health care inundation and rationing never came to pass. So what are we still doing under lockdown? Declan’s got a piece on the site examining how public health directives have shifted—or not—over the course of the pandemic.

Let Us Know

Federal prosecutors are looking into conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi after he accidentally sent an email to Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, instead of Vladimir Zelenko, a New York family doctor who had been pushing hydroxychloroquine. 

The details are here if you want ‘em, but, more importantly, our request of you: Let us know of a time you sent a message to the wrong person and chaos ensued.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph of a bartender serving customers at a roadside bar in Atlanta by Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images.