President Take-No-Responsibility has scapegoats

Impatient with the economic devastation wrought by social distancing and other mitigation measures — and fearful of the potential damage to his reelection chances — Trump has been adamant in private discussions with advisers about reopening the country next month.

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Aides stressed that, despite the president’s fixation on May 1 as a reopening date, the timing remains fluid and no final decision has been made.

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Although governors and mayors have the authority to impose or lift stay-at-home orders and to permit businesses and schools in their localities to reopen, recommendations or guidance from the president or federal agencies could be influential — one of the reasons Trump has called his impending decision the most important of his presidency.

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Trump has been agitating to find ways for businesses to reopen, mindful that he could end up paying a political price for the staggering number of unemployed Americans.

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[T]he debate this week has been over how to implement the return, what data could be used to justify the decision, and how to build public support for it to provide the president maximum political cover, according to one senior administration official involved in the discussions and a second person who has been briefed on them.

Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that if it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts.

  WaPo

So that's why he was reading that list of corporate names at his "briefing" yesterday. (His briefs are actually campaign sessions, and there's nothing "brief" about them - they're running as long as 3 hours.)

During Tuesday’s media briefing, Trump read aloud the names of scores of business leaders, as well as labor, religious and thought leaders, who will be consulted in coming days by the administration.

Painted targets on their backs.

Some [...] are concerned that under federal law, the contents of the meetings would have to become public, should the body meet a certain number of times.

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Conservative advocacy groups such as FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council are also mobilizing to help push the White House and Republican lawmakers to relax public health restrictions. Informally, they have started calling their group “Save Our Country,” although the project has no official name. The Heritage Foundation is launching a parallel set of working groups that is expected to deliver its recommendations on reopening the economy to Vice President Pence.

One idea that has emerged among these conservative groups is to push a liability shield for businesses that would insulate them from lawsuits if their employees get the coronavirus while at work.

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“There are about 10 metropolitan-area cities, and like 90 percent of cases are in 10 metropolitan areas, so you treat those metropolitan areas differently than the rest of the country,” [Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who informally advises the White House] said, adding that he has discussed this “Zip code idea” with the administration.

“You find the counties and Zip codes that don’t have the disease, and you get those things opened up,” Moore said.

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"I’m not speaking on behalf of the White House there. But they are looking at that approach to figuring out where the economy can open up first. This isn’t rocket science.”

No, it's not, and guess what? Those places that "don't have the disease" are not the places that run this country's economy. The places that actually do, are the metropolitan-area cities, and that's where the bulk of the disease is. So....opening up the disease-free areas (if there are any), won't get the country's economy back up. So, how's this genius plan supposed to work?

At the White House news conference that day, Trump stressed the need for Americans to get “back to work,” saying he could envision a reopening scenario based on geography.

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Trump penned a letter to the nation’s governors in late March stating that as the federal government expanded its testing and surveillance capabilities, it planned to categorize counties as “high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk.”

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“We may take sections of our country,” Trump said at the time. “We may take large sections of our country that aren’t so seriously affected, and we may do it that way. But we’ve got to start the process pretty soon.”

Exact same problem.

Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, was asked how such county classifications would work, since no domestic travel restrictions exist to prevent people from moving between, say, a low-risk and high-risk jurisdiction. Birx said a staggered reopening plan would hinge on “highly responsible behavior between counties.”

That's a point, but it's not the big problem.

Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist who is close to the White House, said Trump and his advisers are looking at “a whole panoply of issues,” including staggering the reopening by sectors.

“Everyone wants to get the economy back and going again,” Laffer said. “Aren’t you a little stir-crazy?”

Better than being plain crazy, like the lot of you.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.