Senate Republicans allege their probe of the Biden family has nothing to do with the 2020 election — and also that it totally does.After former Vice President Joe Biden rounded up several Super Tuesday states and secured a delegate lead in race for the Democratic nomination, Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) delivered an update on his party's investigation into Biden's son Hunter Biden. Johnson said he'd release an "interim report" on the probe within the next one to two months, apparently to help Democratic primary voters make their choice, Politico's Andrew Desiderio reports.Senate Republicans have been probing Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine ever since the impeachment trial of President Trump ended without a conviction. This probe and its subsequent report aren't intended to influence the election, Johnson said before pulling a total 180 and saying "if I were a Democrat primary voter, I'd want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote."> “These are questions that Joe Biden has never adequately answered,” Johnson tells us.> > — Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) March 4, 2020Just on Tuesday, Johnson told his committee he was considering subpoenaing documents related to Hunter Biden's work on the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, Reuters reported. That suggestion came without any clear reason, except the fact that the former vice president had just won South Carolina's Democratic primary.More stories from theweek.com It's 2020 and women are exhausted Could Democrats win the battle against Trump but lose the war against Trumpism? Warren isn't endorsing a 2020 candidate just yet

Trump administration’s lack of transparency can make problem worse by sowing mistrust and can ‘endanger the public’ * Coronavirus news – live updatesTwo days before Larry Kudlow was announced as a member of the White House taskforce on coronavirus, the director of the National Economic Council declared coronavirus “contained” in the US, despite a plethora of data that suggested it was not.“I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight,” Kudlow told CNBC, swaddling himself in a comforting narrative that was probably destroyed in his first meeting with the taskforce.Kudlow’s public statements on the level of threat to the US posed by the virus outbreak sit uneasily in the minds of health experts warning of its severity, but they probably rested far more peacefully in the White House, where the favored message seems to be: there is nothing to see here.There have been seven deaths from coronavirus in Washington state and many more positive cases are expected in the US, prompting public health experts to warn that honest, measured communication is of the utmost importance.But that has not been the case with the Trump administration’s response so far, which has been marked by late action, delays, a lack of resourcing on tests, attacks on Democrats for warning of the seriousness of the crisis and, critics say, a politicized emphasis on placating the political concerns of the occupant of the Oval Office, rather than pursuing effective virus containment policy.Michael Carome, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization, said if the government’s response was not transparent, it could make the problem worse by sowing mistrust.“People may do things that undermine the public health response to it because they may not believe what the government is saying, they may not follow instructions for how they protect themselves and respond to disruptions that may result,” Carome said.Carome also drew a line between Trump’s communication style – which is often brash, unreliable and incoherent – to the traditionally measured, fact-based style of health experts.Last week, a senior health department official alleged that she was retaliated against after raising concerns that staff had been sent to assist Americans evacuated from China because of coronavirus without proper training or appropriate protective gear.“If efforts are being made to muzzle them, to control messaging so that it suits the political needs of the administration, that’s ultimately going to endanger the public,” Carome said.The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, hinted that publicly discussing facts while keeping the president happy was easier said than done.“You should never destroy your own credibility,” Fauci, told Politico. “And you don’t want to go to war with a president. But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”For 35 years, Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health. He said he was not being muzzled from speaking about the coronavirus outbreak – which he does not expect the US to escape “unscathed” – but that he has been told to run interviews past the vice-president’s office for clearance.Fauci was one of several top public health officials reportedly told to run their messaging past Pence, after a CDC official warned the spread of coronavirus was inevitable.The CDC’s announcement triggered a dramatic response from the media and public health officials across the US, but Trump insisted everything was fine.Last week, Trump tweeted: “Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” He has repeatedly claimed warmer weather will cause coronavirus to disappear, though it is too early to know if that’s true. The day after the CDC said coronavirus’s spread was inevitable, the president said it wasn’t.Over the weekend, he said Democrats were politicizing the crisis, and compared it to impeachment as their latest “hoax”.Political appointees of the Trump administration, and the president’s children, have lined up to defend Trump’s response.The acting white house chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told people to turn off the television and ignore media reports about the virus last week.Mulvaney said the media had started paying attention to coronavirus because “they think this is going to be what brings down the president”. He did not mention the increased attention came days after the CDC declared coronavirus’s spread in the US was inevitable.“When politics starts to get into the conversation, then people might start to feel they need to take a side and they might start filtering public health information through a partisan lens,” said Nathan Myers, associate professor in the political science department at Indiana State University.If a health crisis is seen as a political issue, it can affect support for emergency funding to fight the outbreak and policies meant to stem its spread.Myers highlighted how only Democrats signed on to a congressional letter asking for more information about faulty coronavirus test kits distributed by the CDC, a demonstrable problem that has even been raised by a few conservative media commentators.“Oversight over something like a public health emergency should very much be a bipartisan thing,” Myers said. “Republicans can ask for information about these kinds of topics without attacking the administration or attacking the president.”Myers’s book Pandemics and Polarization examined how a Republican-held Congress’s distrust of Barack Obama’s administration affected the government’s response to the Zika virus. Months before the 2016 presidential election, Republicans held up $1.1bn in funding to the outbreak by inserting provisions that would restrict funding to Planned Parenthood and reverse a ban on flying the Confederate flag at veterans’ cemeteries.“This is why people hate Congress,” Senator Tim Kaine said at the time.One of the few serious bipartisan efforts to emerge during the coronavirus outbreak is legislation to create automatic funding to respond to public health emergencies, much like existing processes to respond to natural disasters.“That’s almost saying we don’t think Congress can be bipartisan enough to come together on these supplemental funding bills so we need to have a preparedness fund in place so it takes the politics out of the situation,” Myers said.Despite a wave of support from Republican lawmakers, there has been pushback to Trump’s subdued messaging in the conservative magazine National Review. The writer Michael Brendan Dougherty said: “The wrong Donald Trump has shown up to deal with the coronavirus.”Noting that Trump is a germaphobe who has been critical of China, Dougherty writes that instead “we’re getting Trump the market whisperer. We’re getting a Trump who is obviously bothered by the drop in the Dow Jones. We’re getting a Trump who plans to campaign on the conventional measures of success favored by his predecessors. We’re getting a Trump who is downplaying the seriousness of this disease, who is probably acting too late, and who is making promises he can’t keep.”The National Review editor, Rich Lowry, was also critical of the administration’s decision to downplay the outbreak.“By pooh-poohing worries about the virus and saying everything is under control, it is setting itself up for the charge, if things get even a little bad, that it was self-deluding and overly complacent,” Lowry wrote. “It will be accused of making mission-accomplished statements before the mission truly began.”Those articles were missing from a missive the White House sent Monday night to reporters with subject line “Praise for the President’s Coronavirus Response”.The message linked to tweets from lawmakers and three editorials in two right-leaning newspapers applauding the president.

"I'm focused on my job and also on my own campaign, and I'm just not going to get involved in presidential politics," said Collins.

(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s popularity has taken a hit, but it’s his prime minister who’s paid the price.Premier Oleksiy Honcharuk was the chief casualty of a cabinet reshuffle that also envisages a new finance minister. The departure of Honcharuk -- who was replaced by his 44-year-old deputy, Denys Shmyhal -- was overwhelmingly approved Wednesday by parliament.The shakeup marks a change of tack for Zelenskiy less than a year after he picked a government stacked with fresh faces to break free from the country’s notoriously corrupt post-Soviet politics. Honcharuk, 35, was installed as Ukraine’s youngest-ever prime minister to oversee an ambitious economic reboot.Things haven’t gone according to plan, however. The pace of economic expansion has plunged and billions of dollars in international aid have been held up, with the government’s poor performance dragging down Zelenskiy’s own ratings.That’s compounded a baptism by fire for the former TV comic, who months into his presidency found himself center stage in Donald Trump’s impeachment and negotiating face-to-face with Vladimir Putin over the Kremlin-backed war in Ukraine’s east.The president is a “mirror of public opinion,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research institute in Kyiv. “He feels the discontent. He understands that, unfortunately, his bet on rookie politicians unlike their predecessors hasn’t yielded results.”Zelenskiy can’t blame everything on the government.It’s his own ties to billionaire Igor Kolomoisky that have raised eyebrows among investors. Weighing a now long-delayed $5.5 billion loan, the International Monetary Fund frets about the tycoon’s efforts to undo the nationalization of Ukraine’s biggest bank, which he used to own.Criminal charges for the alleged fraud that prompted the state’s takeover are yet to arrive.And the fear is that in turning to old-guard politicians -- Ihor Umanskyi, the replacement for respected Finance Minister Oksana Markarova, served in governments in 2009 and 2014-2015 -- Zelenskiy is extinguishing voters’ hopes of a new start.Oleksandr Kornienko, the president’s party chief, said before the changes were announced that incoming officials would need experience managing state-run or private businesses.Shmyhal, for instance, was deputy head of an energy company owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, until last year, and also briefly managed the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk.But the reshuffle doesn’t mark the end of the “new faces philosophy,” according to Kornienko.“Trust in the president remains, and there’s trust in his economic and social program,” he said. “We have very nice goals for the government but in some spheres it’s been chaotic.”In the end, Honcharuk’s missteps -- which also include an unpopular farmland reform and a failure to bring down household utility costs -- were too much. Economic growth is less than a third of Zelenskiy’s 5% target and risks abound, most recently from the first case of coronavirus.Having rejected a previous request by Honcharuk to resign, Zelenskiy hasn’t been so forgiving this time round.(Updates with parliament approving new PM in second paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Daryna Krasnolutska in Kyiv at dkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net;Volodymyr Verbyany in Kiev at vverbyany1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Andrew Langley, Balazs PenzFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.— Donald Trump has made a career of turning weaknesses into strengths.

On the eve of Super Tuesday, on a day when Democrats began to coalesce around a suddenly surging Joe Biden and national headlines carried news of four new deaths from the coronavirus, President Trump spent a full six minutes near the start of his hourlong speech at his rally here talking about the good news about what is fast approaching a pandemic.

Some 10,000 people packed Bojangles’ Coliseum to hear him, a sea of red MAGA hats and Keep America Great signs. If experts somewhere in America were worried about the dangers of big crowds, or Trump's own response to the epidemic, it wasn’t in evidence here.

It was clear from the way Trump embraced the subject—his first order of business was to trumpet the stock market’s meteoric one-day rise—that Trump sees the spreading illness not just as threat but as an opportunity. Dinged in recent days for his response to the spread of Covid-19—critics calling it some combination of incompetent, incoherent or dangerously indifferent—Trump answered Monday by stoking the sort of nationalist sentiment that’s been so central to his political identity and ascent. Anxiety continues to mount worldwide as the number of affected countries—and the number of cases—continues to climb. But even on a day when four more deaths were recorded in Washington state, Trump used the crisis to renew a fight on an instinctually comfortable front. Instead of pretending it wasn’t real, a manufactured hoax by Democrats to make him look bad, Trump called it “a problem,” but one that highlighted his administration’s signature policy.

“We have strong borders,” he said.

“We’re doing everything in our power to keep the sick and infected people from coming into our country,” he said.

“There are fringe globalists who would rather keep our borders open,” he said.

“No country,” he said, “is better equipped than America to handle new threats, and no people are more skilled, talented, tough or driven than Americans—Americans—and together we are in the midst of the great American comeback.”

The coronavirus and its contribution to last week’s precipitous stock market tumble underscored the risk it still might pose for Trump as the electioneering of 2020 only intensifies. Who knows how the virus, which experts estimate kills up to 2 percent of the people infected, will affect the country? A widespread death toll or a sputtering economy could hobble the president’s reelection prospects. But Trump, of course, is and always has been a wizard of spin, a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale who believes reality can be bent to one’s will based on the stubborn insistence of assertion. “He knows of no other way,” New York gossip columnist George Rush once told me, “and that is to spin until he’s woven some gossamer fabric out of garbage.”

Yet can he spin his way out of a potential pandemic?

“With his base,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell posited Monday in a text message exchange, “yes.”

Under a gray, prerally, midafternoon sky, outside the aged minor-league hockey arena in this city in one of the most important swing spots on the Super Tuesday slate, as auxiliary parking lots overflowed and enterprising residents looking to make some extra money waved cars onto their yards, past the shirts, placards and pins saying “NO MORE BULLSHIT” and “FUCK YOUR FEELINGS” and “ALL ABOARD THE TRUMP TRAIN,” I encountered Rod Webber.

“Trump or Jesus?” he asked passersby.

The documentarian and political provocateur from Boston pointed his phone at the people.

Some said, “Jesus.”

Others said, “Trump.”

“It’s 50-50,” he told me.

“It feels like we’re at Jonestown,” Webber continued, looking out at the gathering sea of red hats. “I went to 40 Trump rallies in 2016, and the Kool-Aid was never as strong as it is these days.”

The line of those waiting to get in was long. The people in it that I talked to were not worried about the coronavirus, or Trump’s response to the coronavirus, or anything else, really, about his performance as president.

The first man I met, for instance, was Bob Palisin, a retired Presbyterian pastor from Concord who wasn’t wearing a red hat but rather one that was suede and tan and sported a button on the front. “BAN IDIOTS NOT GUNS,” it said.

“I think he’s handled it as best he can,” Palisin said when I asked him about Trump and the virus. He downplayed its severity. “The weakest people,” said Palisin, 81, “are the ones who are most likely to be drastically affected by it.” He referred to the people who died at the nursing facility in Washington state. “People who are, let’s say, sick and have diseases may be more susceptible to demise,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that healthy people are not going to be able to fight it off.”

Next I spotted Shane and Tiffany Sheppard, 41 and 35, respectively, up from Augusta, Georgia. Both were wearing hooded sweatshirts touting Donald Trump Jr. to be the president starting in 2024.

“And Ivanka after—even Ivanka before,” he said, referring to Trump’s older daughter and White House adviser.

“So,” I asked, “we’ll have a president with the last name Trump until, like, we’re all dead?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Barron in 2056.”

He and his wife also were unconcerned about the coronavirus.

“Just gotta wash your hands,” she said. “Don’t touch your face.”

“He’s done everything anybody else would do,” he said of Trump. “What are you supposed to do? ‘Let’s get a trillion dollars to help’—help do what? The cold spreads.” Sheppard echoed what Palisin had said about the most vulnerable. “The only people it’s killed so far,” he said, “are the elderly and the people who are already sick.”

He brought up China.

“China,” he said, “China doesn’t like Trump. They’re having to pay a lot more money now than they did before. They’ve been robbin’ us for years …”

“So,” I said, “are you saying that China has manufactured some virus and sent it our way?”

“No,” he said. “I’m just saying they might be, they might be, they might be making a bigger—you know, who knows? I’m not into conspiracy theories.”

He and his wife told me to Google a video on YouTube of a man in China eating live baby mice.

I wondered what the connection was to the coronavirus.

“You’ve just got a lot of people who don’t have healthy habits,” she said.

Over closer to the porta-potties was Rob Ward from Raleigh. The 44-year-old commercial real estate broker was wearing a MAGA onesie made by a company called American AF.

“From what I’ve read, you’re much more likely to die from the flu than you are from the coronavirus,” said Ward, who actually supported Ted Cruz in the primaries in 2016 and voted third party instead of voting for Trump in the general election but now was … a 44-year-old commercial real estate broker wearing a MAGA onesie.

“I think he’s done a great job,” Ward said, referring to his response to the virus and pretty much everything else. “I think he gets criticized no matter what he does.”

I mentioned his use of the word “hoax” talking about the virus last week at his rally in South Carolina.

“I never heard the word ‘hoax,’” he said.

“You know, H1N1 and swine flu and all these other things, you know what’s funny,” he continued. “I read an article about the years that they came out. They were all election years. I mean, it was, like, our last six viruses that have happened in the past, like, 15 to 20 years have all been in an election year. Not that I’m saying, you know, it’s manufactured or anything like that, but I just saw it and thought it was interesting.”

I asked him where he’d seen that.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Did it come across Facebook for you?” I said.

“It did,” he said.

Inside the arena, with 8,600 seats and additional standing space on the floor, Apostle D.J. Wiggins opened with an invocation. “God,” he said, “we thank you that we have a president who is about protecting America and not infecting America.”

After the Pledge of Allegiance, after the national anthem, after Lara and Eric Trump and Diamond and Silk elicited standing ovations, Trump took the stage to rapturous applause.

In his speech, the president called Biden “Sleepy Joe” and Bernie Sanders “Crazy Bernie” and Mike Bloomberg “Mini Mike” and “a mess,” and he described Elizabeth Warren with the racist slur he’s been using for years. He said his impeachment was “one of the great hoaxes in the history of the country.” He said he liked to use rallies the night before primaries to “troll” the Democrats. “We are kicking ass,” he concluded. “Winning, winning, winning,” he said.

But he did just about all of that after he dealt with the matter of the coronavirus.

“My administration has also taken the most aggressive action in modern history to protect Americans from the coronavirus,” said Trump, who in the past has described shaking hands as “terrible” and “barbaric” and “one of the curses of American society” and who two years ago asked lawmakers why the United States takes immigrants from “shithole” countries.

“Our tough and early actions have really been proven to be 100 percent right,” he said.

“We’ve really done a great job with it,” he said.

“We’re keeping our borders strong,” he said.

When the rally was over, all the people in their red hats walked back out into the dark, past the vendors hawking the shirts saying “DONALD FUCKIN’ TRUMP” and “MY ASS GOT ACQUITTED.”

Trump had no choice but to talk about the coronavirus because “the media has made a big deal out of it,” Sandy Wooten, 62, from nearby Waxhaw, told me.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I think as long as you wash your hands and have some brains in between your ears,” she said, smoking a cigarette walking back to her truck, “you’ll be fine.”

President Trump on Monday withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to a senior Pentagon post, after reports that she had questioned the suspension of military aid to Ukraine, a key element in the inquiry leading to Trump's impeachment.

Elaine McCusker raised concerns about Trump withholding aid from Ukraine, which was at the center of his impeachment.