(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump says mail-in voting hurts Republican candidates because it enables fraud among other unspecified reasons, an assertion widely called false by fact-checkers.Now yet another study disputes Trump’s claim that widespread mail-in voting would mean that “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”The study by Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer Wu, Jesse Yoder and Andrew B. Hall of the Democracy & Polarization Lab at Stanford University found that there is no advantage to either Democrats or Republicans to expanded mail-in voting.Looking at states that moved to vote-by-mail county by county, the researchers found that it didn’t affect either party’s share of either turnout or the vote and only modestly boosted average turnout rates.Vote-by-mail “has no discernible effects on either partisan turnout or election outcomes. It is remarkably neutral in its partisan effects,” tweeted Hall.Amash Says He’s Considering a White House Run (12:07 p.m.)Justin Amash, a Michigan representative who left the Republican Party to become an independent, says he’s still considering a bid for the White House.On Monday, after President Donald Trump claimed that a president’s “authority is total,” Amash wrote that “Americans who believe in limited government deserve another option.” When a supporter replied urging him to run, Amash tweeted: “Thanks. I am looking at it closely this week.”On Wednesday, Amash’s campaign told ABC in a statement that he would make a decision “soon.”Amash, a libertarian who is considered one of the more conservative members of Congress, left the GOP in July and voted for Trump’s impeachment. -- Emma KineryAOC Says She’s Not Yet Ready to Endorse Biden (11:11 a.m.)Joe Biden won the backing of progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren this week, but he’ll have to do a little more work to win over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.In an interview with Politico published Wednesday, the freshman representative from New York said she wants the presumptive Democratic nominee to “clarify” his positions on health care and the environment.“We are having conversations with Biden’s team and we will see what some of these policy conversations are looking like,” she said.Specifically, she wants to know more about Biden’s plans to help Puerto Rico, reform immigration and expand health care, calling his recent proposal to expand Medicare to Americans at age 60 inadequate. “I don’t think the vice president has a climate change policy that is sufficient,” she added. -- Erik WassonComing Up:Voting in Wyoming’s mail-in caucuses ends on April 17. Voting in Ohio mail-in primary ends on April 28.For 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.

A federal judge on Wednesday delayed the trial of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two associates of U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, on charges of violating campaign finance laws to Feb. 1, 2021 because of difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The four-month delay means Parnas and Fruman, who were involved in an alleged Ukraine pressure campaign that underlay Trump's recent impeachment trial, will likely not be in the media glare in the final weeks of Trump's reelection campaign leading up to the Nov. 3 presidential election. The Ukraine-born Parnas and Belarus-born Fruman were charged over their alleged use of a shell company to make an illegal $325,000 donation to a committee supporting Trump's re-election.

There was compelling evidence by late December that the new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was spreading from person to person, but Chinese officials didn't take the threat of a significant outbreak seriously until the coronavirus was detected in Thailand on Jan. 13, The Associated Press reports, citing internal documents and interviews with Chinese officials. Top officials in Beijing started preparing for a pandemic on Jan. 14, but secretly, keeping the public in the dark as the virus spread for six days. President Xi Jinping issued a televised warning on Jan. 20, at which point more than 3,000 people had been infected.Chinese officials spent the six days distributing test kits to trace the virus nationwide, ordering wider screening of patients, preparing hospitals for an infectious virus, and easing the stringent rules for confirming coronavirus infections, AP reports. During that week, Wuhan "hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people" and "millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.""If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient," Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told AP. "We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system," and lives would have been saved. Researchers later estimated that if the public had been warned a week earlier and told to wear masks, forego travel, and social-distance, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds.China denies that it hid the outbreak early on, and some outside experts argue that Beijing's actions were defensible given its private actions and the risk of provoking unnecessary hysteria. "But the early story of the pandemic in China shows missed opportunities at every step," AP reports. "Under Xi, China's most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top." Read more at The Associated Press.More stories from theweek.com Why can't you go fishing during the pandemic? Legal scholar who defended Trump during impeachment objects to his idea of adjourning Congress Trump threatens to adjourn Congress to allow recess appointments

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump publicly signaled his frustration Sunday with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government's top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.Trump reposted a Twitter message that said "Time to FireFauci" as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the United States. The president privately has been irritated at times with Fauci, but the Twitter post was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.The message Trump retweeted came from a former Republican congressional candidate. "Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could've saved more lives," said the tweet by DeAnna Lorraine, who got less than 2% of the vote in an open primary against Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. "Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to Fire Fauci."In reposting the message, Trump added: "Sorry Fake News, it's all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up."The tweet came amid a flurry of messages blasted out by the president Sunday defending his handling of the coronavirus, which has come under sharp criticism, and pointing the finger instead at China, the World Health Organization, President Barack Obama, the nation's governors, Congress, Democrats generally and the news media.Trump did not "ban China," but he did block foreign nationals who had been in China in the past 14 days from coming into the U.S. starting Feb. 2. Despite the policy, 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers have still come into the country from China since then.Fauci and other public health experts were initially skeptical that the China travel restrictions would be useful when the president was first considering them, but then changed their minds and told Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, on the morning of Jan. 30 that they supported them.Trump has repeatedly pointed back to those travel limits to defend his handling of the pandemic, but experts have said the limits were useful mainly to buy time that the administration did not then use to ramp up widespread testing and impose social distancing policies before infections could begin growing exponentially.By the third week of February, advisers had drafted a list of measures they believed would soon be necessary, like school closures, sports and concert cancellations and stay-at-home orders, but the president did not embrace them until mid-March.Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said Sunday that earlier imposition of such policies would have made a difference."I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," he said on "State of the Union" on CNN. "Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you're right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down."Fauci's comments, and the president's pushback, come at a critical time as Trump wrestles with how fast to begin reopening the country. Public health experts like Fauci have urged caution about resuming normal life too soon for fear of instigating another wave of illness and death, while the president's economic advisers and others are anxious to restart businesses at a time when more than 16 million Americans have been put out of work.Fauci and the president have publicly disagreed on several issues, including how long it will take to develop a vaccine and the president's aggressive promotion of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effects are unproven against the coronavirus. At a coronavirus task force briefing last week, Trump stopped Fauci from answering a question on the drug.Fauci has become a celebrated figure among much of the public, which trusts him far more than Trump, according to polls. A Quinnipiac University survey last week found that 78% of Americans approved of Fauci's handling of the crisis compared with 46% who approved of the president's response. That has prompted resentment among other government officials, some of whom have privately criticized Fauci for playing to the media and not always sending consistent messages.Trump spent much of Easter Sunday deflecting criticism and finding other targets. "If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump 'ignored early warnings about the threat,' then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China?" he wrote. "They said 'early & not necessary.' Corrupt Media!"He cited a businessman in saying that "Congress was too distracted by the (phony) Impeachment Witch Hunt when they should have been investigating CoronaVirus when it first appeared in China." He blamed states for not being ready. "Governors, get your states testing programs & apparatus perfected," he wrote. "Be ready, big things are happening. No excuses!"He retweeted a message saying that the World Health Organization "enabled China's obfuscation on coronavirus, and that it could have been containable had Beijing not lied to the world." He also retweeted a post from a friendly conservative television outlet saying that the "Obama admin. repeatedly cut PPE stockpile," referring to personal protective equipment, and "failed to replenish" it.The president seemed particularly upset about a New York Times article documenting the administration's slow response to the virus. "The @nytimes story is a Fake, just like the 'paper' itself," he wrote Sunday night, denying that Azar warned him "until later" and dismissing an early memo by another adviser, Peter Navarro, who warned of the prospect of 500,000 deaths. "Fake News!"He did not explain why, if he thought the stockpile was inadequate, he did nothing in his three years in office to replenish it. And in none of his messages did he say why he waited to recommend social distancing measures that experts have credited with helping to stem the spread of the virus.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Health adviser says on CNN ‘you could logically say if you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives’ * Coronavirus – live US updates * Live global updates * See all our coronavirus coverageProminent US public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci appeared on Sunday to confirm a bombshell New York Times report which said he and other Trump administration officials recommended the implementation of physical distancing to combat the coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month.Asked on CNN’s State of the Union why the administration did not act when he and other officials advised, Fauci said: “You know … as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes, it’s not.“…It is what it is. We are where we are right now.”More than 530,000 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the US, with almost 21,000 deaths. Officials currently expect a death toll of about 60,000 by August.CNN host Jake Tapper asked if Fauci thought “lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, stay-at-home measures had started [in the] third week of February, instead of mid-March”.> There was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then> > Dr Anthony Fauci“It’s very difficult to go back and say that,” Fauci said. “I mean, obviously, you could logically say, that if you had a process that was ongoing, and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.“But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”Since the White House issued physical distancing guidelines on 16 March, much of the US has gone into lockdown, shuttering the economy and leading to unprecedented and potentially ruinous unemployment.Chafing against such conditions in an election year, Donald Trump has voiced an eagerness to reopen the economy as early as 1 May. The president has also said he will listen to advisers if they counsel against such a move.On Sunday, Fauci, other experts and governors of hard-hit states were skeptical. Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey, the state with the highest death toll after New York, told CBS’s Face the Nation: “If we start to get back on our feet too soon … we could be throwing gasoline on the fire.”No White House briefing was scheduled on Sunday but Trump continued to attack the Times and its article, in one tweet appearing inadvertently to confirm it, writing: “the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat’.”Trump also claimed vindication regarding his “travel ban” on China. One of his most vocal supporters in the US media, Fox News host Sean Hannity, followed suit.“Hey [Maggie Haberman],” Hannity tweeted, to one of six reporters on the byline of Saturday’s report. “…You should Thank [Trump] for the Travel Ban(s) put in place while you and [the New York Times] were fixated on impeachment and advising people to travel to China. NYTimesEpicFail.”Trump restricted travel from China before travel from Europe. The Times has reported that scientists believe most of the first Covid-19 cases in New York came from Europe, reporting which has prompted presidential tweets.In reply to Hannity, Haberman wrote: “Weird. Six bylines on our story about how the president handled the growing threat of the coronavirus but just one he’s focused on. Something there but I can’t put my finger on it...”The only female reporter on the Times article also tweeted footage of Fauci’s remarks.“This is confirmation of our story,” she wrote, “which focused on various moments the president had to take the threat more seriously and didn’t, in no small part due to the culture of government he’s created.”Trump has also complained about the Times’ use of anonymous sources. On Sunday, the paper’s executive editor responded.Dean Baquet told CNN’s Reliable Sources there were some anonymous sources but the story was “based on many on-the-record interviews, documents. There is a tremendous email chain among scientists inside and outside the government where they talk about the growing crisis.“So, I would suggest that people read it, rather than take the president’s tweet at its word. It is a very well-documented, powerful chapter in understanding why the government was so slow in dealing with this pandemic.”Baquet also said: “I would hope that the president reads it, because I think his tweet maybe indicates that he had not read it. And I think he will see a very important historic portrait of a government that was slow to deal with crisis.”The editor was asked about his previous comparison of the coronavirus outbreak and the US government response with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. In New York, more than three times as many people have died of Covid-19 as died on 9/11.Baquet said he did not know if the government’s failure regarding the pandemic was of the same magnitude as failing to prevent the attacks on New York, Washington and an airliner which crashed in Pennsylvania.“I think we have a lot more reporting to do,” he said. “It’s clearly a failure.”

President recently ousted two inspectors general, including one tasked with leading oversight of coronavirus relief law Donald Trump’s abrupt ousting of two veteran watchdogs has prompted fears the scandal-prone US president is purging people from government who have oversight of fraud, waste and abuse.The moves also come at a time when a global pandemic and resulting mass unemployment crisis has prompted a multitrillion-dollar economic rescue effort, much of which is aimed at helping some of America’s largest companies.Ex-watchdogs – dubbed inspectors general – plus top Democrats have voiced alarm at Trump’s removal last week of an acting IG at the Pentagon slated to lead a new oversight panel for the $2.2tn coronavirus relief law. The move came just days after Trump axed the intelligence community IG who had alerted Congress to a whistleblower complaint precipitating Trump’s impeachment.Trump also drew fire for tapping a White House lawyer involved in fighting impeachment as a special IG to oversee a $500bn corporate bailout piece of the $2.2tn law. Days before, Trump had used the signing statement for the law to blunt two newly created IG posts, suggesting he would decide what information Congress receives about the aid package.Trump’s sudden oustings of the two well-respected watchdogs, Michael Atkinson, the IG for the intelligence community, and Glenn Fine, the acting IG for the Pentagon, sparked special concerns given their timing and apparent political motivations.Trump’s ousting of Fine, who was recently picked by his fellow IGs to run a critical oversight panel for the $2.2tn law, is seen as a broad slap at any oversight on the president and his administration since it rendered Fine ineligible to lead the watchdog panel.Trump’s motives in firing Atkinson prompted other worries. After initially saying he had simply lost confidence in Atkinson, Trump used a pandemic press briefing the next day to unleash an angry torrent at Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint, slamming him as not “a big Trump fan”.Trump’s antipathy to IG watchdogs was displayed again at a pandemic briefing last week when he was asked about a report by the health and human services IG revealing that hospitals faced “widespread” shortages of face masks, and “severe” test shortages.Providing no evidence, Trump dismissed the report as “just wrong”, and the next day labeled it “another fake dossier”.IGs were created in 1978 to ferret out executive agency waste, fraud and abuse. Presidents nominate them, but they require Senate approval.“The mandate for IGs is to serve as the public eyes and ears regarding the functioning of the executive branch,” said Michael Bromwich, a prominent ex-IG at the justice department. “That means they must be independent, and they are required to be so by law. Trump doesn’t understand any legal mandate that conflicts with personal loyalty. He believes everybody in the executive branch should be loyal to him personally.”For instance, Atkinson’s firing reveals Trump’s penchant to “retaliate against people he perceives to be his enemies whose duties require them to do things that are contrary to Trump’s political interests”, Bromwich said.> Trump doesn’t understand any legal mandate that conflicts with personal loyalty> > Michael Bromwich, former IGLikewise, Fine “is simply too independent and has too much integrity to be trusted to minimize or sweep under the rug problems with the $2tn package recently passed by Congress”.Other ex-IGs say Trump’s actions pose a danger to all IG watchdogs and the vital role they perform in curbing corruption“Trump’s actions are clearly a threat to all IGs,” said Cynthia Schnader, a former acting IG at the justice department. In just a few days, “he has fired one, moved another one aside, and publicly attacked a third one for accurately reporting problems.”The former Pentagon IG Eleanor Hill stressed that Trump’s moves seem to endanger the mandate of IGs “to be honest and independent brokers”, and alert Congress to serious problems.Significantly, the current justice IG, Michael Horowitz, who leads a group of executive branch IGs, quickly came to Atkinson’s defense, issuing a strong statement of support for his “integrity and professionalism” – including his handling of the whistleblower complaint that helped spark Trump’s impeachment which featured one count of obstruction of Congress. Horowitz has also vowed that “aggressive, independent oversight” would continue after the firing.Former officials say Trump mistreated Atkinson.“It is troubling to see that the president – apparently based on political grievances – has removed Michael Atkinson, a talented and capable inspector general who was doing exactly what his job requires,” said Mary McCord, a former chief of the DoJ’s national security section where Atkinson once worked.Atkinson himself concurred.“It is hard not to think that the president’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so,” Atkinson said in a statement on Sunday.Other criticism of Trump erupted when he selected the White House lawyer Brian Miller as a special IG for a $500bn business chunk of the $2.2tn law.“Someone who currently works in the White House counsel’s office, serving a president who has tried to silence other inspector generals and announced his intention to silence this one, is not independent,” Senator Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate finance panel, said in a statement.In Bromwich’s eyes, Trump “has rejected all forms of oversight by congressional committees, and has now turned his opposition to oversight to the IG community”.

Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump did not make his typical appearance in Saturday Night Live’s cold open from home this week. But he did do a Fox & Friends-style call-in during which he repeatedly attacked anchor Colin Jost and Michael Che for asking “nasty questions” about his coronavirus response. “I'm happy to report, Colin, that America is now number one in the world for coronavirus,” Trump said. When Jost said he seemed “almost excited about it,” the president added, “Well, my approval rating is up, my TV ratings are through the roof and every night at 7 p.m. all of New York claps and cheers for the great job I’m doing.” “Yeah, I don’t know if that’s for you, man,” Che replied before asking Trump what his latest advice for Americans is, “because it seems to be changing every 24 hours.” “That's a nasty question, you're very nasty,” Trump said. “I've been consistent all along. I’ve always said it was a giant hoax that we should take seriously. Even though it was invented by the Democrats. Impeachment part two. Everyone needs to wash their hands, or not.” He then advised Americans to listen to the “experts”: Sean Hannity, Jared Kushner and the MyPillow guy. Tom Hanks Returns to Host SNL at Home After Coronavirus RecoveryAsked why he has stopped calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” Trump explained, “I had to turn down the ethnic slurs after I discovered that everything we need to survive the virus is made in China.” Finally, Trump delivered this inspiring message to the nation: “In times like this, we need to come together as one nation because no matter our differences, all Americans can agree on one thing. Carole Baskin definitely fed her husband to those tigers.” He signed off by saying, “All the absentee ballots are covered in coronavirus. Happy Easter, everybody!”For more, listen and subscribe to The Last Laugh podcast. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

President Donald Trump has kicked off his general election advertising campaign with a xenophobic attack ad against Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, the opening shot in a messaging war that is expected to be exceptionally ugly.In a minute-long digital ad released late Thursday that relies heavily on imagery of China and people of Asian descent, the Trump campaign signaled the lines of attack it will use in its attempts to rally the president's base and define Biden. The ad reprises accusations Trump has made that the former vice president's family profited from his relationships with Chinese officials and presents selectively edited scenes and statements attempting to portray him as doddering and weak.For the president and his allies, the approach represents their assessment of the race as it narrows into a one-on-one contest with Biden, the opponent who is least susceptible to their charges that the Democratic Party is too far outside the political mainstream.The new ad also shows that while the country has changed drastically in recent weeks amid a national health crisis, the president has not. He continues to lead the nation and run his campaign the way he always has: by belittling his adversaries and exploiting racial discord.While other presidents have used campaigns during periods of national trauma to try to unite the country, political strategists said that Trump was taking the opposite approach."They're just going to run a white grievance campaign," said Stuart Stevens, who worked on the presidential campaigns of the Republicans Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. "It's not complicated. He's losing with everybody but white men over 50," Stevens added."Trump hasn't changed," he said. "He hasn't changed in 30 years."Biden amplified that criticism with a statement Friday, saying, "The casual racism and regular xenophobia that we have seen from Trump and this Administration is a national scourge.""Donald Trump only knows how to speak to people's fears, not their better angels," he added.Since the coronavirus started spreading in the United States, Trump has tried to steer the conversation over his response toward themes and issues he is most comfortable with like nationalism and border security. Until recently, he had been referring to the coronavirus as the "Chinese virus."Now, with unfounded claims that Biden and his family have profited from below-board business deals with the Chinese, Trump is attempting to link his political rival to his chief geopolitical foe at a time when there is rising xenophobia and violence in the United States aimed at Chinese Americans."During America's crisis, Biden protected China's feelings," the online ad says, presenting a montage of clips of Biden complimenting and praising the Chinese, including the country's leader, Xi Jinping, and of a news segment accusing Biden of helping his son Hunter profit off Chinese investments.The ad also includes an image of a smiling Biden standing alongside an Asian American man -- an apparent attempt to suggest that the former president has an inappropriately cozy relationship with China. But the man in the image is a Chinese American, the former governor of Washington, Gary Locke, who also served as President Barack Obama's commerce secretary and ambassador to China.The picture, which appears briefly in between clips showing Biden socializing with Chinese officials and stammering through speeches, was taken at a 2013 event in Beijing where Locke and the former vice president appeared together.The ad's implication that Biden is soft on China is oddly timed, coming as Trump's own stance toward China and Xi has been more positive. Trump has been complimenting Xi, and as recently as last week, the president described the two of them as close allies and good friends.The Trump campaign defended using an image of an Asian American to illustrate Biden's ties to the Chinese, saying it was selected simply because Hunter Biden accompanied his father on the 2013 trip to China. Trump has repeatedly accused him, without evidence, of using his father's official visit to further his own business interests."The shot with the flags specifically places Biden in Beijing in 2013," Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, wrote on Twitter, referring to the picture with Locke. "It's for a reason. That's the Hunter Biden trip. Memory Lane for ol' Joe."Murtaugh did not address the fact that Locke is not Chinese, or that the ad presents the image with no context or explanation.Locke responded by accusing Trump of stoking hatred against Asian Americans. "The Trump team is making it worse," he said in a written statement. "Asian Americans are Americans. Period."In recent weeks, Asian Americans have reported being physically attacked, yelled at and spit upon; organizations have begun to track the incidents. Trump's rise has only pushed many Asian Americans further into the Democratic Party, though they were once considered a fairly reliable Republican demographic.Some Democratic strategists said that the tone and nature of the Trump ad should serve as a wake-up call. The coronavirus pandemic and the human and economic suffering it has unleashed does not mean that politics as usual are on hiatus, they said."This should tell the Biden campaign and every other entity trying to beat Trump that we have to rethink the playbook," said Kelly Gibson, a Democratic media strategist who advised the campaigns of Andrew Yang and Julian Castro. "So if Democrats don't sink to his level, at least a little, we will be at a sizable disadvantage. You can't beat fear with logic; it has never worked and it will never work."The Trump campaign's approach is a coarser version of the strategy that incumbent presidents typically deploy against their opponents: try to define them early before they get a chance to define themselves."What the Trump campaign wants to do is introduce on their terms, or in the case of Joe Biden, reintroduce that opponent to the American people before that opponent gets a chance to introduce himself," said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. "Their whole campaign is going to be about disqualifying Joe Biden."Though the ad is among the first to come from the Trump campaign directly since Biden became the presumptive nominee, an undeclared ad war has been raging for months, initially begun during the impeachment of Trump. In previous ads, including two that CNN refused to air citing "demonstrably false claims," Trump has already attacked the Bidens on similar grounds.And since late February, Priorities USA, one of the largest Democratic super PACs, has spent $6.5 million on ads attacking Trump in key swing states; an early round featured former supporters of Trump voicing their displeasure with his administration. Priorities USA has since started airing ads starkly criticizing the president's response to the coronavirus outbreak.In total, Democratic groups have already spent $15.5 million on general election ads this cycle, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. Many millions more have been spent online as well; Priorities USA alone has spent $19 million on digital attack ads already, and Acronym, another Democratic outside group, has spent $10 million.But it is unclear how much any of this advertising will matter given Americans' preoccupation with more pressing concerns. Biden, who lacks the financial wherewithal that Trump and the Republican National Committee have amassed, could stand to benefit in this regard."The shorter the race, the more it favors the person with the least amount of money," said Stevens, who saw firsthand in 2012 how Obama's financial advantage and the advertising it bought made it difficult for Romney to define himself."One of the major advantages of an incumbent president is monetary," Stevens added. "And that's being mitigated by this virus."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Laura Ingraham wants you to have the unrestricted freedom to spread or die from the coronavirus.Over the past several months, Fox News has been an important platform for those seeking to mock expert opinions on the virus, downplay the outbreak’s lethality, and spread anecdotal claims about how to fight it. All seemingly in the service of either absolving President Trump of any potential responsibility for the pandemic’s U.S. toll or to fulfill the network’s single-note, decades-long crusade to blame anything and everything on Democrats and “the media.”But few personalities have approached the global pandemic with as little concern as Ingraham, the longtime conservative pundit with a coveted primetime Fox News spot and one of the most-viewed shows on the network. In front of an audience of millions every evening, Ingraham has displayed a commitment to dismissing concerns about the virus, mocking advice from doctors she disagrees with, and waving away the importance of coronavirus deaths.As COVID-19 kills thousands across the country each day, the Fox News anchor has demanded a “reopening” of the economy at the start of next month, despite numerous warnings from top public health experts about the risks of leaving quarantine mode too early.Doctor Scolds Fox News: It’s ‘Irresponsible’ to Promote Unproven Coronavirus Drug“At some point, the president is going to have to look at Drs. Fauci and Birx and say, we’re opening on May 1,” she wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. “Give me your best guidance on protocols, but we cannot deny our people their basic freedoms any longer.”Late last month, she railed against doctors, saying they should not dictate government health policy and arguing that opening up the economy was more important than the life-saving measures medical professionals had recommended.“You got to imagine the policymakers at some point will hear from the people who are suffering with these job losses in these businesses and say, you know, ‘We have lives as well, and we have to somehow preserve them,’” Ingraham said.Ingraham did identify the obvious—the projections and advice from public health officials have occasionally shifted. But rather than approaching the topic cautiously on her show, or evaluate how our own drastic measures have curtailed the spread of the virus, she has impatiently drawn the conclusion that any number of deaths below a catastrophic 100,000 is a sign that experts ought to be ignored in favor of a robust economic return (when that, too, seems highly unlikely). Earlier this month, the Fox News star questioned the social-distancing decisions that have slowed down the economy, noting that “hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year from horrific things.” And during one Tuesday evening segment, Ingraham declared that although she believed that “every life matters,” the U.S. may be too overzealous in its social-distancing measures. “It is worth asking, is it not, what would our response have been and would our response have been less damaging to the economy, and to the lives of all of you millions of Americans, if we had had more accurate models from the start?” she said. “And shouldn’t this experience make us less willing to rely on the same experts to help determine when and how we should reopen our economy?”Indeed, there has been a theme for Ingraham. Loss of life, overcrowded hospitals, and an unnecessarily prolonged pandemic are of seemingly little concern.Instead, the virus has been just another excuse to beat up on the show’s recurring punching bags: media and Democrats. In early March, Ingraham compared virus fears from both groups to impeachment and the special investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying such concerns were merely attempts to “stoke panic” and undermine Trump. At the time, she didn’t have much to say about actual coronavirus deaths, but she did have plenty to say about an imaginary universe in which Hillary Clinton was president and the virus would have been a “nightmare.”Perhaps sensing the urgency of the outbreak last month, network brass seemingly attempted to crack down on such outrageous coverage, benching and eventually parting ways with Fox Business Network primetime host Trish Regan after she declared coronavirus fears to be an “impeachment scam.” Fox Business Ditches Trish Regan After Coronavirus ‘Impeachment Scam’ RantBut Regan’s bonkers monologue was delivered to a substantially smaller audience than the three-million nightly viewers Ingraham has enjoyed during the crisis. And Ingraham’s campaign of disinformation and obfuscation has been far more sustained and, at every step, directly flown in the face of not just public-health expertise but the guidelines set forth by her own bosses.Even after much of the U.S. began to shut down to fight the virus’ spread, and Fox News brass advised network staff to work from home and banned non-essential business travel, Ingraham tweeted that it was actually a “great time to fly if not in at-risk population.” (She deleted the tweet days later without any explanation).A number of Fox News employees in New York and D.C.—including Fox & Friends Weekend host Jedediah Bila, and one woman whose family said she had to be intubated—have also tested positive for the virus and, according to New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, several of Ingraham’s own staffers have been quarantined with suspected COVID-19 cases.And yet, even as the virus hits closer to home, Ingraham’s concerns could hardly be less disdainful. Despite a number of journalists having died from the virus, and many more having lost their jobs as a direct result of the resultant economic slowdown, Ingraham has fallen back on one of the laziest tropes of right-wing punditry by claiming the “liberal media” is rooting for death.“They like this crisis point and they really don’t want things to go back to normal, and that a lot of them seem—as the news comes in that might be slightly better than we thought, they’re angrier and grumpier than they should be,” Ingraham said earlier this month, with no recognition of the mourning many news organizations have already had for current and former colleagues who’ve died from the virus. “It’s odd.”Instead of reflecting on her potentially life-threatening advice, Ingraham has only doubled down and, in recent days, settled on a new bogeyman for her audience: egghead doctors with their cautious statements, models, projections, and warnings about the virus.Despite medical experts like Dr. Fauci urging Fox News hosts to be “careful” when touting hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus cure, Ingraham has taken up the mantle of the drug’s most public booster, at one point privately urging the president to promote it. Twitter Deletes Laura Ingraham’s ‘Misleading’ Post Touting Coronavirus CureOn multiple occasions, she misrepresented the credentials of a doctor to boost his anecdotal claim of the drug giving one patient a “Lazarus”-like resurrection at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The doctor does not actually work at that hospital, and while Fox News quietly buried a digital correction to her claim, Twitter eventually forced her to delete her post on the matter.On Monday afternoon, former Harvard Medical professor and renowned HIV/AIDS researcher Dr. William Haseltine complained to Ingraham’s colleague Dana Perino that it is “irresponsible” and “sad to me that people were promoting that drug” which, “at very best… will have a very mild effect on changing the course of the disease, if it has any effect at all.” In return, on her Tuesday show, Ingraham mocked the doctor, calling his logic “disgusting.” The Fox primetime star further ranted against medical experts who have preached caution on miracle cures, claiming that their objections are “merely partisan attacks in disguise.” In Ingraham’s mind, any doctor who disagrees with her is merely trying to attack President Trump. “I see right through their motives.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? 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Even in the midst of a global pandemic and economic collapse, President Donald Trump is charging ahead on his mission to purge his administration of watchdogs who are tasked with exposing waste, fraud, and abuse. And as he goes about this mission, he’s leaning on a 29-year-old loyalist once exiled from the Trump administration for a reported gambling problem, as well as a cadre of conservative firebrands who have fed his paranoia that government careerists are trying to destroy him.Early this month, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, inspector general of the intelligence community, who had been asked to handle the anonymous whistleblower complaint last year that triggered the president’s impeachment at the hands of House Democrats. On Monday, the president used his daily coronavirus press briefing at the White House to take swipes at Christi Grimm, a Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, after being asked about her report documenting the “severe shortages of testing supplies” in certain U.S. hospitals during the coronavirus crisis. On Tuesday, the news broke that Trump had replaced Glenn Fine, an acting Pentagon inspector general who had been assigned to oversee $2 trillion in coronavirus relief money.Those actions are just the beginning of Trump’s plans to remake much of the federal government by appointing Trump-supportive partisans, including inspector general posts, four administration sources say. And they reflect the degree to which the president’s obsession with purging and denigrating his perceived enemies within the government continues to animate him, even as the White House struggles to respond to the coronavirus outbreaks and the increasing number of deaths throughout the country.For the task, Trump has increasingly leaned on the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), headed by recently rehired Trump aide John McEntee. In the past two months, Trump and McEntee have discussed the topic of replacing inspectors general—a number of whose nominations require approval by the Senate—along with various other positions in the federal government. The president has made clear that he is adamant about quickly filling those posts (there are more than 70 such watchdogs across the government) with those more submissive to him and ousting appointees he often baselessly lambasts as “corrupt,” according to a senior administration official.McEntee, Trump’s former presidential body man and a 2016 campaign veteran, was fired two years ago from his White House job by then-Chief of Staff John Kelly, reportedly for an excessive online gambling habit and related tax issues that had hindered him from getting a proper security clearance. Still, he was given a soft landing at the 2020 Trump campaign and remained beloved by the president, the Trump family, and senior Trump staffers who considered him part of “the originals,” a term affectionately used to describe longtime confidants and advisers. Late last year, it was reported that McEntee would head back to the White House for his new gig, with Kelly long out of the picture. And he was given a broad mandate by Trump when he arrived, staffing up with those he trusted, including a college senior as one of his chief deputies.Even within that tight clique of “originals,” the president views McEntee as one of his most trusted lieutenants and has specifically tasked him with being a point man on staff purges for, at  a minimum, the rest of Trump’s first term in office. And McEntee takes the perceived disloyalty to the president just as personally, or perhaps more, than the president himself. Unlike Trump, who can be chummy with Democrats and reporters even as he decries them publicly, McEntee doesn’t have an off switch, those who know him say.“Bashing the press is fashionable in Trumpworld, but a lot of people are faking it. Not Johnny. He genuinely believes your only agenda is taking down Trump,” said a former White House official.The work being carried out by the president, McEntee, and other top officials has started sending shockwaves through various federal agencies and departments. Two officials with knowledge of the situation tell The Daily Beast that they view the White House’s efforts to target inspectors general as part of an ongoing campaign to root out individuals perceived to be disloyal to Trump. “IGs aren’t supposed to be employees of the Trump Organization,” another U.S. official said. “But it’s clear that the president thinks they should be… It’s grotesque.”As part of a broader effort to gather intelligence on allegedly disloyal administration officials, McEntee’s office has relied on outside advice and research from conservative operatives and Trump allies about which inspectors general and senior officials to look into, the sources added. McEntee’s office has also reached out to the offices of GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill for guidance, one of those officials said.Purging inspectors general who show insufficient subservience to Trump has been a longtime obsession of several key Trump allies. Groundswell, a right-wing activist network headed by activist Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, has pushed memos to the president with suggestions for how he can remake the federal government by staffing it to the hilt with Trump fanboys. Tony Shaffer, a retired lieutenant colonel and member of the Trump 2020 media advisory board, posted to Twitter on Thursday: “Fine & Atkinson are the protectors of the Deep State… they all need to be replaced.”And Tom Fitton, who helms the right-wing watchdog group Judicial Watch, helped spearhead a lawsuit in December demanding emails and texts from Atkinson. Fitton is a regular guest on some of the Fox News shows that Trump frequently watches and from which he takes cues. Asked if he’d been in touch with PPO or anyone else in the White House, Fitton wouldn’t confirm or deny “any conversations with the White House that may or may not have happened” but said in a brief interview on Thursday that it is his opinion that “President Trump should fire all the IGs he didn’t appoint.” Fitton added that it’s his read that the president wants “fresh blood” and deserves to have an administration staffed with inspectors general who are “more in sync with him and who are as aggressive as he is.”But while Trump is being egged on to find “fresh blood,” others in his party have grown nervous about the gutting of one of the few potential oversight mechanisms still in existence. The ousting of Atkinson in particular has raised questions about the president’s thinking and motivations during one of the worst global pandemics in history. Over the past several days the president has drawn scrutiny from Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who are demanding answers from the White House about why Atkinson was fired. And the matter might not end there. A Democratic aide familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast that several House committees are in the process of strategizing on oversight efforts related to Trump’s efforts to purge the administration’s top watchdogs.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.