The New Yorker:

“Modified aspirational” is the phrase that Donald Trump used on Sunday, in another of his train-wreck press briefings, to describe how his goal of reopening the country by Easter might be substituted by the prospect of a return to normalcy by a June 1st deadline or sooner: “Maybe we’ll even beat it.” In Trumpian terms, it was a way of saying that his original goal had little or no connection to reality, certainly not to the reality of new models indicating that between 1.6 and 2.2 million Americans could die as a result of COVID-19 if no measures are taken. (These numbers, accepted by the C.D.C., are in line with earlier ones.) The same models suggest that, as Dr. Deborah Birx said on Sunday, “between eighty thousand and a hundred and sixty thousand, maybe even potentially two hundred thousand people” could die even if the country not only sticks with the current distancing measures but performs them, in Birx’s words, “even better, in every metro area, with a level of intensity.” Is that our modified aspiration? Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the same briefing, said that he always hopes to beat the models, which involves changing the “assumptions.” (The course of a new disease can be hard to predict; scientists are working on treatments and, on a longer timeline, vaccines.) Trump, meanwhile, said that, although two hundred thousand dead was “a horrible number,” compared with a potential death toll of more than two million, it would mean that his team had “done a good job.”

Even given the fierceness of the novel coronavirus, it was not inevitable that we would arrive at this juncture. The Administration wasted a month; early testing was a failure; Trump, in his words and his actions, undermined mitigation efforts. (My colleague Isaac Chotiner took a look at where some of the catastrophically bad assumptions came from.) None of these scenarios were inevitable. But so far, some of the lowest expectations about the kind of President that Trump could be in this crisis have proved optimistic. It is tempting to tune him out and focus instead on what Americans can do on a state, local, and individual level—in the last category, practice rigorous social distancing to flatten the curve. And yet Trump’s behavior this weekend inspired a new set of desperate, modified aspirations for the least that he might do going forward.

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