"Our country has to go back to being our country again. You have people that are not going to stand for this and I understand them very well..."

Said President Trump in his interview with ABC's David Muir — transcript, video.

Muir was trying to get Trump to talk about how the reopening would work — whether the results would be monitored and the restrictions reimposed if transmission/hospitalization/death rates go up. Trump continued:

... and we are going to put out little embers and little fires and maybe some big fires, but we still have to go back to work.

Muir wanted Trump to speak in the same terms as Governor Cuomo, who'd said — this is Muir's paraphrase — "you just have to be ready to turn the valve off for a time if you see a spike."

But Trump's reaction to hearing Cuomo's name was to remind us that Cuomo had praised him. Trump said: "Governor Cuomo last week said, the president and the federal government have done a phenomenal job. He said that, a phenomenal job."

That's Trump's strategy in dealing with these difficult questions, to get right on the message that his administration has done a great job. Every question is understood first as a prompt to bang us on the head again with that message. He ignored the whole point of the question, which is about how the reopening will be done. Why couldn't he address Cuomo's idea and agree with it or reject it?

Here's Cuomo speaking on May 4th. Trump acted as though he wasn't familiar with this, but I don't believe that. It's so cogent and sensible that it's very disappointing to hear Trump professing unawareness of it and Muir letting him off the hook. Cuomo:

As long as your rate of transmission is manageable and low, then reopen your businesses and reopen the businesses in phases, so you’re increasing that activity level while you’re watching the rate of transmission. Rate of transmission goes up, stop the reopening, close the valve, close the valve right away. So reopen businesses, do it in phases and watch that rate of transmission. If it gets over 1.1 stop everything immediately. That’s where the other countries wound up. They started to reopen. They exceeded the 1.1, it became an outbreak again. They had to slow down. Rather than starting and stopping, you’d rather have a controlled start so you don’t have to stop, right? And that’s what you learn from the other countries. You reopen too fast then you have to stop and nobody wants to have gone through all of this. And then start just to stop again. Well, how does that happen? First of all, it’s not going to happen statewide. This state has different regions, which are in much different situations than other regions in this state. And rather than wait for the whole state to be ready reopen on a regional basis. If upstate has to wait for downstate to be ready, they’re going to be waiting a long time. So analyze the situation on a regional basis. Okay? And you look at a region on four measures, the number of new infections, your healthcare capacity. If the infections goes too high you overwhelm your health system.... [G]uidelines from the CDC... say a region has to have at least 14 days of decline in total hospitalizations and death on a three day rolling average... This is telling you that you are basically at a plateau level that you can actually start to reopen. Then you’re watching the rate of infection and the spread of the infection....

"You humiliated yourself with your ludicrous run for president last year, and every time you open your mouth now, Andrew Cuomo runs over and drops a stick of dynamite in it to remind you who’s boss."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Bill de Blasio’s new low: blaming the Jews" (NY Post).

The headline refers to De Blasio's harsh reaction to a specific event: a large gathering of Jewish mourners that took place in Brooklyn. De Blasio blamed those Jews for that one thing that they did. The headline makes it sound as though de Blasio had engaged in classic anti-Semitism, blaming Jews in general for things that go wrong.

For example, during the Black Plague in the 1300s, Jews got blamed and murdered on the theory that they were causing the disease. I don't think de Blasio is much good as a mayor and he should never have joined the overcrowded Democratic presidential race, but it's awful to characterize him as "blaming the Jews."

Podhoretz writes:

There’s no way to read your tweet from Tuesday night in an exculpatory fashion. Here it is: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Now, there really is something stupid about that tweet. De Blasio refers to the "Jewish community" when he meant the Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, and they are a small proportion of the much larger set of Jewish residents in New York City. Podhoretz writes that there are 1.2 million Jews in NYC. I had to look up the number of Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, who are not even 10% of the total who belong to "the Jewish community" in New York.

But maybe Podhoretz is seeing into de Blasio soul. Why did he get so mad at the Jews who came out onto the street in mourning? Why did that provoke him into posturing about a strong show of police force? Why did he look at one Jewish community and see "the Jewish community"?

And what a terrible visualization — Cuomo sticking dynamite into de Blasio's open mouth. Where does that violent imagery come from?

"When some historian many years from now tries to explain the pandemic of 2020, there will be a separate chapter on New York City..."

"... but no separate chapter on any other American city. I loathe Trump, but the historian [will] have to look at the actions or inactions of de Blasio and Cuomo, not Trump."

Says a commenter on the NYT article "N.Y.C. Deaths Reach 6 Times the Normal Level, Far More Than Coronavirus Count Suggests" ("More than 27,000 New Yorkers have died since the start of the novel coronavirus outbreak in March — 20,900 more than would be expected over this period and thousands more than have been captured by official coronavirus death statistics").

"You can’t tell people in a dense urban environment all through the summer months: 'We don’t have anything for you to do. Stay in your apartment with the three kids.' That doesn’t work. There’s a sanity equation here also that we have to take into consideration."

Said Governor Cuomo, quoted in "Coronavirus Live Updates: Some States Ease Restrictions..." (NYT).

Cuomo "laid out a broad outline on Sunday for a gradual restart of the state that would allow some 'low risk' businesses upstate to reopen as soon as mid-May. He did not speculate when restrictions would be eased in New York City and surrounding suburbs. But he noted that they could not persist indefinitely."

"Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are on lockdown at their $14 million Canadian bolthole after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau closed the country’s border amid the coronavirus pandemic."

In case you were wondering how Harry and Meghan are doing after running off to Canada into supposedly burgeoning new opportunities, Page Six has the answer.

I had to look up "bolthole." It's "a hole by which to bolt or escape; figurative a means of escape" (OED).

1877 E. Peacock Gloss. Words Manley & Corringham, Lincs. Bolt-hole, (1) the hole by which a rabbit makes its escape when the ferret pursues it. (2) Any unknown hole by which a person makes his way into or out of a house....
1924 E. Marsh tr. La Fontaine Fables 71 [The hare] heard a rustle, And took the hint to bustle Off to his bolt-hole.
1932 H. Simpson Boomerang xii. 306 A girl who had been jilted might choose any bolt-hole to hide her shame....

A very rabbit-y concept.

And while I'm here in the OED, let me look up "lockdown" (a word that we're seeing a lot this week and that I suspect will not go away for a long time). The oldest meaning is "a piece of wood used in the construction of rafts when transporting timber downriver." That goes back to the 19th century.  The next oldest meaning of "lockdown," dating only to the 1970s, is the prison meaning — keeping prisoners in their cells for a long time (notably after an outbreak of violence). Most recently, going back to 1984, the word came into use to refer to "A state of isolation, containment, or restricted access, usually instituted as a security measure; the imposition of this state." Examples:

1999 Computerworld 11 Oct. 8/1 (heading) Many users plan Y2K lockdowns.
2002 Quill (Nexis) 1 May 34 We heard the city was on lockdown and that it wasn't possible to get in.
2005 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 3 May 3/5 Contestants go into lockdown tomorrow isolated from the outside world as they prepare to enter the Big Brother house on Sunday.

I heard NY Governor Andrew Cuomo struggling with the word on this morning's "The Daily" podcast. He said it was a scary word, and he didn't want to use it. It would mean that people are required to stay inside their own homes, and he wanted to assure New Yorkers that he would not do that, yet it was obvious that he was going to say that whether it was true or not, as he openly talked about the problem of causing a destructive stampede to the stores.