--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him, back from quite possibly the worst time vacation in the history of travel. But it seemed like a good idea two weeks ago. And that's the thing about this novel coronavirus crisis we're all in. So much changes so fast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On Sunday, the CDC said no gatherings over 50 people. On Monday, President Trump reduced that number to 10 as he warned that this outbreak could extend well into the summer. Yesterday, Ohio's governor said the state would postpone today's primary. Then an Ohio judge said no dice. Then the governor said he'd ignore the judge. Never has the news more needed to be explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we are going to up our game. From today onward, we're going to open every episode of Today Explained with an update on all the latest coronavirus news. After that, we'll take a quick breather and get on with the regular show, which will most likely also be about COVID-19.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you can help us. Tell us what questions you have. Email us. We're todayexplained at vox.com. Tweet at us. We're at today underscore explained. I'm at Ramis Verham. And thank you for listening. Stay safe and stay smart during this crisis. All right, let's do this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president held a White House briefing today. He offered some tweaks to Medicare and pledged $1 trillion of stimulus, including some Andrew Yang-style UBI, sending Americans checks in the mail in the next few weeks. A lot of that still needs to be ironed out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's now something like 180,000 known cases of COVID-19 globally, and the United States today passed the 5,000 case marker officially. New York State confirmed over 400 new cases in the last 24 hours, bringing its confirmed cases to around 1,500. That's the highest in the United States in any state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Governor Andrew Cuomo has said the peak is still likely 45 days away in New York, and he continues to call on the federal government to ramp up military aid to dramatically expand New York State's health care infrastructure. We're talking hospital beds, ICU beds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As of Tuesday afternoon, 91 people have died in the United States as a result of COVID-19. The country is ramping up efforts to restrict movement. Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area announced a shelter-at-home order on Monday. Canada has shut its border with very few exceptions, including Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the European Commission is considering a 30-day ban on all non-essential travel. And then there's the presidential race back here in the United States. Ohio postponed, but Arizona, Florida, and Illinois are still voting today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The outbreak might not be a huge factor because millions of people have already cast their ballots in Arizona and Florida. More on that tomorrow. For now, on with the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Matthew Iglesias, we did a lot of episodes about the firings, the replacements, the vacancies in the Trump administration. We use the word unprecedented a lot. And whenever we did these episodes, people like Ezra Klein or Matthew Iglesias would say, look, the president hasn't really been tested yet. Imagine how this would all work in a crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now the crisis is here. Millions of people are losing their jobs. The economy is in a tailspin. People are dying. I asked Matthew Iglesias whether President Trump is capable of leading the country out of this crisis and what that might look like.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: It's not great, right? I mean, we have seen over the years lots of examples of the Trump administration being disorganized, being dishonest, being inaccurate, having difficulty collecting information from well-qualified experts.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But it hasn't really mattered in incredibly concrete, tangible ways outside of this specific situation with Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. But now we have a honest-to-God national crisis, a genuinely very difficult situation that, you know, any presidency would struggle with.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And you see that the Trump administration is really flailing. They are failing to do the sort of basic element of communicating in a clear and consistent way what's going on. And it's genuinely very scary.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Before we get into all the details of how this administration has handled the novel coronavirus this year, Let's just talk about steps that were taken before this was even on anyone's radar. And I'm talking specifically about something we've mentioned on the show before, which is that there was this pandemic group set up within the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And this administration disbanded that? When you say me, I didn't do it. We have a group of people I could I could ask perhaps by administration, but I could perhaps ask Tony about that because I don't know anything about it.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Yeah they disbanded it This was during John Bolton tenure as national security adviser He said he wanted to quote unquote streamline the process He sort of dismissed this group
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And part of a larger pattern that we seen which is the Trump administration repeatedly proposed very large cuts to the Centers for Disease Control including you know in their most recent budget submission which was just last month
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And ideologically, temperamentally, they did not believe that pandemic preparedness was an important topic, that it didn't deserve that kind of high-level coordination effort, that the agencies involved with it didn't deserve a lot of money, and that it wasn't an important kind of thing to do.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And you've seen that same mentality sort of play out over the course of February and March. And then Trump has not had the flexibility to change quickly, even when it became clear that, you know, this really was an important subject.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: So once the novel coronavirus is on the administration's radar, let's say January, early February, what exactly does the Trump administration do? Do they ramp up the CDC? Do they ramp up the NIH? Do they get everyone moving or what?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Well, so Trump does what he thinks is taking it seriously, and that's he moves relatively quickly to restrict travel from China. The Trump administration says it will now bar foreign nationals entering the United States if they've been here to China in the 14 days before they arrive.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Because he, you know, has it in his head that this is a foreign problem. He's really big on being tough on borders. At the same time, the travel restrictions, you know, they had exemptions. Americans, for example, were not impacted by it.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And at that point, he seems to forget about it, right? He has incredible levels of confidence in border control. So he keeps saying to people in interviews, We have it so well under control. I mean, view this the same as the flu.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Because of all we've done, the risk to the American people remains very low. And then internally, he just doesn't do anything. So we look back and we say, maybe these restrictions were a good idea. Maybe he bought us some time before the virus came to the United States in a big way.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But when you buy time, the question is, what do you do with that time? And Trump did not get tests up and running. He didn't stockpile necessary medical supplies. He didn't develop a sort of plan B in case containment failed.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And then he was slow to acknowledge that containment of the virus had in fact failed. because he was so committed to the idea that he was this genius and his travel restrictions on China had solved the problem.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And this is back in, we're talking January, early February, the whole country's focused on Iowa, New Hampshire. Are you saying that these were moments that we could have been taking critical steps to prepare the country for this virus hitting the United States?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Yeah, I mean, this could have been a good time for Trump to say, look, I'm really concerned about this virus. And we didn't know that much about the underlying science of the virus. And it would have been a good time to, you know, send up some flares, right?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Say, had there been a pandemic preparedness team at the National Security Council, you could have asked them, you know, hey, man, can you update me on what's going on here? Even without it, you can scramble the jets.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: He could have gotten in touch with health officials personally. He could have told his cabinet, I want everybody to check in on this. What can we do? But he didn't do anything at all, you know.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And he also doesn't like to be told bad news, right? When people would come to him and say, Mr. President, whether you think this border control measures are a good idea or not, they're not foolproof. We really need to keep thinking about this.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Instead, he kind of declared victory and he moved on until it was much too late. We've covered on the show already this sort of bungling of testing at the CDC, that the CDC refused tests from the WHO. They wanted to do their own.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Those tests didn't work. And all of this has led us to this position we're in now where we just don't have enough tests for the entire country. How much responsibility does Donald Trump bear in this testing situation?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Or is there more responsibility on the shoulders of the CDC and the NIH for not doing a better job in that regard and for not maybe making the public more aware? How much are these autonomous organizations or how much is this all linked back to the administration?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: There have been a lot of articles on Vox.com and elsewhere warning that the Obama administration left the country inadequately prepared for a pandemic and that the Trump administration has moved us backwards.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Instead of building on the work that had been done after Ebola, Trump started rolling that work back. And people have been saying for years that we are not ready for this kind of thing. And he didn't listen. And that is 100 percent his fault.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And what I've done is I'm going to be announcing exactly right now that I'm going to be putting our vice president, Mike Pence, in charge. Come late February, Donald Trump does put Mike Pence in charge of this whole situation. Does that help? Does that hurt?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I mean, I think it's an example of how behind the curve the administration has been. People have been saying all throughout the month of February, you need to appoint some kind of a coronavirus czar, some kind of high-level official who's in charge of coordinating all of this.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And the presumption of that is that you need to do coordination, but also that the president personally can't be all coronavirus all the time. So Pence comes in, and it was a good idea to put him in charge.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I mean, if you look at Mike Pence's press conferences, they are much more sort of organized and calm and professional than the ones Trump does. My presence here today and working with you each and every day in the days ahead, I hope, gives evidence of the priority the president's placed on this work.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Mr. President, the last administration said that they had tested a million people at this point. We'll ask them how they did with the swine flu. It was a disaster. Next, please.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But he had resisted this for weeks, and we've just been consistently two weeks or so behind the curve ever since late February. And Pence being put in charge like that and then seemingly sidelined more recently is just an example of that.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Of course last week we got the first big primetime presidential address from the Oval Office at the desk all the bells and whistles We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days And it seemed to just confuse more than it helped We covered it on the show
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But now that some of the things that Trump announced have been implemented, like this European travel ban, what's the fallout? Well, you know, the European travel ban, it looks like it's been a kind of an implementation disaster.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I completely understand why he wanted to restrict travel from Europe. But then they've had Americans returning from Europe trapped in these extremely long screening lines in a situation where people are just in a position to infect each other.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Overnight, chaos at Chicago's O'Hare Airport as passengers return home from Europe. Thousands of travelers left standing in a crowd for hours, shoulder to shoulder. This is exactly what Americans are being told to avoid.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But take a look at some of this video, we know that very long lines and long wait times hit at least three of the 13 airports screening passengers returning from Europe Saturday night.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And then we don't have adequate testing to really monitor everybody who's coming back to do any kind of case tracing. And so it's likely that this effort to stem an influx of outside infected people will have actually made the problem worse.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Meanwhile, making that the epicenter of his primetime address, It was just a second example of Trump being so hung up on border controls and external threat that he's not addressing the fact that we have substantial community spread inside the United States of America.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Since that Oval Office address, this has become a much graver situation in the United States, from national sports leagues canceling and postponing to schools being shut down to cities being shut down to people in the service industry across the country losing jobs.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: It's hurting a lot of people right now in a way that it wasn't even just a week ago. How has the president's messaging changed since that Oval Office address?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Well, you know, it didn't change immediately. For several days through the past weekend, he continued to sort of downplay the coronavirus, assure us that it was going to wash away really soon, and mostly seemed focused on trying to talk up the stock market.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: That really changed Monday afternoon. The president gave a press conference where, for the first time, he really said, like, he doesn't know how long this is going to last. It's a serious problem.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: He got behind CDC guidance telling people to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. And to me, most significantly of all, he acknowledged for the first time that the reason the stock market is down is that the situation is actually quite grave.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And it will go back up, he said, when we resolve the coronavirus problem, which, you know, hopefully is true. But it's wise. And President Trump, while not handling the situation perfectly by any means, is now finally taking it seriously, seeing this as a big problem.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: He's calling on people to avoid gathering in large groups. He's calling for the cancellation of events. He's telling people they need to stay away from bars and restaurants. And that means he's acknowledging that these public health measures are going to be a big problem for the national economy that's going to require some kind of large-scale solution.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But it's not something we can avoid. More with Matthew after the break on Today Explained. Thank you.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. Support for this episode comes from Bilt. Bilt is a platform that lets you pay rent and earn points on your rent payments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By paying rent through Bilt, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Bilt wants you to go out and do things in the community. You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for BILT members every month. When you're ready to travel, they say BILT points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining BILT.com slash explained. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Matthew, the Trump administration is finally talking about dramatic measures to shore up the millions of Americans who are already hurting and those who will be hurting as a result of this crisis.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: There's like Andrew Yang style checks to every American. There's apparently a $850 billion stimulus on the way. And then there's this much smaller stimulus they've been talking about for days. Let's start with that small guy because it's going to land at any moment now.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: The result of more than a dozen phone call negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. This is going to do some real good.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: There are provisions in here that are going to sort of beef up the unemployment insurance program. They're going to beef up nutritional assistance program. Those are important measures They are also doing some extension of paid sick leave which is something that the politicians involved both from the White House and Nancy Pelosi have talked about a lot
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But that's actually the area where it looks a little bit threadbare. I mean, this is going to deliver some real help to some people, but it still leaves the sick leave portion of the American safety net pretty patchy.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And I would just say the scale of this package is not equal to the challenge. And clearly the Trump administration knows this isn't enough because it's now, as of today, offering to do much, much more. Tell me about this $850 billion package that they're now talking about.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Sure. So they're talking about a large-scale package that will be aimed at two things. One is kind of industry-specific support. President Trump, in particular, has been fired up about trying to help airlines.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: He is also in the hotel industry and seems very open to the hotel industry's argument that they need financial support. Casinos and cruise ship companies also seem to be in the mix there.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: It's not entirely clear what those kinds of bailouts or financial support might look like. But this is something that, you know, I know I've spoken to Democrats on the Hill. They have concerns about this idea, but also some recognition that it has merit.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I think we're going to see a lot of discussion of this, hopefully some kind of, you know, reasonable compromise. The other piece is trying to get money into people's hands.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: The president had been talking about payroll tax cuts for a long time. He hasn't disavowed that, but today he and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin both indicated that they were open to the idea of simply giving cash to individual Americans.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: The payroll tax holiday would get people money over the next six to eight months. We're looking at sending checks to Americans immediately. And And what we've heard from hardworking Americans, many companies have now shut down, whether it's bars or restaurants.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Americans need cash now, and the president wants to get cash now. And I mean now in the next two weeks. How much? I will be previewing that with the Republicans.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: There are some numbers out there. They may be a little bit bigger than what's in the press. Go ahead. That's an idea that Jason Furman, who was the chief economist in the Obama administration, has been very vocally championing.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: And this idea has been adopted by Senator Mitt Romney. now potentially by the Trump administration, some Democrats in Congress as well. And we'll have to see if it gains momentum.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Is this like Andrew Yang-style universal basic income, or is it just a one-timer? It's not the same as a universal basic income. One reason that people who are skeptical of UBI like this idea is precisely because it isn't permanent, right?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: So everybody will get these checks, so it gives everyone some help. But if you have a job, even during this crisis, the fact that you're getting a time-limited check is not a good reason to, like, quit your job and go live off UBI or something like that.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: So it has appealed to people who are skeptical of UBI. A concern that, you know, some people will continue to raise is that it's not targeted in any way, right? Lots of people urgently need financial assistance in this crisis.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Plenty of other people don't really, but they'll be getting money too. The case for doing it this way is that it's simple. It's like fair. You can easily explain to people like, why did that guy get a thousand dollars? Well, he got it because everybody's getting it.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I think this is a good idea. It's not a cure-all for what fixes us since obviously no matter how much you get in a check, you're not going to take a plane flight internationally tomorrow.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Large segments of the economy are just shut down. So we're going to need to either support industries or else support some kind of transition out of those industries.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But, you know, giving everyone some money, that would be nice. That would help. I guess the trillion-dollar question is how is the country going to pay for all this?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I mean, in the short term, we can and should pay for it by borrowing money. Interest rates are very, very low. That's how you bolster the economy. You know, it's going to mean a higher debt level.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: It could mean higher taxes down the road. But I think everybody needs to be really careful here from an economic standpoint, right? We know that a lot of the economy has shut down for public health reasons.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: It seems like more is going to have to shut down in the future. And it's tempting to think of this as being like a light switch where, you know, you can turn it off and then you can flip it back on again.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But economic life doesn't work that way, right? If millions of people lose their jobs, lose their tips, lose their incomes, and that stays lost for a number of weeks, then even when you turn the economy back on again, they're not going to have any money.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: So they're not going to be able to buy anything. And you're going to see cascading job losses. And you could have us sort of stalled out for a really, really long time unless we do something proactively to sort of not just help people get through this current crisis, which, you know, will be difficult but will pass.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: We're going to have to restart things once it's safe from a health standpoint. And that's going to take a sort of big shove of stimulus measures from the government.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Could all of this have been avoided if this country at least were more careful? Or is it just a case that the way we live now, the way our porous borders work, that this was coming no matter what?
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: Look, Taiwan and Singapore have closer economic, geographical, and cultural ties to China than the United States has. They have not been unaffected by coronavirus. Nobody has been and nobody could be.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: But they, with sufficient proactive measures, have kept their populations largely safe and are now not shutting down their domestic economies. This is why people say you should have a president who knows what he's doing, and we don't.
--:-- Matthew Iglesias: I guess we'll be talking a lot more about that in the coming weeks and months, Matthew. Thank you. Thank you.
--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you for listening to Today Explained. If you want to support our show, you can subscribe to our Patreon or make a one-time donation at vox.com/donate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you have any questions or topics you'd like to discuss, email us at todayexplained at vox.com. Follow us on Twitter at todayexplained. And if you liked this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our theme music is by Mark Phillips. Our editor is Alex Sugiura. Our production team includes Alex Sugiura, and many others.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is a production of Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
