A month or so ago, people were telling me that the choice between reopening and not was a false one — the thing to do was "smart" reopening, which took maximal advantage of mitigating measures like masks and social distancing 1/
What we actually got, however, was stupid reopening, which is producing exactly the viral spikes we feared 2/ washingtonpost.com/national/flori…
You might have expected some effort to clean up — to try to hold on to some reopening while going for the mitigating measures. But no: the Trump-Fox axis is doubling down on stupid 3/
Why do this? Part of the answer is that Trump believes that admitting mistakes is weak, so he always doubles down. It's also, probably, about the desperate hope that pretending things are OK will fool people for a few months 4/
But that really looks like a bet that has already failed. The problem is that even a hopeless political strategy can still kill a lot of people 5/
