Politics

The Future of the American Idea

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  • Patrick Semansky / AP

    What Will Happen When Red States Need Help?

    President Trump’s targets have been Democratic leaders. But the outbreak isn’t going to stay confined to Democratic states.

  • Most Popular on The Atlantic
    • Joan Wong

      How the Pandemic Will End
      Ed Yong

      The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

      Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.

      To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.

      A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”

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    • Jared Kushner
      Pool / Getty

      Exclusive: Kushner Firm Built the Coronavirus Website Trump Promised
      Robinson Meyer

      The extent of Oscar Health’s work on coronavirus testing hasn’t been previously reported.

      On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping.

      That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.

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    • Fred Milgrim, pictured here hours before his shift as an emergency-medicine doctor at a hospital in Queens.
      Justin J. Wee

      A New York Doctor’s Warning
      Fred Milgrim

      China warned Italy. Italy warned us. We didn’t listen. Now the onus is on the rest of America to listen to New York.

      In the emergency-department waiting room, 150 people worry about a fever. Some just want a test, others badly need medical treatment. Those not at the brink of death have to wait six, eight, 10 hours before they can see a doctor. Those admitted to the hospital might wait a full day for a bed.

      I am an emergency-medicine doctor who practices in both Manhattan and Queens; at the moment, I’m in Queens. Normally, I love coming to work here, even though in the best of times, my co-residents and I take care of one of New York City’s most vulnerable, underinsured patient populations. Many have underlying illnesses and a language barrier, and lack primary care.

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    • A woman lounges in the window of an apartment building
      Maria Litwa / Laif / Redux

      The Four Possible Timelines for Life Returning to Normal
      Joe Pinsker

      The coronavirus outbreak may last for a year or two, but some elements of pre-pandemic life will likely be won back in the meantime.

      Updated at 4:40 ET on March 30, 2020.

      The new coronavirus has brought American life to a near standstill, closing businesses, canceling large gatherings, and keeping people at home. All of those people must surely be wondering: When will things return to normal?

      The answer is simple, if not exactly satisfying: when enough of the population—possibly 60 or 80 percent of people—is resistant to COVID-19 to stifle the disease’s spread from person to person. That is the end goal, although no one knows exactly how long it will take to get there.

      There are two realistic paths to achieving this “population-level immunity.” One is the development of a vaccine. The other is for the disease to work its way through the population, surely killing many, but also leaving many others—those who contract the disease and then recover—immune. “They’re just Teflon at that point,” meaning they can’t get infected again and they won’t pass on the disease, explains Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at the UC Irvine. Once enough people reach Teflon status—though we don’t yet know if recovering from the disease confers any immunity at all, let alone lifelong immunity—normalcy will be restored. (It may also turn out to be the case that people who are immune to the disease can still pass it on under certain circumstances.)*

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    • A black and white photo of two health care professionals in medical protective gear holding a cotton swab.
      Steve Pfost / Newsday RM via Getty

      Private Labs Are Fueling a New Coronavirus Testing Crisis
      Alexis C. Madrigal
      Robinson Meyer

      Backlogs at private laboratories have ballooned, making it difficult to treat suffering patients and contain the pandemic.

      On the surface, the American COVID-19 testing regime has finally hit its stride. Over the past five days, the states have reported a daily average of 104,000 people tested, according to data assembled by The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer collaboration incubated at The Atlantic. Today, the U.S. reported that 1 million people have been tested for the coronavirus—a milestone that the White House once promised it would hit the first week of March.

      But things are not going as smoothly as the top-line numbers might suggest. Our reporting has unearthed a new coronavirus-testing crisis. Its main cause is not the federal government, nor state public-health labs, but the private companies that now dominate the country’s testing capacity. Testing backlogs have ballooned, slowing efficient patient care and delivering a heavily lagged view of the outbreak to decision makers.

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    • Donald Trump
      Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

      The President Is Trapped
      Peter Wehner

      Trump is utterly unsuited to deal with this crisis, either intellectually or temperamentally.

      For his entire adult life, and for his entire presidency, Donald Trump has created his own alternate reality, complete with his own alternate set of facts. He has shown himself to be erratic, impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive, cruel, mendacious, and devoid of empathy. None of that is new.

      But we’re now entering the most dangerous phase of the Trump presidency. The pain and hardship that the United States is only beginning to experience stem from a crisis that the president is utterly unsuited to deal with, either intellectually or temperamentally. When things were going relatively well, the nation could more easily absorb the costs of Trump’s psychological and moral distortions and disfigurements. But those days are behind us. The coronavirus pandemic has created the conditions that can catalyze a destructive set of responses from an individual with Trump’s characterological defects and disordered personality.

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    • Ina Jang

      The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun
      McKay Coppins

      Across the country, social distancing is morphing from a public-health to political act. The consequences could be disastrous.

      For Geoff Frost, the first sign of the coronavirus culture war came last weekend on the golf course. His country club, located in an affluent suburb of Atlanta, had recently introduced a slew of new policies to encourage social distancing. The communal water jugs were gone, the restaurant was closed, and golfers had been asked to limit themselves to one person per cart. Frost, a 43-year-old Democrat, told me the club’s mix of younger liberals and older conservatives had always gotten along just fine—but the guidelines were proving divisive.  

      At the driving range, while Frost and his like-minded friends slathered on hand sanitizer and kept six feet apart, the white-haired Republicans seemed to delight in breaking the new rules. They made a show of shaking hands, and complained loudly about the “stupid hoax” being propagated by virus alarmists. When their tee times were up, they piled defiantly into golf carts, shoulder to shoulder, and sped off toward the first hole.  

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    • President Trump
      Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

      The Political Genius of Donald Trump
      Frida Ghitis

      The president is transmuting his calamitous failures into political gold.

      Donald Trump is presiding over one of the worst calamities to befall the nation in living memory, and anyone who has followed his response since the coronavirus morphed from a worrisome outbreak in a Chinese province into a global pandemic knows the truth: Trump’s response has been disastrous. It’s no wonder that just a couple of weeks ago, a writer in this magazine concluded that “the Trump presidency is over.”

      It seemed reasonable, logical. But once the polls started coming in, it turned out the American public—at least for now—disagrees. Despite his well-documented incompetence and lies, Trump is now enjoying some of the highest approval ratings of his presidency. Even more baffling, a majority of Americans—as many as 60 percent in one poll—think he’s doing a good job tackling the crisis.

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    • A graphic showing two hands overlaid by a maze
      The Atlantic

      How Not to Tank Your Relationship in Quarantine
      John Tierney
      Roy F. Baumeister

      “This time of isolation could be a period of great growth or great struggle in your relationship.”

      Humans have evolved with a drive to share life with a partner—just not all day long. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the savanna formed pair-bonds, but they parted in the morning to go about their separate tasks. So did our ancestors on the farm. For hundreds of thousands of years, even the most devoted couples have been uttering some version of that basic romantic principle: “I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”

      So what happens now that spouses are staying home all day, and many unmarried couples suddenly find themselves quarantined together? The peril facing relationships quickly became obvious to the pioneers of this new intimacy on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where couples were cooped up for two weeks in their cabin during the ship’s quarantine. Ellis Vincent, a retired airline executive from Australia, told a reporter that he and his wife, Kimberly, were passing the time by having long conversations during which she displayed a remarkable memory.

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    • An illustration of paper people cut out of the Constitution.
      pockygallery / shutterstock / The Atlantic

      Beyond Originalism
      Adrian Vermeule

      The dominant conservative philosophy for interpreting the Constitution has served its purpose, and scholars ought to develop a more moral framework.

      In recent years, allegiance to the constitutional theory known as originalism has become all but mandatory for American legal conservatives. Every justice and almost every judge nominated by recent Republican administrations has pledged adherence to the faith. At the Federalist Society, the influential association of legal conservatives, speakers talk and think of little else. Even some luminaries of the left-liberal legal academy have moved away from speaking about “living constitutionalism,” “fundamental fairness,” and “evolving standards of decency,” and have instead justified their views in originalist terms. One often hears the catchphrase “We are all originalists now.”

      Originalism comes in several varieties (baroque debates about key theoretical ideas rage among its proponents), but their common core is the view that constitutional meaning was fixed at the time of the Constitution’s enactment. This approach served legal conservatives well in the hostile environment in which originalism was first developed, and for some time afterward.

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    More Popular Stories
  • Pool / Getty

    Exclusive: Kushner Firm Built the Coronavirus Website Trump Promised

    The extent of Oscar Health’s work on coronavirus testing hasn’t been previously reported.

  • Ina Jang

    The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun

    Across the country, social distancing is morphing from a public-health to political act. The consequences could be disastrous.

  • Politics Daily

    The Atlantic Politics Daily: The Social-Distancing Culture War

    There once was a time at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when social distancing wasn't a polarized along party lines. That’s changing

  • Newsletter

    The Atlantic Politics Daily: When COVID-19 Comes to Trump Country

    When the coronavirus pandemic comes to Trump country, politicization can only last so long. Plus: What’s the deal with Oscar Health and COVID-19 testing?

  • Edmon de Haro

    Even Dead Bodies Pose Risks

    Undertakers are scrambling to adapt to the complexities of COVID-19.

  • Mike Segar / Reuters

    The Ticket: Risking Exposure in Congress

    Representative Grace Meng of New York shares the view from the floor of Congress—and from the epicenter of the pandemic.

  • Kevin Frayer / Getty Images

    The Problem With China’s Victory Lap

    The Chinese Communist Party is trying to present itself as a global leader in pandemic response. If it declares success too early, it may lead the world back into disaster.

  • Writers
    All Writers
  • The Atlantic

    ‘We Are Like Sitting Ducks’

    Karlena Dawson is at high risk of complications from COVID-19. Where she lives makes her even more vulnerable: a Seattle immigrant-detention center.

  • Joe Raedle / Getty / The Atlantic

    What Do Progressives Do Now?

    Progressives are eager to use the coronavirus crisis to convince Joe Biden—and millions of other Americans—of the necessity of major reforms.

  • Mike Segar / Tom Brenner / Reuters / ...

    Cuomo and de Blasio: A Tale of Two Leaders

    The two Democrats have been a study in contrasts as the Empire State becomes the epicenter of the global coronavirus outbreak.

  • Yusiki / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

    Watch New Orleans

    With the country’s attention turned north, the coronavirus pandemic is exploding in Louisiana.

  • Andressa Anholete / Getty / Katie Martin / ...

    The Coronavirus-Denial Movement Now Has a Leader

    Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has lashed out against local officials who have implemented severe lockdowns, accusing them of destroying the country.

  • Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty

    How Los Angeles Is Preparing for a Worst-Case Scenario

    Will Southern California’s perceived lower density prevent a public-health emergency? Not necessarily.

  • Politics Daily

    The Atlantic Politics Daily: It’s Up to the States Now

    How the leaders of the two most populous cities in America are handling the pandemic. Plus: Save the 2020 election and vote by mail, this law professor argues.

  • Win McNamee / Getty

    The COVID-19 Crisis Reveals an Old Divide Between the Parties

    The debate over reopening the country has an uncanny parallel to one of the ugliest political fights of the past decade.

  • Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg / Getty

    It's Not Just the Presidential Race Adjusting to the Coronavirus

    COVID-19 has overshadowed nearly every facet of American life, including the 2020 elections.

  • Politics Daily

    The Atlantic Politics Daily: There Are Other Elections

    Not just the 2020 presidential race. Plus: What the healthy owe to society, especially the more vulnerable, in the time of the coronavirus.

  • Ashley Gilbertson / VII / Redu​x

    Why America Is Uniquely Unsuited to Dealing With the Coronavirus

    For decades other countries were shaped by the traumas of disease outbreaks while the United States remained largely untouched. No longer.

  • Cpl. William Hester / DVIDS / Katie Martin ...

    A Marine General’s Next Battle: Grocery-Store Logistics

    Larry Nicholson once led 20,000 troops in Afghanistan; now he’s making sure you don’t run out of food during the coronavirus crisis.

  • David J. Hogen / Getty / The Atlantic

    Arnold Schwarzenegger Plays Hero One More Time

    The former governor calls in to The Ticket from his house in California to discuss the coronavirus response.