Coronavirus US live: Trump says distancing guidelines will 'fade out' as US deaths pass 60,000

The White House meeting with business executives — which in many ways ressembled a coronavirus briefing — just needed.

As he’s done at briefings, Trump took questions from reporters, alongside Mike Pence and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. The president made many of the same claims he’s made at press briefings, blithely repeating that the pandemic will soon “be gone”, without explaining why.

But there were a few key differences between the press briefings and today’s live-streamed meeting. Trump’s public health advisers were absent. And notably, the camera was continuously focused on Trump — there was no footage of the reporters in the room asking questions.

Trump said he’s planning a trip to Arizona next week, and Ohio soon.

“Hopefully in the not too distant future we’ll have some massive rallies and people will be sitting next to each other,” Trump said. “I can’t imagine a rally where you have every fourth seat full, every six seats are empty for everyone you have full. That wouldn’t look too good.”

The president suggested that a vaccine may not be needed as part of a recovery from the pandemic. “If you don’t have a vaccine, if the virus is gone, you’re like where we were before,” he said.

At least 89 coronavirus vaccines are in development, according to the World Health Organization, but even the most promising options still need to undergo rigorous safety testing, which could take a year to 18 months.

But without a vaccine, why does Trump think the pandemic will just go away? He dodged the question.

“It’s gonna go, it’s gonna leave,” Trump said, without explaining his thinking. “It’s gonna be eradicated.”

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

Daniel Kelly, the conservative supreme court justice who lost his re-election bid earlier this month, will participate in a controversial case before he leaves the court over whether more than 200,000 Wisconsin voters should be removed from the state’s voter rolls.

The Wisconsin supreme court is currently considering whether to hear the case, which was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal group. The group wants to force the state to immediately remove voters it suspects have moved from the voter rolls. The state has refused to remove the voters, saying it is not confident enough the voters have moved and wants to give voters until after the 2020 election to confirm their voter registration.

Last year a circuit court judge ordered the state to remove the voters, but an appeals court reversed the ruling. The suit is being closely watched because it is believed to be an obvious effort to benefit President Donald Trump, who won the state by just under 23,000 votes in 2016. Voters who lived in zip codes that were predominantly students or African Americans were more than twice as likely to be flagged for removal, a Guardian analysis found.

Kelly recused himself in November when the court considered a request to hear the case on an expedited basis. His recusal made a difference — the court wound up deadlocking 3-3. Kelly lost his election to Jill Karofsky, a liberal challenger, by more than 163,000 votes. But now that the election had passed, Kelly said he saw no ethical obstacle preventing him from hearing the case.“In light of the fact that this case cannot now affect any election in which I would be a candidate while the case is being decided, there is no ethical bar to my participation in the consideration of the petition for review or the merits of the case if the petition for review is granted,” Kelly wrote in a Wednesday order. Karofsky’s 10-year term begins on August 1, and she will narrow the conservative majority on the court from 5-2 to 4-3.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at NYU and an expert on judicial ethics, said he did not see anything improper in Kelly’s decision.“It is rare but not unheard of for a judge who recuses to unrecuse,” he wrote in an email. “Judge Kelly is still a judge and the matter is before his court. The reason for the prior recusal, which was correct at the time, is no longer present. So it is fine to reverse his position.”

“I see the new normal being what it was three months ago,” Trump said. I think we want to go back to where it was.”

So far, his public health advisers have disagreed. The new normal, per Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, as well as the president’s own plan to reopen the economy, suggest that distancing will have to be scaled back slowly.

Nevertheless, Trump insisted, “the target date” to reopen “is as soon as possible,” Trump said. “If I watch Alabama play LSU, I don’t want to see 20,000 people instead of 120,000 people.”

Hi, it’s Maanvi Singh — blogging from the West Coast. The president is speaking at a White House with industry executives.

“I don’t see protecting cities and states if they’re going to be sanctuaries,” Trump said. Municipalities that prevent their law enforcement from cooperating with immigration authorities shouldn’t get federal coronavirus aid, he said.

Vice President Mike Pence said he expects the US to be conducting 2 million tests a week next month.

“We’re doing more than a million tests a week now, 5.8 million tests total,” Pence said moments ago during a White House event with industry executives. “We expect by next month very quickly to be at a capacity to do more than 2 million tests a week.”

That would work out to about 285,000 tests being conducted every day, but some health experts have said the country will need to conduct millions of tests a day to effectively limit the spread of the virus.

The Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn reports:

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, personally oversaw the dispersal of a large, tightly packed Hasidic Jewish funeral on Wednesday, lashing out at the conduct of mourners, sparking angry counter-criticism from community leaders.

In a tweet, the mayor called the large processional “absolutely unacceptable”, and vowed to bring social gatherings such as that event to an end while movements are still restricted by coronavirus guidelines.

A follow-up tweet from the mayor drew criticism for singling out the Jewish community and generalizing about its members:

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted that generalizing New York’s Jewish population “is outrageous especially when so many are scapegoating Jews”.

On Wednesday morning De Blasio apologized at a press event for a heavy-handed response, saying: “If you saw anger and frustration, you’re right. I spoke out of real distress. People’s lives were in danger right before my eyes.”

On the same day as the funeral, crowds gathered to watch a city flyover by the US navy’s Blue Angels and the air force’s Thunderbirds planes in honor of healthcare workers.

“Only bigots have a problem when a few 100 Hasidim do what thousands of people in the same city have done the same day: not social distance,” the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council tweeted.

The Dow closed up more than 500 points following today’s promising news about a potential coronavirus treatment.

The Dow closed up 532 points, or about 2.2%, to 24,634, although markets are still significantly down from February.

The markets seemed to be responding to the cautious optimism about the results of a trial of the drug remdesivir to treat coronavirus.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said of the drug earlier today, “This will be the standard of care. … What it has proven is a drug can block this virus.”

But bad news still far outweighs the good when it comes to the state of the economy. New data from the commerce department shows the US economy shrank by 4.8% last quarter.

Trump will participate in a virtual Fox News town hall on reopening the economy this weekend, the White House has just announced.

In a press release on the town hall, Fox News said the event would take place Sunday from 7 pm to 9 pm ET, and it will be co-moderated by anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

The virtual town hall, which is entitled “America Together: Returning to Work,” will air live from the Lincoln Memorial.

Fox News noted the president would answer viewer-submitted questions for an hour and a half of the town hall, which is interesting considering Trump reportedly wanted to start a talk radio show as coronavirus cases started to rise in the US.

According to the New York Times, the president envisioned hosting the show for two hours a day and taking listeners’ questioners, but he ultimately decided against it because he didn’t want to compete with controversial radio host Rush Limbaugh.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy criticized speaker Nancy Pelosi after the Democratic leader announced the members who would serve on the coronavirus select committee.

McCarthy accused Pelosi of trying to launch “impeachment 2.0 with a partisan and unnecessary oversight committee.” “The roster the speaker has chosen makes clear that this is not an honest effort at transparency and accountability, but rather another attempt to politically damage the Trump administration,” a spokesman for the California Republican said.

McCarthy previously said he would not name the Republican members of the select committee until the Democratic members were announced. Pelosi said she gave McCarthy her list of names last week.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced the Democratic members who will serve on the coronavirus select committee, which will oversee the distribution of government funds from the coronavirus relief bills that Congress has passed.

The Democratic members are majority whip Jim Clyburn, finance committee chairwoman Maxine Waters, oversight committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, small business committee chairwoman Nydia Velázquez, congressman Bill Foster, congressman Jamie Raskin and congressman Andy Kim. Clyburn will also serve as the chair of the select committee.

“As House Speaker, I am proud to appoint these distinguished and accomplished leaders of the Congress and Country to the Select Committee on the Coronavirus,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“We must make sure that the historic investment of taxpayer dollars made in the CARES Act is being used wisely and efficiently to help those in need, not be exploited by profiteers and price-gougers.”

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

A Kansas law requiring residents to prove their citizenship when they registered to vote is both illegal and unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

The law, which went into effect in 2013, required Kansans to show a document such as birth certificate or a passport when they went to register to vote. Before it was blocked by a lower court in 2016, it prevented around 30,000 people from registering to vote.

Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state nationally known for his anti-immigrant views and support of voting restrictions, championed the measure, saying it was necessary to prevent non-citizens from registering to vote in his state. In an unusual move, Kobach personally defended the measure in court in a 2018 trial.

Practically speaking, the ruling on Wednesday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th circuit, upholds a lower court ruling from 2018. It does not change much in Kansas because the law was first blocked by a lower court in 2016.

But it offered more affirmation that there was not the kind of voter fraud in Kansas to justify the law, as Kobach claimed. The court noted that “at most” 39 non-citizens had registered to vote in Kansas over the last 19 years. Many of those cases, the court be explained by administrative error, and did not justify the burden placed on 30,000 voters.

The case was “the most important voting rights trial of the 21st century,” tweeted Richard Hasen, an election law expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

It was closely-watched among voting rights advocates, who have long seen Kobach, who chaired Donald Trump’s short-lived voter fraud commission, as a leader in a conservative push to restrict voting rights. The American Civil Liberties Union, which helped represent the plaintiffs in the case, saw it as a chance to put Kobach’s claims about voter fraud on trial and show how flimsy they were.

Kobach said the ruling was an example of “judicial activism” and a “perversion of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause.” A spokesperson for Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said his office was reviewing the ruling.

“This law disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans, denying them the most fundamental right in our democracy,” said Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s voting rights project.

“We are gratified the court struck it down, and now call upon Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab to turn the page on Kris Kobach’s sorry legacy of voter suppression, drop any further appeals, and work with us collaboratively in the interests of all Kansas voters.”