Opinion

The last couple of weeks have obviously been very hard for President Trump. His public mood has been even more volatile than usual. What with being humiliated for showing his monumental ignorance on national television when he tasked his government scientists with studying the possibility of injecting disinfectant into the human body to "clean the lungs" and then finding out that his fantastic miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, appears to make people worse rather than better, it's been a rough time.

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime exploiting chaos for personal gain and blaming others for his losses. The pure madness in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – shortages of equipment to protect hospital workers, dwindling supplies of ventilators and critical medications, jaw-dropping confusion over how $2.2 trillion of aid in the recent coronavirus law will be distributed – has given him the perfect cover to hoard power and boost his chances of reelection.

The medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, died by suicide this week, not while she was in the thick of emergency work in the nation’s epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic but afterward, while she was staying at her family home. She recounted to her father the devastating toll the virus took on patients. Shortly following her was another frontline emergency medical worker, John Mondello, 23, who is said to have experienced anxiety around the amount of death he saw, which affected him as a “heavy experience when he’d fail to save a life.”

President Donald Trump got called out for trying to sow disagreement between New York Democrats.

Widely criticized for being woefully unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump and his allies have been offering a variety of excuses — from blaming the government in Mainland China to insisting that no one could have seen a crisis of this magnitude coming to arguing that he was distracted by impeachment earlier this year. But journalists for the Washington Post and The Atlantic, this week, have noted that Trump has found plenty of time to tweet about things other than coronavirus.

Nothing angers Andrew Cuomo more than the notion that taxpayers in "red states" should resent or resist assistance for "blue states" struggling against the coronavirus. Hearing that message from Senate Republicans provoked the Democratic New York governor to remind the nation several times of the gross disparity between what his state remits to the Treasury and what their states reclaim in federal benefits.

President Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House Thursday afternoon and declared he is "very proud" of his performance on the number of coronavirus deaths per capita. Trump announced that deaths per million are "very, very strong," but he has no idea how right he is, because coronavirus deaths per capita in the U.S. are very, very high, and that's very, very bad.

It's to be expected that Trump and his teammates think the rules never apply to them. It's understood that a man like Vice President Mike Pence — whose most viral moment came when he  touched a piece of NASA's equipment marked "DO NOT TOUCH" — certainly doesn't. And the same former governor of Indiana, who somehow takes pride in his botched response to his state's HIV outbreak, probably doesn't understand the concept of public health.

“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” So I wrote back in June 2012, with a presidential election approaching.

When supporters of President Donald Trump are asked what they like about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, judges are often at the top of the list: the Kentucky Republican has been quite forceful when it comes to getting far-right judicial nominees confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And NBC News journalist Leigh Ann Caldwell reports that getting even more judges confirmed will be a high priority for McConnell when the Senate is back in session.

On Thursday, armed protesters descended on the Michigan state capitol in Lansing to demand an end to the stay-at-home order — even though the vast majority of the public still supports such health measures.

There's a lot of sport made on social media over the fact that Donald Trump Jr., in his desperation to be more like his sociopathic father, is dating his stepmother's doppelganger, in both age and looks. But spare some palace-intrigue armchair psychoanalysis for the fact that Trump's daughter Ivanka grew up to marry a man who is startlingly like her daddy.

The more researchers know about how the coronavirus attaches, invades and hijacks human cells, the more effective the search for drugs to fight it. That was the idea my colleagues and I hoped to be true when we began building a map of the coronavirus two months ago. The map shows all of the coronavirus proteins and all of the proteins found in the human body that those viral proteins could interact with.