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‘Total’ Trump. At an unhinged news conference on the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump asserted his authority to overrule governors on stay-home orders: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that is the way it’s gonna be.”
■ New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: “The constitution says we don’t have a king.”
■ Gov. Pritzker: “It’s up to the governors to make decisions about the executive orders we put in place.”
■ Trump is full of it.
■ Columnist Rex Huppke: “I don’t know of anything more legally binding than a presidential tweet-decree.”
Fauci’s ‘not-quite-apology.’ The nation’s top infectious-disease specialist, Anthony Fauci, kindasorta walked back comments that might have seemed critical of the president’s late action against the pandemic.
■ Humor from Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker: “Study: No one could have seen pandemic coming except people capable of reading.”
■ Watch if you dare: The propaganda video Trump played at yesterday’s news conference, prompting networks to cut away.
■ Journalism critic Jay Rosen—who’s called on journalists just to walk out of presidential bloviation sessions—lists 13 reasons they stick around.
Gig relief. Pritzker says Illinois’ self-employed workers can expect unemployment benefits in about a month.
■ He’s promising fixes in the state’s unemployment system …
■ … which he defended last week as something that “works fine if you have a normal number … of applications.”
■ As stimulus checks begin to show up in Americans’ bank accounts, where’s yours?
■ COVID-19 suspension of the income tax deadline aside, some Illinoisans still need to file by tomorrow night.
■ The Billy Goat Tavern and other restaurants are going to court against their insurer asking to be covered for pandemic losses.
‘An individual who has now tested positive was likely present while you were voting.’ That message is going out to Chicago citizens who cast their ballots in locations staffed by people who carried the novel coronavirus—including one who died.
■ ProPublica: At least 19 kids at a Chicago shelter for immigrant detainees have tested positive for COVID-19.
Did you survive? If you had the virus and survived, University of Chicago Medicine wants to hear from you, for research to see if your blood can help those still in the hospital.
■ The City of Chicago’s top doc: Immunity tests are coming … sometime.
■ A McHenry County judge is ordering the county’s health officials to give cops the names of coronavirus patients.
Benighted People Dept.
■ The governor of South Dakota resisted issuing a stay-home order, and now her state is home to one of the nation’s largest single coronavirus clusters.
■ PolitiFact: Florida’s Ron DeSantis falsely claimed COVID-19 hasn’t killed anyone under 25 in the U.S.
■ He’s also declared pro wrestling “an essential business.”
■ A Virginia pastor who, five days after that state’s governor discouraged gatherings of more than 10 people, told a crowd of congregants “God is larger than this dreaded virus” is dead of COVID-19.
Wisconsin backfire. Conservatives’ push to hold Wisconsin’s primary last week amid a pandemic seems to have boomeranged, as voters who risked their lives to cast ballots picked a liberal Democrat to unseat an incumbent Republican.
■ Barack Obama reportedly was set to come down off the fence today and back Joe Biden for president.
■ The New York Times explains why The New York Times took 19 days to report on a former Senate staffer’s sexual assault charges against Biden.
Groupoff. The businesses whose deals it promotes crippled by the pandemic, Chicago-based Groupon is cutting 2,800 workers—more than 40% of its staff.
■ At least three UPS employees nationwide have died from COVID-19, but delivery workers complain they “don’t even know who’s sick.”
■ Amazon has fired two workers who criticized its coronavirus and climate policies.
Urban rebirth? Wired: The pandemic could spell an opportunity to remake cities.
■ Vox: It’s the end of the office as we know it.
‘A right-wing nut from Illinois.’ A star-studded cast brings to life the late Phyllis Schlafly’s 1970s fight to kill the Equal Rights Amendment: Mrs. America, an FX on Hulu miniseries that Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper calls “pitch-perfect.”
■ The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman on the “Karen” phenomenon: “Do I really need to spell out the sexism of a meme about a woman’s name that took off from a man griping about his ex-wife and has become a way of telling women to shut up?”
■ Debuting weekly on Facebook Live: South Side residents’ home movies from the ’40s to the ’80s, set to music by Chicago DJs.
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Thanks, Joe Hass, for inspiration in this edition.