This week started with too much coronavirus exposure because people just couldn’t stay home over Memorial Day weekend, and this week ended with too much coronavirus exposure because another policeman killed another unarmed black man and brought thousands of Americans to the streets in protest. You decide who has a better reason to be out.

Here’s what happened in politics during the week ending May 31…

Shootings This Week:

1. There were 21 (TWENTY-ONE!) mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). Shooters kill 14 people and injure 90 more.

• • This is a huge number of shootings, and they were mostly NOT related to the protests against George Floyd’s murder.
  • One of the shootings is a drive-by with multiple gunmen shooting more than 100 rounds into a graduation celebration.

2. Protests in Louisville, KY, against the killing of Breonna Taylor turn violent and seven people are shot. Louisville police killed Taylor earlier this year during a no-knock warrant. The shooters at the protest haven’t been found.

Russia:

1. Attorney General William Barr opens a new investigation led by U.S. Attorney John Bash over the “unmasking” of American names around the Russia investigation into the 2016 election. This is presumably about Michael Flynn in an effort to prove he was being railroaded. Three things to know:

• • The people who requested the unmasking couldn’t know who’s name would be revealed.
  • The people actually making the requests were often not the person listed as doing so, but they might be staff who prepare briefings and in their research made the requests in the name of their bosses.
  • Intelligence agencies receive thousands of requests to unmask names every year. This isn’t out of the ordinary.

2. The Bureau of Prisons orders Roger Stone to report to prison on June 30, though Stone says he’ll challenge that date.

Legal Fallout:

1. The Department of Justice drops its investigations into Senators Kelly Loeffler, Dianne Feinstein, and James Inhofe over stock trades they made in the early days of the pandemic. The investigation into Senator Richard Burr is still ongoing.

Courts/Justice:

1. The Supreme Court upholds California Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order limiting gatherings at places of worship to 100 people or 25% total occupancy. Several states are being sued for not creating exceptions for places of worship in their limits on crowd sizes.
2. Senator Lindsey Graham urges older federal judges to step down so Trump can replace them with younger, conservative judges. This tells me he either thinks Trump will lose or that Republicans will lose the Senate this year. He specifically says the intent is “to make sure the judiciary is right of center.” The judiciary is supposed to be apolitical.

Coronavirus:

1. Joe Biden attends a Memorial Day event wearing a mask and calls Trump a fool for refusing to wear one. Trump, in turn, implies that Biden is hypocritical for wearing a mask outside but not inside his home. Huh?
2. The World Health Organization suspends testing of hydroxychloroquine after an observational study of 96,000 patients from 67 continents concluded that patients taking the drug had a significantly higher rate of death. Other groups have also suspended their tests or have suspended tests for certain at-risk patients. Others are continuing with their tests.
3. Trump announces the termination of the U.S. funding agreement with the WHO, and Trump’s national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, calls the WHO corrupt. Corrupt. Here are a few things we work on together. Or should I say worked?

• • Combatting diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio.
  • A global Ebola response.
  • The WASH-FIT (water, sanitation, hygiene, and facilities) program in low- and middle-income countries.
  • Food safety and the regulation of medicine.
  • The Global Hearts Initiative to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease.

4. The EU urges Trump to reconsider defunding the WHO, with the EC president saying, “actions that weaken international results must be avoided” and “now is the time for enhanced cooperation and common solutions.” She also says that for global responses to pandemics to work, the support and participation of all are required.
5. In 2016, the Obama administration and OSHA issued new health industry regulations that would ensure that they’d be prepared and ready for a pandemic or epidemic. The rules were to go into effect in 2017, but the Trump administration formally stripped those rules from the regulatory agenda.
6. Scott Gottlieb, who was the FDA Commissioner under Obama, says we can’t stop the pandemic unless we address racial inequity. The pandemic is affecting communities of color at higher rates (both case rates and death rates).

• • Part of that is socioeconomic—lower incomes, crowded living arrangements, essential jobs, and crowded transportation. They also don’t have good PPE at those essential jobs.
  • Part of that is the healthcare system—they don’t trust it, doctors treat them differently, and they have poorer access to care.

7. Conspiracy theories from the far-right could hamper efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus. A recent poll found that 44% of Republican respondents think Bill Gates will use mass vaccinations to insert tracking chips into all of us. If only that were the only conspiracy theory going around about this…
8. A new study indicates that COVID-19 patients have the highest amount of viral shedding during the first week of symptoms and that they’re not as infectious 11 days after getting sick. However, asymptomatic shedding does still occur.
9. Preliminary findings in tests for the antiviral drug remdesivir indicate that the drug can shorten recovery from about 15 days to 11 days.
10. Another clinical trial begins for a COVID-19 vaccine, this one developed by Novavax.
11. A study in France indicates that even mild cases of COVID-19 produce antibodies.
12. An inflammatory syndrome similar to Kawasaki disease has been reported in children with COVID-19. Now doctors see it in young adults in their 20s. These patients have inflammation in their blood vessel walls and in serious cases can sustain heart damage.
13. Trump will extend the deployment of 40,000 National Guard troops helping with coronavirus relief efforts instead of terminating them one day before their benefits kick in as he had originally planned.

Exposures:

1. A Republican Representative in Pennsylvania’s state House tested positive for the coronavirus more than a week ago, but when he told GOP leadership, they decided who they would tell or not. They only told GOP members of the House, while Democrats went back to their families unaware that they could be carrying the virus. The GOP leadership says they followed protocol, and that everyone who needed to know did.
2. Arkansas traces a recent increase in coronavirus infections to a high school swim party, a church gathering, and meat processing plants.
3. COVID-19 has killed 100 grocery workers that we know of so far.
4. More than 62,000 healthcare workers have been infected with the coronavirus and nearly 300 have died from it.
5. Vermont has no coronavirus hospitalizations for the first time since March.
6. After the Memorial Day weekend shenanigans at Lake of the Ozarks, MO, neighboring counties issue travel advisories and urge self quarantines over fears of coronavirus spread.
7. The latest iOS update allows you to participate in anonymous exposure notification and tracing through your iPhone. But for those of you who fear being tracked, you can disable it.

Closures:


1. The health officer who was behind California’s early stay-at-home orders says the state is opening too quickly, specifically around allowing large gatherings (of up to 100 people). Southern California is still seeing increases in cases and deaths.
2. Around half of the dozen or so states that see an uptick in new cases this week are states that opened early, in late April or early May. States seeing an increase this week include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma.

Protests:

1. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro joins demonstrations protesting his Congress and Supreme Court. He doesn’t wear a mask, despite a government decree to do so. Also, Trump suspends travel from Brazil to the U.S. by non-citizens because of their coronavirus outbreak.

Numbers:

1. New Zealand goes five days with no new COVID-19 cases and has no new COVID-19 hospitalizations following the discharge of its last coronavirus patient. The country only had 1,500 confirmed cases and 21 deaths.
2. The U.S. reaches 100,000 known COVID-19 deaths on May 28.
3. Here are the numbers by the end of the week:

• • 1,770,384 people in the U.S. are infected so far (up from 1,622,670 last week), with 103,781 deaths (up from 97, 087 last week).
  • 6,028,326 people worldwide have been infected (up from 5,276,942 last week), with 368,945 deaths (up from 342,078 las week).

Healthcare:

1. A new Oklahoma law allows grandparents and would-be fathers to sue doctors who perform abortions for wrongful death. GOP legislators think that women are being coerced into abortions.
2. In-person protests at abortion clinics have continued during stay-at-home orders, often without social distancing or masks. They’re still getting hands-on with the people they’re protesting and shouting in their faces. So great. Now getting an abortion really can kill you again. Workers have to hand out masks to patients as they arrive, and they try to whisk patients in before too much contact occurs.
3. Members of the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls issue a statement accusing certain U.S. states, like Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, and Iowa, of manipulating the pandemic to restrict women’s reproductive rights.

International:

1. China approves a proposal to impose security legislation over Hong Kong, giving the country broad power over the city. The resolution bans secession, terrorism, subversion, and foreign interference, and gives China’s security agencies the ability to operate in Hong Kong.
2. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says that the U.S. no longer sees Hong Kong as autonomous from China. Trump threatens to end Hong Kong’s favored trade status to punish China.
3. The Trump administration is readying another arms deal with Saudi Arabia similar to the one Congress condemned last year that Pompeo approved. Trump fired the inspector general who was looking into the Trump administration’s actions around that.
4. The Trump administration warns Russian, Chinese, and European companies that have waivers to work at Iranian nuclear sites that he’s ending those waivers and sanctions could apply.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. A Minneapolis police officer kills a black man suspected of passing a counterfeit $20-bill by kneeling on his neck for EIGHT AND A HALF minutes.

• • Video shows the officer looking out dispassionately while George Floyd says “I can’t breathe,” while he calls out for his mother, and even after the life left Floyd’s body. Six years after Eric Garner, and still black men can’t breathe.
  • Onlookers try to get him to stop. Officers refuse to even check his pulse.
  • The officers claim Floyd tried to resist arrest, but onlookers disagree and home video and surveillance video don’t bear it out either.

2. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is so upset he can barely keep it together during a press conference.
3. All four officers are fired. The man who killed Floyd, Derek Chauvin, is arrested for third-degree murder and manslaughter.
4. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI begin independent investigations.
5. Protests start as soon as the video is published. Authorities caution protestors to wear masks (most do) and continue social distancing (it’s too crowded to).
6. The protests start out peacefully but later become violent after protestors march toward the 3rd Precinct. Some start vandalizing and spray-painting police cars. And then the police show up in riot gear throwing tear gas and riling up the protestors further. Protestors start the precinct building on fire.
7. Protests against police brutality spread across the country. Even though the family warns off any instigators of violence, the protests in Minneapolis lead to looting, Molotov cocktails, tear gas, and fires. In Los Angeles, protestors shatter the windows of police cars and block freeways. In the words of one protestor:

• • “The whole city can burn down. They should all be out here protesting, not just people who care about black lives. Everybody. Burn it down. Make them pay. Maybe then they’ll understand.”

8. Always one to throw fuel on the fire, Trump threatens to bring Minneapolis “under control,” calls the protesters “thugs,” and says “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
9. The officer who killed Floyd had a dozen conduct complaints against him but was never disciplined. This leads people to point to Amy Klobuchar, who was the county prosecutor at the time. It turns out that as is the norm, Klobuchar let a grand jury decide when to bring charges against a police officer.
10. The University of Minnesota announces it won’t contract with the Minneapolis PD for large events and specialized services.
11. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz mobilizes the National Guard to help quell the protests there. By the end of the week, thirteen states call in the National Guard. Twenty states and forty cities across the U.S. institute curfews, usually at 6 PM or 8 PM, but Santa Monica, CA, starts the curfew at 1 PM due to all the looting. Protestors defy the curfews.
12. Even police chiefs across the country call the officer’s actions “undefendable.” A police chief in Tennessee tells his officers that if any of them don’t see the injustice in what Chauvin did, they should just turn in their badges now.
13. Police respond to the protests forcefully in some cases, with tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot gear.

• • They even arrest news crews, one while they were reporting live. You can hear the reporter saying they would move to where the police tell them, and the next thing he’s being handcuffed for refusing to move.
  • One of their rubber bullets strikes a journalist near the eye, requiring surgery to save her vision.
  • A Louisville, KY, police officer is placed on administrative leave after he fires pepper balls at the media. It took a while to determine which officer it was because, like so many officers dealing with the protests and riots, he had turned off his body camera.

14. Hundreds of businesses across the U.S. are damaged by looting and vandalism. Local to me, Santa Monica was a bizarre scene. While peaceful protestors marched the streets, organized looters arrived in luxury vehicles and executed coordinated hits on businesses there. While the police marshaled the protestors into tight groups using riot gear, tear gas, and rubber bullets, what were they doing to stop the looting? They did arrest 400 people, most of whom do not live in Santa Monica.

• • Across the country, much of the looting appeared to be planned and coordinated, complete with U-Hauls and SUVs.
  • We see videos of peaceful protestors trying to prevent looters from doing their thing.

15. Attorney General Bill Barr blames the looting and violence on Antifa and left extremist groups, though there’s no evidence of that. He does say that some are coming from out of state.
16. St. Paul’s Mayor, who previously said that every person arrested over the weekend was from out of state, recants that saying that his information was inaccurate. Most lived in Minneapolis and the surrounding area. Mayor Frey and Governor Walz also walk back their similar statements.
17. The Department of Public Safety Commissioner says that white nationalist and hate groups are using social media to encourage looting and violence. Evidence is limited for this claim as well.
18. Protestors gather near the White House, so Trump encourages his base to come to the White House in counter-protest. Talk about mixing a powder keg.
19. His Secret Service whisks Trump off to his security bunker for about an hour as the protests grow around the White House. The bunker is designed for emergencies like terrorist attacks.
20. Joe Biden visits the site of protests in Wilmington, DE, and speaks with protestors.
21. Trump’s allies and advisors urge him to address the nation. Joe Biden releases his own statement about the killing and later gives a twenty-minute speech about it,
22. Finally, during a speech at the SpaceX rocket launch, Trump acknowledges Floyd’s killing, says he spoke with Floyd’s family, and announces a federal civil rights investigation into the matter. He talks about the pain of the nation, but then he spends twice the time talking about the rioters and calling out Antifa and far-left extremists for the violence.
    • His advisors and Republican lawmakers ask him to tone down his rhetoric, especially on Twitter, calling it “unhelpful.” That’s the understatement of the year.
    • Trump blames the unrest on “radical-left anarchists,” leaving out the fact that radical right elements are encouraging violence and looting as well. He accuses the media of trying to foment hatred and anarchy. The fact is we won’t know who’s responsible for what for some time, and may never know some of it.
    • Trump tweets that he’s going to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, indicating he doesn’t understand Antifa. First, it just means “anti-fascist.” Second, it’s not an organization that you can cut off funding for. Experts say it would be unconstitutional. It seems that whether you blame Antifa or white supremacists depends on which side of the political aisle you fall.
23. An officer in Seattle arrests a man and uses the same “knee on the neck” maneuver that killed Floyd. Onlookers object and a fellow officer knocks his knee off the suspect’s neck.
24. After police cruisers are seen apparently driving into a crowd of protestors, Mayor Bill de Blasio says he wouldn’t blame them if they did.
25. In Los Angeles, police who stopped by the scenes of protests blocking the freeway sped off after protestors smashed their windows.
26. In Dallas, a man charges at a group of protestors with a machete and they beat him. It appears he was trying to protect his business.
27. Some of the protests have seen shootings and deaths, but it’s not clear where the bullets came from—vandals, protestors, or police.
28. A tractor-trailer drives into a march on a Minneapolis freeway. Reminiscent of the Rodney King trial, protestors pull him from the truck but the police arrive and take him to the hospital. And arrest him.
29. Two Atlanta officers are fired after they’re seen on video tasing two college kids out of a car and using excessive force on them.
30. We see images of police officers in some cities joining in with the protestors by taking a knee, marching in the protests, and consoling protestors.
31. Protestors say the threat of police brutality outweighs the fear of the coronavirus.
32. A truck pulling a horse trailer drives into a group of protestors. When he can’t get through, he places a gun on his dashboard and protestors start throwing things at his trailer, including a smoke canister. So some media report that the protestors started the horses on fire (they didn’t). Media also report that the driver injured two protestors, driving over their legs. We’ll have to wait for the truth to shake out of this one.
33. Richmond’s police chief says that protestors set fire to an occupied building and then blocked fire trucks from getting there to rescue a child stuck in the building. But the fire chief contradicts that story, saying that the fire extended from a burning car and burned the outside only. All occupants were safely out by the time firefighters arrived.
    
34. This caps a series of high-profile discrimination and killings, including the police killing of Breonna Taylor, the chasing and killing of jogger Ahmaud Arbery, and video of a white woman calling the cops on a black birdwatcher because he asked her to leash her dog.
    • The white woman in the park calls the police to say “an African American” man was threatening her and brings up fake tears to make it sound convincing. She gets fired and loses her dog.

Climate/Environment:

1. Washington and Oregon have designated salmon habitat as an official use of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. But now the EPA is claiming that because of climate change, it’s too hard to keep the waterways habitable for salmon, a problem that’s sure to get worse with the loosening of the Clean Water Act. So the EPA says that since the rules are too hard to follow, we should change the rules.
2. Twenty-three states, four cities, and Washington, D.C. sue the EPA for the agency’s rollback of fuel efficiency standards.
3. The National Park Service under Trump is finalizing a rule to allow hunters in Alaska to kill bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens. This is a reversal of rules put into place under Obama.
4. In 2019, the U.S. consumed more renewable energy than it did coal. That’s the first time since 1885.
5. A judge in Montana cancels energy leases on more than 470 square miles of land where he ruled that the Interior Department didn’t do enough to protect the greater sage grouse, a ground bird with declining numbers.

Budget/Economy:

1. A top economic advisor to Trump, Kevin Hassett, calls American workers “human capital stock” when saying they’re ready to get back to work. Comparing people to property aside, over 2/3 of Americans are worried about going back to work during the pandemic.
2. 2.1 million more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the total since mid-March to nearly 41 million.
3. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange opens for the first time in two months.
4. The Dow Jones rises 600 points in one day as more states take steps to ease the lockdown restrictions.
5. Two months ago as part of their Families First relief package, Congress created an emergency child hunger program but it still hasn’t reached many of the 30 million children who need it.
6. California was the first state to institute shutdown orders, and it’s paying the economic price for it. Unemployment is above 20% (the national rate is around 15%), and movie studios, tourist destinations, and large venues are all closed.
7. Following coronavirus outbreaks of the coronavirus at meat processing plants in North Carolina, farmers there are forced to euthanize 1.5 million chickens.
8. The Trump administration mails out postcards with social distancing guidelines and Trump’s signature, which cost the U.S. Postal Service $28 million. Trump has refused to provide aid to the Postal Service in the coronavirus relief packages.

Elections:

1. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden makes his first public appearance in the two months since the shutdowns started. He and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, lay a wreath at veterans park in Delaware on Memorial Day. Trump, on the other hand, insists on going to Baltimore’s Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, despite Baltimore’s mayor imploring him not to due to the pandemic and added cost of security.
2. Trump threatens to move the Republican National Convention to a different state if North Caroline Governor Cooper forces them to maintain pandemic social distancing and capacity guidelines.
3. The RNC sends Governor Cooper their proposed safety protocols that will allow them to go ahead with the convention while minimizing the spread of the coronavirus. Trump asks Cooper to allow a full convention without any mask requirements, so then the RNC says they want Cooper to allow full attendance as well, and they want bars and restaurants to be running at capacity. The state just had its biggest one-day spike in cases.
4. South Carolina Republicans return to the campaign trail, pandemic be damned. No masks, no social distancing, shared microphones, handshakes, and hugs.
5. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who claims that voting by mail is rife with fraud, has been voting by mail since 2010.

Miscellaneous:

1. Trump gets fact-checked by Twitter and threatens to shut down social media. Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media platform has been adding more and more fact-checking tools for three years, says that social media shouldn’t be fact-checking political speech.

• • So Trump signs an executive order that seeks to allow social medial companies to be held liable for what other people post. The EO merely encourages the FCC to rethink the scope of the existing law.
  • Twitter flags another of Trump’s tweets for inciting violence. This was his “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet.
  • Trump thanks a supporter on Twitter for posting a video where he says, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

2. SpaceX launches its first manned mission to the International Space Station. This is the first time since 2011 NASA has used our own spacecraft to launch humans into space.
3. Trump speaks after the launch, saying that when he took over, NASA wasn’t pretty; it was decrepit. Pence says it’s the culmination of three and a half years of renewed leadership in space.

• • In reality, the program was initiated under George W. Bush in 2006 and was carried through during Obama’s time in office. SpaceX was granted the contract in 2014. In 2015, they selected the astronauts who are flying the mission.

4. The Defense Department’s principal deputy inspector general, Glenn Fine, resigns one month after Trump removed him from the oversight position for the pandemic relief packages. It also follows several firings of inspector generals by the Trump administration.

Polls:

1. Trump’s approval rating continues to slip as Americans have a negative view of his handling of the pandemic. Joe Biden holds a double-digit lead over Trump in presidential election polling.