This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.

The membership rush allowed the president to take $26 million out of the business from 2015 through 2018, nearly triple the rate at which he had paid himself in the prior two years.

People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.

she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father’s business

Mr. Trump has an established track record of stiffing his lenders. But the tax returns reveal that he has failed to pay back far more money than previously known: a total of $287 million since 2010.

In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business.

In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

When white supremacists applied for a permit to hold a march in 2018 to commemorate the first anniversary of their protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Facebook group organized a counterprotest in Washington, D.C. The group was called the Resisters. Its administrators, who went by the names Mary and Natasha, recruited a coterie of enthusiastic organizers to promote the rally. When Facebook took down the Resisters’ page—noting its ties to IRA accounts, and implying that Mary and Natasha were fictitious creations—American leftists were shocked to learn that they had apparently been hatching plans with foreign trolls.

Whereas the KGB once needed to find journalistic vehicles to plant their stories—usually the small-audience fringes of the radical press—Facebook and Twitter hardly distinguished between mainstream outlets and clickbait upstarts.

It fomented conspiracies about the CIA—that the agency had orchestrated the spread of the AIDS virus in a laboratory and plotted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

. It was natural to assume that they had been harvested from the email hack, too. The Macron leaks suggested a dangerous new technique, a sinister mixing of the hacked and the fabricated intended to exploit the electorate’s hunger for raw evidence and faith in purloined documents.

It’s impossible to know their reasoning, but Russian hackers made what would prove to be a clever decision not to alter Podesta’s email. Many media outlets accepted whatever emails WikiLeaks published without pausing to verify every detail, and they weren’t punished for their haste. The Podesta leaks thus established a precedent, an expectation that hacked material is authentic—perhaps the most authentic version of reality available, an opportunity to see past a campaign’s messaging and spin and read its innermost thoughts.

May’s declining cases are the result of April’s physical distancing, and the consequences of May’s reopenings won’t be felt until June at the earliest. This long gap between actions and their consequences makes it easy to learn the wrong lessons.

“We have decades of social-science research that tells us these things work,” says Courtney Boen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a question of political will, not scientific discovery.”

“When America catches a cold, black people get the flu,” says Rashawn Ray, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “In 2020, when America catches COVID-19, black people die.”

“It’s inevitable that we’ll see stark increases in infections in the next weeks,”

Of all the threats we know, the COVID-19 pandemic is most like a very rapid version of climate change—global in its scope, erratic in its unfolding, and unequal in its distribution. And like climate change, there is no easy fix. Our choices are to remake society or let it be remade, to smooth the patchworks old and new or let them fray even further.

Up to 40 percent of the 170,000-person Navajo (Diné) Nation have no running water; they can’t effectively wash their hands. About 30 percent have no power; they burn coal or wood for heat, resulting in irritated lungs that are vulnerable to a respiratory pandemic—a problem exacerbated by uranium mining on their lands.

successful public-health departments tragically make the case for their own diminishment

The better strategy is not to try and prevent the virus from traveling, but to build a public-health system nimble enough to catch it when it arrives. Don’t build one big wall; instead, ready a thousand nets.

And they had all restrained the virus to a much greater extent than the U.S.

Stay-at-home orders were necessary but ruinous, economically and emotionally. Their purpose was to buy time for the country to catch its breath, steel its hospitals, and roll out a public-health plan capable of quashing the virus.

This decentralized system is a strength: An epidemiologist in rural Minnesota knows the needs and vulnerabilities of her community better than a federal official in Washington, D.C.

But no single factor can explain differences across nations or regions.

Redbird doesn’t share the widely held fear that Americans have become inured to social distancing and will refuse to suffer through it again. The bigger risk, she says, is that demoralizing bouts of shutdowns and reopenings will nix any prospect of economic recovery. “You only get to say Go out, trust me once,” she says. “They won’t believe you the second time.”

“Crises are political only until they are personal,” wrote the journalist Elaina Plott, in a piece about a Louisiana woman who convinced her conservative friends to take the coronavirus seriously after her own husband fell sick

of the counties that had reported cases of COVID-19 by early April, 37 percent had lost their local newspaper in the past 15 years

When national news diverges from local reality, “suspicions about whether the epidemic was a hoax will find fertile ground in places with a more ambiguous experience of the disease,”

“We had a strong sense of shared purpose when everything first hit,” says Danielle Allen, a political scientist at Harvard. But that communal mindset may dissipate as the virus strikes one community and spares another, and as some people hit the beaches while others are stuck at home. Patchworks of risk and response “will make it really hard for the public to get a crisp understanding of what’s happening,” Rivers says.

Ultimately, it emerged that the first author of the study had failed to disclose a significant conflict of interest; thereafter, most of the coauthors distanced themselves from the study, the journal officially retracted the article, and the first author was eventually found guilty of misconduct and lost his license to practice medicine

including a majority of voters in Republican primary elections in 2011

why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective in memory updating and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and, ironically, increase misbelief

As my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal have reported, 20 percent of Americans who are tested for the coronavirus are still getting positive results.

His piece was widely circulated in conservative circles and the Trump administration. When asked about his lack of epidemiological training in an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Epstein responded, “One of the things you get as a lawyer is a skill of cross-examination. I spent an enormous amount of time over my career teaching medical people about some of this stuff.” His essay initially speculated that 500 Americans would die from COVID-19. He later updated that estimate to 5,000. So far, the death toll stands at 58,000, and is still rising.

But other scientists, including statisticians, virologists, and disease ecologists, have criticized the study’s methods and the team’s conclusions.

But they must also be rigorous. “Clinicians are under tremendous stress, which affects our ability to process information,” McLaren says. “‘Is this actually working, or does it seem to be working because I want it to work and I feel powerless?’”

When people learned about a meeting in which global leaders role-played through a fictional coronavirus pandemic, some wrongly argued that the actual pandemic had been planned

And the desire to name an antagonist, be it the Chinese Communist Party or Donald Trump, disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups. It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.

The facile dichotomy between saving either lives or the economy belies the broad agreement between epidemiologists and economists that the U.S. shouldn’t reopen prematurely.

The death toll is still climbing, but seems unlikely to hit the worst-case 2.2 million ceiling. That was close. Or, as some pundits are already claiming, that was exaggerated.

One such test claims to correctly identify people with those antibodies 93.8 percent of the time. By contrast, it identifies phantom antibodies in 4.4 percent of people who don’t have them. That false-positive rate sounds acceptably low. It’s not. Let’s assume 5 percent of the U.S. has been infected so far. Among 1,000 people, the test would correctly identify antibodies in 47 of the 50 people who had them. But it would also wrongly spot antibodies in 42 of the 950 people without them. The number of true positives and false positives would be almost equal.

Starbird recommends slowing down and taking a moment to vet new information before sharing it.

the staccato pulse of reports merely amplifies the wobbliness of the scientific process, turns incremental bits of evidence into game changers, and intensifies the already-palpable sense of uncertainty that drives people toward misinformation.

Amid the psychological loam of fear and uncertainty, conspiracy theories are germinating like weeds.

On Twitter, false information spreads further than true information, and at six times the speed.

they offered a longer and more accurate explanation.

In late February, Nancy Messonnier, the respiratory-disease chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, broke ranks and told Americans that community spread of the virus within the U.S. was a question of when, not if. Messonnier urged the nation to prepare for possible school closures, loss of work, “disruption to everyday life that may be severe,” and “the expectation that this could be bad.” The next day, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” The day after, CDC Director Robert Redfield reiterated that “the risk is low,” and said that Messonnier could have been more articulate.

On January 26, Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tweeted, “We should be planning for the possibility that [the coronavirus] cannot be contained.”

To work out if widespread testing is crucial for controlling the pandemic, listen to public-health experts; to work out if widespread testing is possible, listen to supply-chain experts. To determine if antibody tests can tell people if they’re immune to the coronavirus, listen to immunologists; to determine if such testing is actually a good idea, listen to ethicists, anthropologists, and historians of science. No one knows it all, and those who claim to should not be trusted.

A lack of expertise becomes problematic when it’s combined with extreme overconfidence, and with society’s tendency to reward projected confidence over humility.

We hunger for information, but lack the know-how to evaluate it or the sources that provide it. “This is the epistemological crisis of the moment: There’s a lot of expertise around, but fewer tools than ever to distinguish it from everything else,” says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic contributing writer.

“The climate-change people are used to it, but we epidemiologists are not.”

The precise magnitude of the virus’s fatality rate is a matter of academic debate. The reality of what it can do to hospitals is not.

This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty.

For now, doctors are routinely prescribing it without knowing if it works or, crucially, if it does more harm than good.

The disease seems to wreak havoc not only on lungs and airways, but also on hearts, blood vessels, kidneys, guts, and nervous systems

The virus might vary little around the world, but the disease varies a lot.

Besser and his successor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom Frieden, gave more than a hundred press briefings. President Barack Obama spoke publicly about the outbreak only a few times

You don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it.

Within days, even before Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, issued official work-from-home orders, almost half of Seattle’s workers were voluntarily staying away from their offices. When bars and restaurants were officially closed, on March 15th, many of them were already empty.

Epidemiologists also must learn how to maintain their persuasiveness even as their advice shifts. The recommendations that public-health professionals make at the beginning of an emergency—there’s no need to wear masks; children can’t become seriously ill—often change as hypotheses are disproved, new experiments occur, and a virus mutates.

Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. “Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.” Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel and socializing, to submit themselves to blood draws and immunization shots—even when there’s scant evidence that they’re directly at risk.

But when Riedo stopped to calculate how many of his hospital employees had been exposed to the coronavirus he had to quit when his list surpassed two hundred people. “If we sent all of those workers home for two weeks, which is what the C.D.C. was recommending, we’d have to shut down the entire hospital,” he told me. He felt like a man who, having casually swatted at a buzzing insect, suddenly realized that he was beneath a beehive.

then you go to the gym

In New York City, another week passed until an equivalent percentage did the same. Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced COVID-19 deaths by fifty to eighty per cent.

Good politicians should worry about poor children missing school just as much as they worry about the threat of an emerging disease.

A former adviser tweeted, “The mayor’s actions today are inexcusable and reckless.” Another former consultant tweeted that the gym visit was “Pathetic. Self-involved. Inexcusable.”

Layton and a deputy health commissioner, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, indicated to de Blasio’s staff that if the Mayor didn’t act promptly they would resign. (The next day, Layton’s staff greeted her with applause, and at least one employee offered to give her some money if she had to make good on the ultimatum.)

One City Council member told me that health officials “had been trying to say that publicly for weeks, but this mayor refuses to trust the experts—it’s mind-boggling.”

On March 4th, he tweeted, “If you feel flu-like symptoms (fever, cough and shortness of breath), and recently traveled to an area affected by coronavirus . . . go to your doctor.” This was the opposite of what city health supervisors were advising: people needed to stay inside and call their doctor if they felt sick.

The effort was blocked over fears that it might create a panic, but such alarm might have proved useful.

During a pandemic, however, all those imperatives are reversed: a politician’s job is to inflame our paranoia, because waiting until we can see the danger means holding off until it’s too late. The city’s epidemiologists were horrified by the comforting messages that de Blasio and Cuomo kept giving.

On the day that Seattle schools closed, de Blasio said at a press conference that “if you are not sick, if you are not in the vulnerable category, you should be going about your life.”

New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio

which one local columnist compared to the popular girl in high school who “always smiles and says hello” but “doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to.”

By the second week of April, Washington State had roughly one recorded fatality per fourteen thousand residents.

Morale at the C.D.C. has plummeted.

When the coronavirus pandemic started, E.I.S. alumni began working non-stop, with some setting up cots inside their offices. While the virus remained overseas, the C.D.C. led communications, scrupulously following E.I.S. protocols. But soon after the coronavirus landed on American shores the White House took over. E.I.S. officers were dismayed to see the communication principles that the C.D.C. had honed over the years being disregarded, and sometimes turned on their head. A Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice-President Mike Pence, was formed, excluding everyone from the C.D.C. except its director, Dr. Robert Redfield. “The C.D.C. was ordered into lockdown,” a former senior official at the agency told me. “They can’t speak to the media. These are people who have trained their entire lives for epidemics—the finest public-health army in history—and they’ve been told to shut up!”

He proposed a new division, named to evoke the Central Intelligence Agency.

King County has a strong reputation for excellent public-health experts, and the worst thing we could have done is substitute our judgment for the expertise of people who have devoted their lives to serving the public

“If we order people to wear masks, then every C.D.C. official must wear a mask in public. If we order hand washing, then we let the cameras see us washing our hands. We’re trying to do something nearly impossible, which is get people to take an outbreak seriously when, for most Americans, they don’t know anyone who’s sick and, if the plan works, they’ll never meet anyone who’s sick.”

The Bush Administration did a good job of creating the infrastructure so that we can respond

in quiet violation of C.D.C. guidance

It’s kind of like a secret society, but for saving people