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Two gentlemen considered at 'high risk' of contracting COVID-19 met tonight in the Washington DC studio of CNN, to pitch themselves to an on-edge nation as the best alternative to Donald Trump. The Sunday night face-off between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders was initially supposed to be in Phoenix, Arizona, as the state votes on Tuesday. But that was in The Before Time. Even the CNN panel was socially distanced before the debate, with panelists spaced six feet apart across two studios, as opposed to the usual eight people crammed behind the desk like a pack of hot dogs. This memo clearly didn't get sent down the hall to where the debate was being held, as Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Univision's Ilia Calderón sat unhealthily close together.

President Trump announced on Friday that the country is now in a state of emergency, due to the rapid pace of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus and its spread. Such a declaration escalates the federal government’s ability to respond to the virus, via the access of billions in funds that can be dispersed to state and local governments in need of additional financial assistance to accommodate robust public health responses. But the declaration was made too late. While we have the ability to contain this outbreak effectively with international coordination, the failures of the Trump administration to respond more quickly is troubling.

Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday over the spread of COVID-19, promising to dedicate $50 billion in funding for states to fight the virus. The order is the latest in a line of actions taken by the administration to try to stem the spread of the virus: major restrictions on travel from China and the European Union, convincing insurance companies to waive copayments on Coronavirus testing, and loosening FDA restrictions on testing, among others. 'We will overcome the threat of the virus,' President Trump said during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden.

Jared Kushner has a lot on his plate. The White House senior adviser was tasked this week with conducting research into the coronavirus to help Trump decide whether to declare a national emergency. According to Politico, Kushner is talking to 'relevant parties' and will 'present his findings to the president'. It appears that one of these 'relevant parties' is an emergency room doctor called Kurt Kloss, father of Jared's sister-in-law Karlie. And Dr Kloss sought the advice of other medical professionals on Kushner's behalf...in a Facebook group with almost 22,000 members. 'If you were in charge of Federal response to the Pandemic what would your recommendation be,' Kloss wrote in the private group Wednesday, according to screenshots passed to The Spectator.

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no libertarians in a pandemic. As the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States starts to resemble the exponential outbreaks in countries where the pandemic is more advanced, the American public wants the kind of security that only government can provide. Donald Trump was elected to provide security, whether from the domestic challenge of outsourcing or the foreign challenge of a rising China. In recent days, he has failed in judgment, in leadership and in decision-making. Only after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic did he address the nation and announce the closure of America’s borders.

Despite telling a Michigan auto worker to his face that he was ‘full of shit’ about gun rights and lampooning some weapon called an AR-14 (which is an assault rifle used by fake country the Republic of Surea and not the beloved, American semi-automatic sporting rifle, the AR-15) earlier Tuesday while campaigning, Joe Biden soared ahead in the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders in states Sanders swept from under Hillary Clinton in 2016. Michigan, and Biden’s victory there, is perhaps the only interesting primary story we'll see this election cycle and reveals more about the 2016 election than it does 2020.

Twitter announced last month it would start flagging content the company and moderators decided was manipulated to deceive their users. The fear at the time was that this would of course be applied as Twitter deemed fit — decisions would be based solely on the personal opinions of the moderator or moderators. That fear now seems real. Twitter flagged a video clip of presidential candidate Joe Biden stumbling over his words at a recent campaign rally. Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media manager tweeted out a clip of the speech, which Twitter flagged as ‘manipulated media’. The trouble is, under the definition of what manipulation is and how that applies to video, the clip Twitter flagged was not manipulated. Instead Twitter is simply flagging context.

The results of Super Tuesday show that while Joe Biden can’t be described as coherent, the Biden campaign has found a coherent message. It is not a message bristling with policy detail. It is not a message that swears fealty to intersectional dogma. Certainly, it is not a message that has much appeal to anybody under the age of 30. Instead, what Biden offers is a strange vision of a nation restored to a pre-Trump summer of the early 2010s. ‘We have to correct,’ Biden says in his speeches. The correction is not aimed at what those on the left perceive to be enormous structures of injustice and inequality. Biden rarely talks about systems.

Elizabeth Warren did not die in a tragic accident yesterday. But judging by the reactions of America’s journalists and academics, you would be forgiven for thinking she had. Instead, she suspended her presidential campaign after a string of self-inflicted, humiliating failures. Yet huge swathes of the overeducated US intelligentsia responded the news as though their entire worldview had been shattered. I don’t see much of a difference in the reactions of Warren’s elite opinion-maker supporters to her campaign suspension and the way Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash was processed by NBA fans: raw trauma and disbelief, with some anger and desperation mixed in.

Being president just wasn’t in Elizabeth Warren’s DNA. The New York Times’s favorite candidate has nevertheless stopped persisting. After finishing third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday, all the smoke signals were there, and the media could no longer circle the wagons around her. The question was never about if Warren was going to fold her tent and go home, it was simply a case of when. Warren was supposedly considering taking her candidacy all the way to the convention, but that would have been quite the gamble for both her and her party.

The aftershocks of a stunning Super Tuesday continue to ripple through the conscience of America. Suddenly, a great number of Americans find themselves wondering where they can turn to find the best hope to restore American dignity and normalcy. I’m referring, of course, to Libertarian presidential candidate and fugitive John McAfee, who sadly announced he was suspending his campaign in a Twitter video Wednesday from parts unknown. The country has been robbed of the potential for McAfee, surrounded by a plethora of gorgeous Belarusian strippers and strapped up with an AK-47, to be sworn in to the presidency with an acid-dipped joint dropping from his lips. McAfee instead declared his candidacy for vice president alongside Libertarian candidate Vermin Supreme.

Arlington, Virginia A special type of Democratic voter lives in the suburbs of DC that conservatives heavily caricature whose existence I couldn't confirm until now. Overwhelmingly white, young, progressive, desperately out of touch, and they love Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren fans are hard to come by nowadays, but I was lucky enough to find one of her last pockets of support at an Arlington Democrats and Arlington Young Democrats election night party. Nearly a hundred of the club's members gathered at William Jeffrey's Tavern, a bar with plenty of craft beers on tap and a projector screen set up to display live Super Tuesday results. Local news crews swarmed the small section of the bar reserved for the group.