Trump wants to color this moment as one in which he is leading America forward and Democrats are dragging their feet. It is a narrative that falls nicely into his grievance-driven worldview. Each time we resist his efforts to reopen the economy, we come off as that much more effete and out of touch. He’s setting a trap for us.

And in politics, you can’t beat something with nothing. Rather than centering our agenda on resistance to the reopening he intends to trumpet, Democrats should respond by explaining how we intend to rebuild America.

To be clear, the issue here isn’t policy — or even economics. It’s culture. Democrats are so aligned with data, science and logic that we’ve lost sight of why so much of the country is skeptical of expertise. It was the elites who claimed we’d be welcomed as liberators to Iraq, where we would find weapons of mass destruction. It was the elites who talked up collateralized mortgages, and then bailed out Wall Street while Main Street suffered. In too many cases, the elites have gotten the big ones wrong and never paid any price.
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Partly as a result, Trump’s insistence that the country reopen resonates. Set aside that he’s substantively responsible for the carnage: This is the first national crisis that hasn’t received a national response — and the consequences are obvious to everyone. Trump is keen to pose as the lone voice sticking it to the haughty, know-it-all institutional experts, but he doesn’t have any idea how to get us out of the current economic and medical morass.

Democrats need to move beyond resistance, reluctance and mere relief. Americans are hurting today — and many fear, quite understandably, that the millions of jobs and small businesses destroyed by the pandemic may never come back, even when the lights come back on. Reopening the economy isn’t going to bring back all the jobs lost at both the big chain outlets such as J.C. Penney and at all the neighborhood retail storefronts. Maybe most pointedly, reopening the economy won’t do anything to protect the Michiganders whose lives were destroyed when obsolete dams burst, flooding huge swaths of Midland County.

New York's 15th congressional district, with Yankee Stadium at its heart, is home to some of the country's poorest and most diverse people, an Obama oasis bordering AOC's neighborhood—and yet it is on the verge of electing a Trump-loving Democrat for its open seat in the House.

That Democrat is Reverend Ruben Diaz Sr., a flamboyant, cowboy hat-wearing New York City councilman who immediately distinguished his views when he announced his run in 2019, saying "I am the opposite of AOC in the South Bronx."

And that has national Democrats, opponents and progressives like Planned Parenthood and LGBT groups in a panic because the 77-year-old minister has a history of making inflammatory statements about homosexuals and strongly opposes abortion because of his religious beliefs.

"He would instantly become Donald Trump's favorite New York congressman," strategist Eric Koch of anti-Diaz super PAC Bronx United told Newsweek, adding that Diaz Sr. would be an unreliable Democratic vote in the House caucus.

To complicate matters, he has a son, Ruben Diaz Jr., who is his namesake and a Bronx borough president many call the most popular politician in the borough. Diaz Jr. is regularly asked to comment on his father's actions, as he did disapprovingly when Diaz Sr. invited Senator Ted Cruz to visit the Bronx, but the consensus is that his son is a political plus for the reverend.

The 15th district is the poorest and most diverse district in the country—more than 97 percent of its residents are minorities and the median household income was estimated to be $28,042 in 2017. It is also comfortably Democrat. Barack Obama took nearly 97 percent of the vote there in 2012. It borders the district Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents.

NEW YORK — It was laundry that broke Mary Shell. Or rather, the lack of an in-unit washer and dryer in her Brooklyn apartment where Shell, 37, a field producer for reality television, could barely afford her half of the rent before the novel coronavirus pandemic because work had been slow for months. Times are even tougher now that her roommate, also unemployed, has had to move back in with her parents.

Shell was so financially strapped that she began inquiring about various night-life gigs, only to see covid-19 close all the bars and clubs. (“So that’s another job you can’t do in a pandemic.”) Still, her situation might have been bearable if the nearest laundromat wasn’t four blocks away.

“I just want to be able to do laundry without having to drag it up and down a four-story walk-up or pay someone $40 or $50 to do it for me,” said Shell — echoing a gripe of New York City’s apartment-dwellers so timeless that “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Living Single” and “Broad City” all have episodes about the indignities of shared laundry facilities. But throw in a pandemic and Shell said the stress has been “exhausting,” noting how she recently showed up to her laundromat to find that someone had handled all the clothes she had just washed.

“Everyone deserves space and basic amenities,” she said, lamenting how, in New York, many landlords deem a washing machine a “luxury” item. “It’s just insulting to come at us and be like, ‘We’re going to charge you an extra thousand dollars a month for this standard appliance that’s been in American households since the 1970s.’ ”