It appears President Trump is attempting to take his war against immigrants to a new level, and he’s using COVID-19 as an excuse to do it.

I’ve mentioned a number of times that we really don’t know the precise mix of factors that are making some states and countries disasters and allowing others to keep it in check. A critical component in all cases is where communities and governments are taking mitigation and containment seriously. But in New York, are we just doing a great job or is the initial outbreak – in which at least 20% of the city population was apparently infected – giving us some extra ability to keep case rates down?

New York City isn’t close to herd immunity by traditional definitions. But ‘herd immunity’ isn’t a binary thing – you don’t have it and then suddenly you do. It’s more like a friction that builds up incrementally in the process of community spread as more people cease to be capable of being vectors because they have immunity to the disease. The more people become infected the more friction there is until at one point the virus can’t effectually reproduce itself and fizzles out.

Clearly this factor is helping New York keep cases very low. But how much – whether it is a minor assist or a major factor – we don’t know.

That’s where a very interesting article from David Wallace-Wells comes in.

Last week we did our second Inside briefing since we came back from our COVID briefing hiatus. I spoke to Annette Gordon-Reed, one of the country’s preeminent Jefferson scholars and the author of two books about the Jefferson-Hemings family and the historical controversies surrounding it. Gordon-Reed is a professor at Harvard Law School and has a joint appointment in the History Department. Her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy was the first major scholarly work to take the existence of Jefferson’s mixed race family seriously. It came out only about a year before the matter was settled conclusively by DNA evidence. Before then it wasn’t universally rejected by historians but was treated as either unknowable or unlikely, an ancient calumny that played little part in the Jefferson biographical tradition. I was eager to discuss this until-recently hidden or denied part of America’s past with Gordon-Reed and get her perspective on how we should see Jefferson in this era of iconoclasm that has accelerated in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

We’re publishing the discussion in its entirety for members. Watch after the jump.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on the Kamala Harris pick.

My first thought is that as with much else about Biden it is – for this moment – a thoroughly conventional pick. She compensates for Biden’s relative lack of demographic match for the coalition that he leads. Biden is old, male and white. Harris is young (at least as presidenting goes), female and black. She also has a recent immigrant background from South Asia. Joe needs a lot of compensating and she provides a lot. Critically, she has run and won three statewide races in the largest state in the union, in addition to running a major presidential primary campaign. So few surprises.

Sen. Kamala Harris’ (D-CA) appointment as Joe Biden’s running mate represents a wealth of necessary firsts for our nation and is the culmination of months of political maneuvering from both Biden and Harris’ teams and the Democratic Party as a whole.

But why float in the breeze for a few hours after months of speculation when we can dive into a plethora of “what’s next?” inquiries. That is the media’s job after all.

A brief follow up to yesterday’s post about the possibility of widespread immunity or resistance to COVID among those who have never been exposed to it. Carl Bergstrom – who is a professor at the University of Washington and a good Twitter follow for COVID – has an important caution or caveat on this hypothesis. If it’s true that say 50% of people started with COVID immunity, then that means that it’s dramatically more infectious than we thought.

These things are so transparent that it is hard to know what to say beyond the obvious. But I wanted to note that based on yesterday’s evidence, Donald Trump’s and the Trump campaign’s central attack line against Kamala Harris is that she is “disrespectful.”

A Trump campaign email that went out last yesterday called her “the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful, MOST LIBERAL of anyone in the U.S. Senate.” In his afternoon press briefing President Trump used the word three times. He said Harris was “very disrespectful to Joe Biden” and then said it’s “hard to pick somebody that’s that disrespectful.” Later he attacked her ‘disrespectful’ behavior toward Brent Kavanaugh. “I thought it was terrible for our nation. I thought she was the meanest, the most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate.”

Here’s something to look forward to as we attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that COVID-19 is still very much our reality: Reading the contents of pen pals President Trump and Kim Jong Un’s letters to one another.