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National

President Trump intends to nominate John Gibbs to run the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), according to two sources with direct knowledge of the decision, which remains closely held.

Why it matters: OPM is the HR department for the federal government's civil service. The agency has become a focus of the White House's efforts to install and reward Trump loyalists across the government.

As Politico first reported, the previous head of OPM, Dale Cabaniss, "stepped down because of, what two people familiar with the matter said, was poor treatment from the [then] 29-year-old head of the Presidential Personnel Office, John McEntee, and a powerful appointee at OPM, Paul Dans."

Between the lines: Gibbs is a former conservative commentator who currently serves as a senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Gibbs received national media attention when CNN reported, in 2018, that he "spread a false conspiracy theory that claimed Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign chairman took part in a Satanic ritual."

White House response: Deputy press secretary Judd Deere told Axios that "the White House has no personnel announcements at this time."

Go deeper: Trump's loyalty cop John McEntee clashes with agency heads

Scoop: Trump to put loyalist in charge of government's HR department

In 2018, Gibbs "spread a false conspiracy theory" about Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Politics

Trump administration

Donald Trump

2024 will be an election year like no other, as President Biden seeks re-election amid economic uncertainty, two wars and questions about his age. His likely foe, former President Trump, faces felony charges and vows revenge on his political enemies. Meanwhile, Americans generally are dissatisfied with those choices and are divided over immigration, race, education and more.

Politics & Policy

President Trump and his top advisers are trying to rebrand Joe Biden as a danger to America — with some aides admitting privately that the "Sleepy Joe" nickname will never gin up the visceral reaction they exploited against "Crooked Hillary" Clinton.

Driving the news: The emerging strategy is to claim Biden's mental faculties are diminished and say he can't rein in protesters' most controversial excesses, including toppling a Ulysses S. Grant statue, looting stores, burning buildings and vandalizing St. John's Church.

Why it matters: Trump is trailing in key states, and some of his advisers say they're running out of time to make suburban moms so scared of "Uncle Joe" that they'll vote for Trump.

A growing number of Trump's advisers say their best shot is to convince voters that the avuncular Biden won't really run the show if elected. 

"We need to be demonizing him," said a Republican lawmaker who talks regularly to Trump. The lawmaker said "Sleepy Joe" sounds harmless, congenial and low key. "Sleepy probably sounds nice to a lot of people right now, with everything that's going on," he said.

In April's NBC/WSJ poll, only 25% of voters held a "very negative" view of Biden. In the NBC/WSJ poll of April 2016, meanwhile, 42% of voters held a "very negative" view of Hillary Clinton. Trump's figure is similar to Clinton's — around 43% of voters today say they hold a "very negative" view of him (53% were "very negative" on Trump in April 2016). 

In recent days, Trump has sought to cast a more sinister light over Biden, replacing "Sleepy Joe" with "Corrupt Joe," the Washington Post first reported.

Behind the scenes: Trump's aides say it will be harder to make Biden widely despised than it was with Clinton, who was a conservative media target for decades.

"You're not going to make Joe Biden hated personally," said a source involved in the internal discussions. "You can't do it through personality." 

So they will try to argue that he wouldn't really be in charge. "You've got to make it so that a vote for Joe Biden isn't a vote for Joe Biden, it's really a vote for his radical left-wing puppet masters," the source said.

Between the lines: Trump and some of his top advisers and surrogates have been testing variations on that theme.

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller often sends out talking points to Trump insiders, which he calls "Quick Bites." Last Monday's talkers, reviewed by Axios, included this point: "The left-wing mob controlling Joe Biden's campaign and the Democratic Party has gone too far. Statues of Teddy Roosevelt and defunding the police is just the beginning, and Joe Biden is too weak to make them stop."

In Thursday night's town hall with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Trump didn't use the phrase "Sleepy Joe," according to the Fox transcripts.

He did say: "I don't think Biden's a radical left, but it doesn't matter because they're going to just do whatever they want to do. They'll take him over. ... Whether you like it or not, he's shot. The radical left is going to take him over."

Both Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale have made versions of this pitch in recent days. 

Yes, but: It's not at all clear that any of these new attacks will work.

Trump's advisers have long argued over the most effective way of attacking Biden, and in the most recent NYT/Siena College poll, more than 60% of voters disagreed with the notion that Biden was too old to be an effective president.

It's also a bit of a head-scratcher as to how Biden can be both "Corrupt Joe" — which suggests a degree of agency — and totally incapacitated.

Biden campaign response: "During the entire clown car parade of shattered, failed, and recycled lies that is the Trump campaign, Donald Trump has never been able to stop telling on himself," Biden's director of rapid response, Andrew Bates, said in a statement.

Bates listed Trump vulnerabilities, including the coronavirus response, China and questions of mental acuity, noting how Trump mused about whether doctors could inject disinfectant into people to treat the virus.

"Whoever comes up with these attacks," Bates said, "we should honestly be paying them."

From sleepy to senile: Inside the Trump campaign's effort to rebrand Biden

Trump's aides say it will be harder to make Biden widely despised than it was with Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump campaign

2020 election

Joe Biden

The Biden campaign plans to focus its messages this week on "the difference between what Joe Biden called for and what Donald Trump did at crucial inflection points" since the pandemic arrived in America, according to a Biden adviser.

What we're hearing: Expect the Biden campaign to use footage of Trump golfing, holding rallies, complaining about being mistreated by the media and saying he wanted testing slowed down. 

Plus they'll hammer Trump for continuing his assault on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during this health crisis — noting that if the Supreme Court invalidates the law as the administration is seeking, it could strip 23 million Americans' health care and eliminate coverage for preexisting conditions amid a pandemic.

Biden's deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said that Trump's "streak of failure to protect or even prioritize American lives and jobs is one of the most catastrophic mistakes made by any commander in chief in modern history."

"And the entire time," she said, "Joe Biden has laid out a better course — sounding the alarm early, telling President Trump not to trust the Chinese government about containment, and releasing a comprehensive national testing strategy months ago."

Trump campaign response: "President Trump has been leading the nation through the global coronavirus crisis while all Joe Biden has done is try to turn it into a political weapon from his basement in Delaware," responded Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh.

"If Biden had truly been warning everyone about the virus since January, why was he campaigning normally into the second week of March?" he said. (In late January, Biden wrote an op-ed sounding the alarm about Trump's early handling of the coronavirus.)

"When the President restricted travel from China in January, Biden called it 'xenophobic' and 'fear-mongering,'" Murtaugh added.

He said that "all Biden knows about handling a crisis is that he can't. ... During the swine flu outbreak when Biden was vice president, the White House had to apologize for his reckless remarks so they didn't cause 'undue panic.'"

Biden campaign to zero in on COVID inflection points in coming week

Expect the Biden campaign to use footage of Trump golfing, holding rallies, saying he wanted testing slowed down.

Biden met with families who have benefited from the Affordable Care Act and made remarks on his plan for affordable health care, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, June 25. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

Data: The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios

Sunday saw the world hit two grim global coronavirus milestones — 10 million confirmed cases and 500,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

Why it matters: The world may now be past peak lockdown — with economies reopening from Spain to South Africa — but it has not seen the worst of the virus. More than one in five cases recorded during the entirety of the pandemic came in the last two weeks alone.

The big picture: As the virus has reached every country on Earth, the eye of the storm has shifted from China to Europe to the developing world. Latin America is now the global epicenter, with South Asia not far behind and sub-Saharan Africa bracing for impact.

The U.S. and Brazil continue to record by far the most new cases. Together with Mexico, they also accounted for half of all deaths recorded over the past week.

India will likely surpass those countries in the coming weeks, according to Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor at the University of Michigan who has been modeling India's outbreak. She doesn’t expect the outbreak to peak there until late July or August.

Hospitals in New Delhi and Mumbai have been overrun, and rural areas are now detecting significant outbreaks, even as India has lifted its lockdown.

While case counts are rising fast across South Asia, a dearth of testing obscures their true scale.

Even fewer tests are being conducted in parts of sub-Saharan Africa (an American is 150x as likely to have been tested as someone from Nigeria, for example). But what data we do have indicates Africa is “on the brink of a large outbreak,” according to Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Africa was battered by the global economic slowdown before the virus itself. Now, vaccinations and treatments for other conditions have slowed as resources shift toward COVID-19. 

Between deaths from other diseases and increases in hunger, says Gayle Smith, CEO of the ONE Campaign and a former USAID administrator, "it's very possible that there will be a higher mortality rate from the knock-on effects than from the virus itself."

Where it stands: When the pandemic first struck pockets of wealthy countries — from northern Italy to New York City — it accelerated exponentially but fell nearly as rapidly in the weeks after lockdowns were imposed.

That trajectory has not held across the U.S., and it certainly has not held in poorer countries for which lockdowns had to be weighed against hunger and extreme poverty.

Even accounting for increased testing, it's clear that a pandemic that was once concentrated primarily in Europe, and then in the U.S., is now buffeting every corner of the globe.

Many countries that had additional time to prepare have used it well. Contact tracing ramped up more quickly in some African cities than American ones, for example, and the new Africa Medical Supply Platform will allow equipment to be distributed across the continent as hotspots emerge.

The bottom line: The harsh reality remains that poorer countries are fighting the same virus that stretched health care systems and crippled economies in the rich world with weaker infrastructure and far fewer resources.

Go deeper: Coronavirus accelerates in Africa as economic damage deepens

Global coronavirus death toll exceeds 500,000

World

Coronavirus

Latin America and Latinos

Conflicts, policies and powers are intersecting and shaping the world. Breaking news and analysis of national security, foreign policy and global crises.

The U.S. health system faces critical questions about cost, access and equity. Technological advances and new discoveries about diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s are transforming patient care and reshaping public health.

Health

Face The Nation-10 38 23 Am - 10 41 27 Am-2020-06-28

Vice President Mike Pence, head of the White House coronavirus task force, pushed back on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday against claims that the new surge of coronavirus cases is a result of states reopening too quickly.

Why it matters: Public health experts, including the task force's own Anthony Fauci, largely agree that increased mobility and social contact stemming from the lifting of lockdown restrictions are driving spikes in infections. 

Most of the states that began reopening in May did not meet the White House's guidelines for declining cases.

Former CDC director Tom Frieden equated states reopening while cases were still growing to "leaning into a left hook," warning on "Fox News Sunday" that the outbreaks are only going to get worse and that effects of new restrictions won't be seen for a few weeks.

Driving the news: New cases are skyrocketing in a number of states that reopened early and aggressively after initially avoiding large-scale outbreaks. Texas and Florida — two of the largest current hot spots in the U.S. — have had to pause parts of their reopening plans in a desperate effort to curb the spread of the virus.

Florida on Friday banned serving alcohol onsite at bars, and Texas closed bars completely and limited restaurant occupancy. Pence said he fully supports the efforts by both states' leadership. 

Between the lines: Other countries that waited longer to reopen and did so more cautiously have not seen the same dramatic spike in new cases that the U.S. has experienced. Pence and President Trump have partially blamed the surge on increased testing, but health experts say that this doesn't fully explain the massive spike in cases.

What he's saying: "I know there's a temptation to associate the new cases in the Sunbelt with reopening, but it's important to remember that states like Florida and like Texas actually began to open up in early May. For the better part of six weeks, John, we did not see any significant movement," Pence said. 

"In my conversations with governors in Florida and in Texas — and in Arizona in particular — we're monitoring very closely their hospitalization rate, and we continue to be very confident that they have the supplies and the support and the capacity to give people the ... level of care that any of us would want a family member to have."

The bottom line: As the U.S. struggles to contain the coronavirus and barrels toward disaster, Pence defended the Trump administration's response and insisted that the country is in a better place than it was four months ago.

Go deeper: The coronavirus surge is real, and it's everywhere

Pence disputes that virus surge was caused by states reopening too quickly

Public health experts agree that the lifting of lockdown restrictions is driving spikes in infections.

Mike Pence

Health Care

Finish Line

Axios Finish Line

Axios AM

No president in our lifetime has enjoyed a more mesmerizing, seemingly unbendable hold on his political base than Donald Trump. He shifts their views on big topics like the FBI or Vladimir Putin and retains their support regardless of what he says or does. 

Why it matters: This connection is turning fast into a liability for Trump and the entire GOP because the president and his mostly white, mostly male base are on the opposite side of most Americans on the epic topics of our day — wearing masks, combating the coronavirus, and condemning racial inequality and police brutality. 

They are now basically egging each other on. 

President Trump this morning retweeted (then deleted) a video of a man in a golf cart with a "TRUMP 2020" sign who yelled "white power!" at Trump critics. 

Trump added the note: "Thank you to the great people of The Villages," a retirement community in Florida. "The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall."

White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told reporters: "President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters."

The White House did not respond when asked whether Trump condemned the supporter’s comment.

When the tweet was still up, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the only Black Republican senator, told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union": 

"[Y]ou can't play it because it was so profanity laced. The entire thing was offensive. ... I think it's indefensible."

The context: Advisers both inside and outside the White House have urged the president to tone down his violent rhetoric, which many worry could escalate racial tensions and hurt him politically, Jonathan Swan reported.

The big picture: Top Republicans have told us for five years that Trump’s base will ultimately cost the party power. 

The nation is growing too diverse and too progressive.

These Republicans warned that tough-guy, noninclusive action and talk would backfire — first with minorities, then with educated white people.

The polls suggest strongly this is unfolding in real time.

Trump’s superpower turns to kryptonite

Trump and his mostly white, mostly male base are on the opposite side of most Americans on the epic topics of our day.

Axios

Sunday's top stories

Scoop: Trump to put loyalist in charge of government's HR department

From sleepy to senile: Inside the Trump campaign's effort to rebrand Biden

Biden campaign to zero in on COVID inflection points in coming week

Global coronavirus death toll exceeds 500,000

Pence disputes that virus surge was caused by states reopening too quickly

Trump’s superpower turns to kryptonite

Pelosi: A national mask mandate is "long overdue"

Health secretary says "window is closing" to get coronavirus under control

Airbnb CEO: Travel may never be the same

Global coronavirus cases top 10 million

Florida reports record single-day spike in coronavirus cases

Trump tweets "wanted" images as 4 charged over bid to topple Andrew Jackson statue