This line from the same report might be one of the most incriminating sentences ever published about this (or any) president: "Trump's advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that if it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts."

So the plan was to create a national death panel, conscripting corporate America into sharing the guilt in the fairly high likelihood that the plan goes pear-shaped.

Can you see the problem with the plan? Well, yes: Business leaders might not want to be on the Trump death panel. CEOs of large public-facing corporations tend to be cautious types who steer clear of reputational risks, like being implicated in a plan with a high probability of mass death.

By Wednesday, the advisory council had devolved into a Zoom call. Many of the participants still hadn't been informed that they had been selected, and some either had scheduling conflicts or were unable to log in. A White House official explained to the New York Times "that while the administration did not wait to hear back from all 200 people whose names were announced as part of the effort, it had sent an email notification on Tuesday afternoon to all the people involved alerting them that they had been selected." Apparently this is supposed to support the point that the blame for the debacle lies not with the administration but with the corporate executives who didn't respond quickly enough to the "Would you like to join our death panel?" email.

Most comically, most of the business leaders who did make the call used their time (after the prerequisite flattery for Trump, which everybody knows is needed to make the president pay attention to your message) to urge the administration to step up testing nationwide. "There was a wide consensus that more testing was needed before the economy could reopen," reports the Times. Business leaders say "pressure tactics to reopen the economy as fast as possible make no sense if the virus isn't fully under control and consumers and businesses don't feel safe to resume anything close to normal activities," reports Ben White.

In other words, the group that was originally designed to counteract the advice of public-health professionals wound up giving Trump the exact same advice.