TRUMP PICKS A SWEDISH MODEL: As with reindeer, immunity is in the herd.

It couldn’t be any other way. The national shutdown was wide enough to cripple to world’s largest economy. It was tight enough to save big-city hospitals from overload and avert a death rate that elected representatives, in a unacknowledged moment of bipartisan consensus, knew would mean a massacre of the incumbents at every election from now until ABBA reformed. But America’s national shutdown wasn’t especially tight by international standards, and not because Trump wanted to get the country back to work as quickly as possible.

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