Our picksMassive New Citizenship Database | Doomsday Bunkers | Hezbollah Sleeper Cell

Trump’s Medicine (Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic)
A new controversy over a drug tells a bigger story about Donald Trump’s presidency—and his relationship with misinformation.

Monday marked a turning point in the president’s relationship with misinformation. Trump said he is taking hydroxychloroquine, a medication that’s been touted by conservative media outlets as a treatment for COVID-19, even though his own FDA warns against its use for that purpose outside of hospital settings or clinical trials.

While it’s not news that the president is amplifying misinformation about the outbreak—we’ve been tracking lies and untruths from him here—the admission that he is ingesting a drug based on it points to bigger questions about the president’s media diet and how his immersion in such conversations is influencing his response to the outbreak.

How to Reduce Both Nuclear and Pandemic Threats after COVID-19 (James E. Doyle, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The virus reveals fundamental flaws in the strategies nations employ to provide security for their people. What will governments learn from this pandemic and what must they do differently in the future to safeguard their populations?
Success will require abandoning old concepts of national security and cooperatively allocating limited resources wisely to address the growing challenges of public health threats. This can be done only by coordinated international action.

Trump Administration Is Building Massive New Citizenship Database to Get Around Census Question (Jamie Ross, Daily Beast)
Remember when courts blocked the Trump administration from asking the deeply controversial citizenship question on the 2020 Census forms? Well, it seems to have found a workaround. According to a report from NPR, the administration is gathering a load of different types of government records to try to determine the citizenship status of every person living in the country. The Census Bureau is reportedly compiling IRS tax forms, data from Medicare and Medicaid, and driver’s license records. That’s on top of records from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, the State Department, the U.S. Army, federal prisons, and the Department of the Interior’s law-enforcement system. The information could be used to guide future political mapmaking and allow for redistricting plans to be based on the number of citizens old enough to vote—rather than the total number of people there. A GOP strategist previously said such a move would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

China is a Serious Issue, Not a Campaign Meme (Kevin Baron, Defense One)
‘Beijing Biden’ is a baseless political smear, trivializing one of America’s most complicated challenges.

Home, sweet, home? (Zoe Schiffer, Verge)
COVID-19 is fueling a boom in the doomsday market, thanks to some dubious marketing claims.

The Hezbollah Sleeper Agent Busted for Black Ops in America (Michael Daly, Daily Beast)
Ali Kourani allegedly helped a global terrorist network plot revenge against the U.S. from a home in the Bronx. He was undone after running a stop sign with 190 pairs of Uggs.