To: President Donald Trump

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a shocking story claiming that the GRU — the same Russian spies who interfered in the 2016 U.S. election — paid Taliban-linked Afghan militia to attack coalition forces, including Americans. Per the report, President Donald Trump was allegedly briefed on the operation in March and did nothing.

The federal government’s response to COVID-19 has been haphazard, mismanaged and ultimately deadly. Yet the Trump administration is trumpeting the country’s “success” against the pandemic, with the vice president recently declaring that the U.S. response to COVID-19 is “cause for celebration.”

The surge in new COVID-19 case numbers in the Sunbelt and the West is so alarming that New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut now require visitors from “hot spot” states to self-quarantine. As the Philadelphia region reopens, the long-promised expansion of contact tracing — an essential tool to control person-to-person transmission — is just getting started. And as is true with testing, the amount of contact tracing underway is nowhere near what’s necessary to control the spread of the coronavirus.

California, again, is leading the nation’s fight against climate change. The California Air Resources Board adopted a rule Thursday requiring that by 2045, all trucks sold in the state be zero-emission models.

If Americans took our national parks for granted before, they probably don’t anymore. Long weeks in COVID-19 lockdown, it turns out, have a way of renewing your appreciation for outdoor adventure. And with air travel and resort vacations in a holding pattern, many more families will be taking road trips this summer, Griswold family style (minus, hopefully, the unfortunate death of Aunt Edna).

I sometimes refer to the COVID-19 pandemic as “the great psychometric test.” We are all being placed under different kinds of strain, and we have the chance to react for better or worse.

It’s been a week since the Supreme Court handed down a powerful and important decision recognizing protections for the civil rights of Americans regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or other status not previously recognized. What we’ve seen in that week is commentary criticizing the decision and commentary supportive of it. But what has been lacking is a full assessment of the logic that powered the decision and will likely now drive other needed changes.

The coronavirus outbreak forced students at colleges across the U.S. to finish the spring semester at home. As Congress considers additional relief for higher education, lawmakers should focus on helping students at greatest risk of abandoning their studies altogether.

President Donald Trump moved a bit forward on police reform Tuesday, signing an executive order that doesn’t mandate change, but only “encourages” police departments to modify their policies under threat of losing federal grant money.

While the nation has focused on the widespread demonstrations and marches protesting police brutality against people of color — particularly the killings of unarmed black men — a parallel story has been unfolding in a series of violent incidents involving armed far-right extremists.

China has decided to end any semblance of self-government for the city of Hong Kong. The mainland government could no longer tolerate either the protests against Chinese suppression of democracy on the island or a local legislature that sometimes bucked directives from the central authority in Beijing.

Even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, gays and lesbians in many states could be wed one day and fired on the next because of their sexual orientation. The court rectified that lingering injustice Monday when it held that not only gay but also transgender employees are protected by a landmark federal law against discrimination.

To date, COVID-19 has infected at least 2 million Americans and killed more than 115,000, a quarter of all the world’s cases and deaths.

America’s war in Afghanistan has dragged on too long. But the U.S. domestic political calendar shouldn’t dictate when to end it.

As the coronavirus exacts a grim toll among nursing home residents and employees in experts warn that any slowdown in the pandemic’s spread will not lessen the likelihood of a second wave of infections. Nursing homes and public health agencies were ill-prepared for a pathogen that has claimed 26,000 lives in these facilities nationwide.

There is a word for what Americans are experiencing, what we have been experiencing for the past few years. There is a word for the division, the economic upheaval, the loss of faith in institutions, the erosion of the rule of law, the collapse of social norms and the despair so many of us feel. The word is anomie.